"the bridge was Joe's house, @ Joe Ball, of Michipicoten, With Clothes Torn Off, Won Desperate Batt Hobbled by a snow- shoe and unarmed he strangled the wolf with a piece of trappers cord. ~Beat off three others with snow- shoe he was able tc rer ve from} right foot. -------- 3 (my J. W. Curran In the Sault Daily : sta , Bam and I reached the 3 San the Miochipicoten pent the evening listen- seph Ball, tell the r heard. It {On Oct. Long Por River. We s ing to our host, JO best wolt story 1 have eve ; a true ome. Coming from "The Mission" on the Lake Superior shore yqu climb pretty steadily upwards. When at last you peer over the rim into the valley of the Michipicoten you see a basin say ten or twelve miles wide from rim to . he river is away down below you and across it is a vast vista of autumn leaves, Whose wealth of ¢ 'us fill the eye. You get the feeling you are looking at. the side of a moun: tain that stretches away in the dis- . 'ancy down the river. Down on the river we could see a ridge, ang bent 3 oot falls. the roar of the 200 f Aste stretch of wilderness. Dally Star has always fim. T this great The Sault ." 'eombatted the idea that an Algoma wolf would attack a man. It has in- y several stories of alleged tag ont of them had ever stood up under examination, Bat I 'am prepared to accept Mr. Ball's 'story that a wolf did attack him. He inswered freely ali questions put to Rim, and went into minute details. | We talked for three hours in the ening and then reviewed the fight for more than an hour next morning my request. There couldn't have anything vital left uncovered. Mr. Ball has been in the Michipi wilderness for over 25 years. came in with the Foleys when 'they were building the Algoma Cen- ral & Hudson's Bay Railway to do Jlacksmithing. For the last couple Lif years he has lived at the falls on ne Michipicoten river with his cou- win, Isaac, looking after the power plant there that hasn't tuned a ® for some time, waiting for a Michipicoten's iron d will need power. an is tall and square and with a build that would film well as an uphelder of law in a law- Jess camp. 1 noticed at our evening 'meal he didn't eat partridge, and Sam Bald he hated to seé the birds shot. r host casually mentioned then t he was sure he could raise part- with his hens "if people would bother them." You don't have many visitors seven and a half in from Lake Superior on the jomi trail! " The fight took place in February, 7.--seven years ago. There were wolves in it,--one principal and ' assistants. Mr. Ball killed the neipal with his bare hands. The The poi I the battle was on the wad that rau south from the Grace five and a half miles from Mi Mission, That winter Mr. had been the caretaker of both Grace and the Norwalk mines, -- of these having a full equip t of machinery and buildings to k after. They had grown up over: nthe Doom of a QUATter of a ry ago when Michipicoten's jal showings of free gold promoters' so assidu . ~~ * he NIGWAM® built ine Harbor for the use the Al inl Branch er miles away I. « Ojibway Villagé . drag of my snowshoes when about | 'hirty feet away from me or less, a olf came out ou my trail and head- ed me ofl." Mr. Ball took his pipe from his mouth and put I* on the table be- side the coal ofl iamp. "I had heard the wolves before I saw the first one. [I said to myself when I first heard them 'There are my two hounds; some one must have loosed them.' I knew that nobody but myself had keys for my house, and I figured that someone had broker in Wolves first make a few ylps and {then comes the long howl. You can always tell them. I had only my jack knife and a plece of trapper's cord about three feet long. All trappers carry some cord. It's a very useful thing in the woods, it comes in handy for a hundred uses, but I carry a shot gun now too." Mr. Ball drew a piece of cord out of his pocket. It had a loop on one; end. 1 adopted it on the spot. Next] day I used it on the trail to tie a can on the outside of my packsack, and thereafter to truss up a coat to put in the same place. "Did the wolf kncw you were a { man?" "Certainly it did. No question of that. I had noticed its tracks in the , fast falling snow, which was coming idown so thickly that it would cover your tracks in five minutes: It was the freshness of the wolf tracks that {drew my attention. 'Why' I sald to myself 'that wolf is right here. I rhadn't gone ten yards then before the ' wolt jumped out ahead of me on the trall, He stood broadside on, licking this lips. He didn't hold up his head but kept looking down. Then his tail began to rise and he came to me, I braced mysell." "lI wasn't frightened," sald Mr. Ball. "I think I can say that the feel- ing uppermost in my mind was sur- prise. I had never in all my exper- ience in the woods where I have spent most of my life heard of a wolf deliberately stepping ahead of a man to dispute the road with him. It puzzled me, and even when the yel- low brute stood his ground and star- ed at me boldly I had no idea he would attack me,--not the faintest suspicion he would. And I was un- armed,--didn't even have a stick in my hand." : "The wolf came on slowly on my trail,--he probably took two. minutes to get within jumping distance. When I realized through his slow approach, his showing his teeth, his licking his lips,--and I didn't take my eyes off him for a second,--that he was going to attack me, I tried to get my snowshoes off. I managed to untie the right one, but somehow in the hurry my left foot slipped through the harness, and I couldn't free my ~ ~ oma Central kai who eis Re chsoiagton Helen Mine -- Three : { I The Mission* to Pi HAL LH | WE If NIE | 0] aE A ! left hand, just far enough back so the inwards like a shark's. Consequently animal could not bite him. "1 just had hold of the cheek; it wasn't a| bone hold." | "I had always had: a powerful grip, and people had remarked it even when I was a boy," he ssid. And with this brawny left hand on the jowl in a death grip, the wolf and the man fell off the hard trail into the three feet of soft snow,--the man on