Wolf saunters through Meeteetse subdivision
By CAROLE CLOUDWALKER
Staff writer
The wolf was at the door of Micki Campbell’s Vision Quest Estates home
north of Meeteetse last week.
Well, almost at it.
“I was in my yard unloading groceries when I saw it,” Campbell said. “I
wondered whose dog it was.”
Then she looked again. It was no dog, she says.
The large, handsome, silver-gray and black animal was in the subdivision’s
Valley Road, said Campbell, who watched as a woman in a pickup truck
“swerved to avoid it.”
Campbell ran to get her video camera. When she came out of the house with
the camera, she also was on her cell phone talking with her husband.
“He said, ‘Walk toward it,'” she said. That did not seem like the best
idea to Campbell, especially when the wolf “came toward me” and was 100
yards away. She said the animal appeared to have no fear of her.
“I took off running back toward the house,” she says, though the wolf “was
not aggressive.”
But the wolf headed toward a neighbor’s calving pasture, so Campbell got
in her car and went to tell the cattleman.
The Vision Quest subdivision is about two miles north of Meeteetse.
Campbell says the wolf “came up from Meeteetse Creek, past our house,
through a field and to the (Greybull) river,” then appeared to head toward
the Wood River.
Among her wolf souvenirs are the home video she recorded and a clump of
hair.
“He left it on a fence,” Campbell says.
Campbell’s Vision Quest neighbor, Sue Hiser, also saw the wolf at about
noon and also initially mistook it for a dog.
“I was in my house and just happened to be looking out the front door,”
Hiser says. “He was just trotting on down Valley Road.”
She ran outside but lost sight of the animal. Hiser’s dogs did not bark,
but when the animal passed closer to the neighbor’s horses, “they got real
riled up,” she said.
Ken Beers, Campbell’s cattle-raising neighbor, also has no doubt the
animal he saw Wednesday was a wolf.
At noon Beers was entering the back door of his home on the east side of
WYO 120 about a mile closer to Meeteetse than Campbell and Hiser. He
turned toward the road after hearin g a car slow down and saw an animal
crossing the road.
“I said to myself, ‘I wonder where my dogs are, where my grandkids are and
where my wife is.'” He said his youngest stock dog at one point was just
five feet from the wolf.
“In my opinion … this animal was accustomed to being in this area. …
He was on a route,” Beers said. “His actions indicated to me this was a
route he took (before).”
Beers says in recent weeks he’s noticed “some things out of order,” such
as “cows you normally get along with” that now charge or “calves 200 yards
from where they’re supposed to be and through two fences.”
Because of that, he concluded the wolf has visited before and feels
comfortable in the neighborhood.