A killing in Canada puts an end to the myth that wolves won't harm humans.
Feb 28, 2006
"There is nothing to lead us to believe that death was caused by anything other than injuries consistent with canine bites," she says. "There were wolves near the body and wolf tracks all around, and there's a history of wolves in the area."
There was also little doubt among eyewitnesses that wolves had stalked and killed the young man.
"It wasn't pretty," says Topping. "It was just as though those wolves had taken down a moose or a caribou."
Only it wasn't an animal. The wolves' victim was a human, and the incident has stunned the conservation community, which has almost universally maintained that wolves don't, and won't, attack people.
An Unlikely Candidate
By and large they haven't. The death of Carnegie is the first documented wolf-caused fatality of a human in North America in at least 100 years, and maybe the first ever on this continent, period. While researchers have documented more than 80 incidents of wolves attacking or injuring people over the last century, none of those instances resulted in death.
Kenton Joel Carnegie was an unlikely candidate to be the first. Tall, lanky and inquisitive, the geological engineering student from Oshawa, Ont., was in good health and had spent plenty of time outdoors, though none of it in wolf country. Carnegie was in the third week of a short-term contract to provide high-resolution aerial imaging for the mineral industry. Both gold and uranium are mined in northern Saskatchewan's outback, and Carnegie was one of dozens of itinerant workers who service the industry from remote industrial hubs scattered across the region.
Points North Landing, where Carnegie bunked when he wasn't helping with surveys, is one of the largest of these service hubs. Built about 150 miles south of the Northwest Territories border, Points North looks and functions like a frontier railroad boomtown. Goods are trucked from La Ronge to the camp, then loaded onto aircraft to be flown to mine sites and a string of remote communities in the bush.
The camp features a well-maintained dirt airstrip, a bunkhouse, a mess hall and buildings for storage and equipment repair. While no more than a couple dozen technicians and maintenance workers live at the settlement, Points North is a conduit for several hundred workers who fly in and out of the camp to work shifts at the mines. All those workers generate a mountain of garbage, which is dumped in a clearing about a half mile from the camp.
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