Today's Looking Back can be found here.

From the May 5, 1985 News-Miner:

Pilot-trapper tracks the challenges of the wolf hunt

By DAVID FOSTER

Associated Press Writer

McGRATH—The lone wolf must have chased the moose up and down the frozen river for days, never daring to close in for fear of being trampled.

Lucky Egrass, studying the animals' tracks from the cockpit of his skiplane, could only guess at that part of the story. But the end was marked clearly by a bloodstain on the snow.

The exhausted moose had fallen in open water and drowned, Egrass says. Half its body stuck up through the ice, and the wolf was gnawing off shreds of flesh.

At the sound of the airplane, the wolf bolted. Egrass says he tracked the wolf for miles, finally landing beside it on a frozen swamp. He leaped out of the plane, grabbed a rifle and killed the fleeing animal with a single shot.

Lucky Egrass hunts wolves, and he does it very well. This past winter, he shot 18.

What he does is legal. In every other state, where wolves are rare or nonexistent, the remaining few are protected by law and cherished as symbols of wilderness that used to be. But in Alaska, there is yet enough wilderness to hide 6,000 to 10,000 of the predators.

Government officials here allow, even encourage, the killing of wolves. Sometimes they participate in the activity themselves, shooting the animals from airplanes and helicopters. Since 1975, Alaska has spent nearly $1 million on "aerial wolf control" and has killed about 1,300 animals.

This pleases many Alaskans who see wolves as vermin, killers of moose and caribou that might otherwise live to be hunted by humans. But the killing enranges other people, most of whom live Outside in more heavily populated places. They say Alaska's wolves must be protected to keep them from meeting the same fate as wolves elsewhere.

The controversy, one of Alaska's hottest, has made Egrass wary.

"You anti-wolf hunting?" he asks bluntly when approached for an interview. His round face is impassive, his stare as penetrating as that of the predator he hunts. He would prefer not to become prey himself.

"I don't really like to talk about wolf hunting in town. You don't know who's sitting around, who's listening, who's checking on what."

Things have changed since the 1950s, when a dead wolf was worth a $50 bounty. Wolves were poisoned, shot, trapped, snared, and even strafed by planes with guns mountedo n the wing struts. Egrass remembers watching local men return from wolf-hunting flights. One winter they killed nearly 350 wolves.

Egrass was a child then. Now, at 27, he sometimes rues not being born two decades earlier. "Back in the old days, in the '60s, the wolf hunter was the hero," he says. "Now the wolf hunter is a bad guy."

Poisoning was banned first, because of danger to other animals. Then, in 1968, the bounties were stopped. In the 1970s, aerial hunting by private pilots was banned.

That leaves conventional hunting, trapping, and the method Egrass uses: "land-and-shoot trapping." Hunters in Alaska may not shoot animals on the same day they fly over an area. But licensed trappers may track animals from the air and start shooting as soon as they land and stop the airplane.

Opponents of this method say it is slaughter, violating all tenets of sportsmanship. But Egrass says it is a difficult, dangerous way to kill wolves. "They don't stand out in the open and wait for you. I've seen dozens and dozens of wolf hunters come through here. Very seldom do you see them get anything."

Land-and-shoot trapping demands two abilities especially useful on the modern frontier: straight shooting and skillful flying. Lucky Egrass is adept at both.

He grew up in this Kuskokwim River town, population 500 and the largest settlement for 150 miles around. There are no roads out of town — just miles and miles of spruce forest, winding rivers, muskegs and mountains.

At 13, Egrass hunted alone for moose. At 15, he bought a used airplane with money made from trapping and odd jobs. At 16, he flew his first solo flight. At 17, he shot his first wolf.

Today he works as a public safety officer, one of McGrath's two policemen.

In his spare time, he flies his Piper PA-11, a single-engine mosquito of a plane good for quick landings and takeoffs. His hunting range covers 18,000 square miles, an area larger than Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

He shares this rugged territory with 11 wolf packs, each containing 7 to 17 members. Egrass knows where the packs are and where they are likely to go. He even has names for some—the Folger Gang, the Untouchables, the Dillinger Gang.

Winter is wolf-hunting season, when snow and ice turn swamps into landing strips, and tracks in snow betray the wolves' passing.

Egrass follows the tracks until they connect to wolves, then trails the animals from about 1,000 feet up. He waits for them to enter an opening in the forest, then quickly points his plane downward, trying to land before the wolves regain the safety of the woods.

"There are so many things to watch for. You don't want to fly into anything. You've got to watch how fast the animals are moving. You've got to have your landing spot picked out. And you've got to land your airplane right on that spot when they break."

In good conditions, the plane skids to a stop within 250 feet. From the back seat he grabs a .25-caliber bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight. There is also a smaller .22-caliber rifle to finish off wolves that aren't killed instantly. He rarely uses the smaller gun.

Within seconds, Lucky Egrass can kill as many as three wolves as they streak for cover at speeds approaching 30 mph.

This year's take of 18 wolves was a good one. The snow was deep and the wolves were slow. Even so, the economics hardly justified the effort, he says.

A pelt fetches $250 to $500, but Egrass figures he spends four hours airborne for each wolf killed, and a day's fuel can cost $120. The costs rise further when he adds the $17,000 invested over three years to rebuild his vintage 1947 airplane.

But there are other reasons to hunt one of the craftiest of all predators. "It's a challenge. It's an art. Flying and hunting combined is one of the better huntings I can ever think of."

And killing wolves is a community service, he says. About 75 percent of McGrath's families depend on shooting at least one moose each year for food. In other villages, the percentage approaches 100 percent.

Most McGrath residents support what Egrass does. In December, a local advisory group asked the state Board of Gmae to let state aerial hunters kill still more of the area's moose-eating wolves.

But in the cities of Anchorage and Juneau, where more than half Alaska's population resides, sentiment runs against the wolf hunts. Under pressure from wildlife protection groups, the state this winter suspended aerial wolf hunts in two areas of Interior Alaska. And now a lawsuit is challenging Egrass' brand of land-and-shoot trapping, claiming it is an illegal form of predator control.

The arguments rage on, as they have for years. But Lucky Egrass no longer pays attention to the people who oppose what he does. He has killed more wolves than most of them will ever see.

"They need to come out here for a winter, see the packs and how they operate," he says. "A lot of them would see a need for wolf control."

City dwellers don't appreciate the immensity of Alaska's wilderness, Egrass is convinced. "In this country up here, you can fly four or five hours without seeing another house or a street.

"There's no way we're going to go out there and exterminate the wolves. It would be impossible. The reason they don't have wolves in the rest of the country is because they've built massive cities and roads all over the place, not because of hunting. That one year they killed 350, they never did hurt the country. We've still got wolves now, and we'll have wolves forever."