The last wolf in New England roamed before the car, before the strip mall and before the subdivision were ever conceived. People hunted more for food than for sport, and logging subdued the wild places with a yoke of commerce. Coexistence was not an option: the wolf was pursued relentlessly and killed. And disappeared.

Some of the cut forests have regrown, the moose has returned, and the deer are profuse. The wolf, the top predator, would return the ecosystem to a semblance of its former self. But the landscape of New England is different, divided.

How, when and where to reintroduce the gray wolf in the Northeast is complicated, and public support is essential: 85 percent of the land is privately owned. Aside from the 6-million-acre Adirondack National Park in New York and parts of northern Maine, much land is in small parcels of fields and forests. Some in the paper and logging industry fear for their jobs. Hunting groups worry that the wolf might kill too many deer or moose or harm children. And a few people still believe fairytales about wolves’ evil nature. Meanwhile, a push to list the gray wolf as threatened rather than endangered—a move that would give the reintroduction program and the people living with it more flexibility—is stalled.

“Learning how to coexist is the key, whether it is neighbor with neighbor, hunters with nonhunters, environmentalists with big business, humans with wolves,” says Ann MacMichael, president of the Maine Wolf Coalition. “We have far to go and much to learn.”

In the nineteenth century, the federal government initiated bounty programs (which continued as late as 1965) offering $20 to $50 per wolf taken. As a result, by the early twentieth century, wolves became nearly extinct in the lower forty-eight states. By the time the Endangered Species Act made the killing of wolves illegal in 1973, all but a few hundred that lived in northeastern Minnesota had been wiped out.

Wolves have slowly made their way back in several areas, chiefly through reintroduction. But wolves have not roamed the Northeast woods for more than 100 years. In New Hampshire, the last gray wolf was killed in 1887. In Maine, the last certain wild wolf was killed in 1863, although there have been sightings of wolflike canids since that time. In New York, the last gray wolf was shot in the 1880s.

Populations of wolves remain in eastern Canada, but physical barriers to their crossing have cut off the natural repopulation of wolves in the Northeast. In particular, the Saint Lawrence Seaway may have been a crossing point for wolves before year-round shipping demanded that an ice-free channel remain open. The Northeast is a biological island for wolves, and wolf populations will likely return only with the help of humans.

A recovery plan to reintroduce the wolf into the Northeast—to the northern Appalachian Mountains of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont or New York—has been considered since the late 1970s. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the recovery of the wolf in this country, designed the initial plan. In 1994, Defenders of Wildlife and RESTORE: The North Woods, a group working to create a new national park in Maine, became actively involved, as later did the Coalition to Restore the Eastern Wolf.

Maine seems the most likely destination for the wolf. It has about 18,000 square miles of suitable habitat, and gray wolves kill and eat moose, deer and beaver—animals with abundant populations in this less developed state.

“Wolves strengthen the biodiversity of a region by bringing into balance species with large populations and bolstering species under stress,” reads a position statement of the Maine Wolf Coalition. Wolf kills provide food for scavengers such as bears, ravens and eagles, and the large canines will help keep the population of coyotes, a newcomer to the Northeast, in check. Fewer coyotes mean more rodents for smaller predators.

“The wolves will displace some coyotes—not the suburban ones, but the ones in wilder places,” says Paul Nickerson, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s northeast coordinator for endangered species. “When there is a top predator, the ramifications go all down the food chain.”

“Elk, moose and caribou evolved as prey animals. Now we’ve taken away their natural predators,” Nickerson says. “[With wolf reintroduction] we’re moving toward a total ecosystem restoration of at least 100 years ago.”

Wolf reintroductions in other parts of the country have met with mixed success and much controversy. Mostly they’ve been on public land—gray wolves in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho’s national forests; Mexican gray wolves in national forests of New Mexico and Arizona; and smaller, rarer red wolves in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee. Officials push on despite some public outcry—the wolves have killed livestock and in turn have been killed by humans.

“In the long run, public education about the wolf and the preservation of large tracts of wildland with low human densities and minimal accessibility will best help preserve the wolf,” says Nina Fascione, director of carnivore conservation for Defenders of Wildlife. “The Fish and Wildlife Service has said they will not shove wolves down the throats of the states in the East. The states will have much more input in the East than they have had elsewhere,” says Fascione. Wolf reintroduction can be a lengthy process—the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park took about twenty-five years.

Public attitude is changing, but not everyone is convinced. A recent Defenders of Wildlife poll taken in the Adirondacks showed that 42 percent of those responding approve of restoring wolves there, 41 percent disapproved and 17 percent were neutral.

Even though wolves would fill an empty ecological niche, some are worried about the prospect of these wild neighbors. One worry is that wolves will get too close to humans. Population density is higher in the Northeast, and people in these mountain communities haven’t heard a distant wolf howl for more than a century. However, wolves are cautious and are unlikely to wander into populated areas, say some experts. “They will be placed in deep forest,” Peggy Stuhsacker, a wildlife biologist for the National Wildlife Federation, says. “We wouldn’t see them. They’re fearful of people.”

Another concern comes from the Pulp and Paperworkers’ Resource Council, a national grassroots labor organization of hourly paid employees. Mark Steele, who works at Mead Paper in Rumford, Maine, is a representative of that group. “There have not been any issues yet with timber harvest in other parts of the country regarding wolves, but some environmental groups or individuals may call into question their habitat.” The Maine Endangered Species Act says that a state agency shall not permit, license, fund or carry out projects that will significantly alter the habitat or violate protection guidelines, which means that the difference between classifying the wolf as threatened or endangered might be a big difference when it comes to harvesting timber.

“There are certain logging operations that require permits,” Steele says. “We could get caught up in the courts, like what happened with the spotted owl.” The forest products industry contributed $6 billion to the state’s economy in 2000.

The Maine governor’s office is not in favor of wolf reintroduction. “Reintroduction programs for large mammals are expensive and require considerable time to address both the needs of the animal and people affected by any proposal,” says Lee Perry, a spokesman for Governor Angus King. “Until there is a clear public mandate and authorization as required by the legislature, the department will not promote the reintroduction of wolves into the state of Maine.”

The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, the largest hunting organization in the state, is opposed to wolf reintroduction. Its members introduced anti-wolf legislation.

“What happens depends more on public attitude than anything else,” Nickerson says. New Hampshire forbids reintroduction, Nickerson says, and Maine has passed a law stating that wolves may not be reintroduced without the prior approval of both houses of the legislature and the commissioner of inland fisheries and wildlife. Despite the laws, Nickerson estimates that wolves might be returned to the Northeast in a decade.

Kristin DeBoer of RESTORE: The North Woods says the group has already bought 8,000 acres in northern Maine, and it’s hoping to introduce legislation to Congress to establish the Maine Woods National Park and Preserve, a 3-million-acre parcel owned by a few timber and paper companies. The new national park would be a good place to base wolf reintroduction.

There are still a few issues, in sparsely populated northern Maine and across the region, that only time will solve. “The public is just not ready, and without public involvement and acceptance, reintroduction could not succeed,” says MacMichael. “We do not want wolves in Maine when there is a danger of their being destroyed because of fear of them,” she says.