top. | Mr. Ball held out his sinewy left hand. He had fingers af great natural power, and his work at the forge for a lifetime has strengthened them.' "Men would break the skin in my palms, but not one ever was able to break my grip," he said. You must realize that Mr. Ball was telling a guest a story that enthrall- ed both speaker and listener. The narrative was simple and sincere and there was no thought of boasting. The man took no offence at the most searching questions; his reply was always unaffected. His only thought was to make his story perfectly un! derstood. | It would be impossible to repro-'the hard trail and the other was that it. The lair of the Wolves was traced | duce the dramatic recital in cold we had rolled of! tuls trail to the up'a creek to the Mariposa gold mine. Who admits that he is a Ku type. When Mr. Ball, in telling of his wrestling with the wolf got on his knees on the floor, to show how he had fought the animal, my mind car- ried back to the night Sir Henry Irving had played the part of old Math jas, the inn keeper who under hyp-' notic spell is forced to rehearse the tragedy he was mixed up in."Mr. Ball lived over again his terrible exper- lence. It was plain that the tory gripped his whole being and that no! press home the attack. Something ribs were fairly well covered. little part of it would ever escape his memory. : The battle in the snow was a ter- ritic one. "I was tilled with a cold fury," said Ball. "The wolf was a powerful brute, and you will realize that when I tell you that several this way he carried me about twelve) feet. The brute's efforts to shake : il i of i. i i ! get i! + i and set off for the Dyce shanty. Mrs. Dyce was alone. I told her the story what he takes hold of. I have seen and showed her the wolf. She called deer here at my door terribly torn,~-- attention to the fact that my coat and not badly enough wounded to imme- vest and gray flannel shirt were torn diately die. I knew if any of the wolv- to shreds back and front. I told her es behind me reached my thigh, I was I was going home for my gun, and gone. They would have torn out the would go back after the three muscles. So that I kept down as wolves. But when I got home I found much as I could striking out from my position on the ground. " The three jumped at me perhaps ten tim- could not bring himself to skin es,--I don't know. They came on to- animal he had killed. gether just like three dogs. They took! "I never can explain what came the back out of my coat in mouth- over me," he said. fuls. He crawled into bed and lay there "I had fought the single wolf for 'for two hours. Then he arose, found when a wolf bites, he tears away The reaction had come. Mr. Ball the | | possibly five minutes, when the three his clothes were beyond repair, and others came at me from behind. They donned another suit. tried to bite me, and I slashed back | at them with the snowshoe. One I suade him from returning to the managed to kick heavily as he lunged scene of the fight, but Ball spent the at me from behind trying to reach rest of the afternoon there with his my thigh. (rifle. The wolves did not return. "There were two things that favor-| The skin of the wolf was sold to ed me. One was that I had the wolt Mr. Willlam Morrison, superintendent in the soft snow, where he had not of the power plant on the Michipico- the footing he would have had on ten River, who paid Mr. Ball $12 for left. The three wolves stuck to the Mr. Robert Patterson, the engineer trail, and thus | was able to oppose there had hung up a moose hide close them with the snowshoe in my right by and the wolves had eaten most of hand, and to kick at them behind it. The place where they had lain in with my right foot while I knelt over the snow there was found. the other wolf. Had the three at: "Why did the wolf attack you?" tacked on my left side I couldn't have| "Hunger drove him to R. I found done a thing. They would have had nothing in his stomach except a little me in a trap. But they never attem- moose hair. His intestines were pted to leave the hard trail to the clean. You could almost see through left of which | was, and they didnt them. And yet he wasn't skinny. His He seemed to be on their minds, and at- had a big frame." ter making several attempts to reach! A certain old trapper says that a me, they backed up suddenly and all wolf is always hungry and is never three of them raised their heads. hungry. By which he means that he They seemed to be looking over the can defer eating till another day If trees on the high side of the road he wishes to. If this is true it would when suddenly they struck off swift seem to have been the inexperience "1 wag tiring. 1 had been holding! "Were the wolves fully grown?" 1 a powerful animal for several min-! asked. utes with my leit hend, and I dare| 'No, sald my host, "The one 1 £0. 1 had been tempted to kill weighed probably 76 or 83 knife. I could open it with my : i i web 1 I had to go to bed.' ! Mrs. Dyce had endeavored to dis-! | : { a limited extent, but none of the true breed have ever been seen in Algo- ma. The Fish and Game Department of the Ontario government has for years been paying bounty on so call. ed "brush" wolves. Experienced bush- men in Algoma do not believe in the existence of the brush wolf; they say that a brush wolf is simply a young timber wolf. So it turned out to be in the case of Jack Egglesfield's wolf, and this is also the case with Jim Summers' two wolves at Mac- Lennan. If any trapper in Algoma be- lieves there are two kinds of wolves I have not yet run across him. The farmers have accepted the govern- ment's dictum that there are two breeds, with reluctance, and lately there has grown up a legend that the brush wolf hangs around farmhouses to kill sheep. He will come right onto a fleld to attack them, in sight of a; plowman. The bold brush wolf seems to be simply a young and unsophisticated timber wolf, there being no other kind of wolf In Algoma. In support of this theory it may be pointed out that no old wolf has been caught in a trap and no old wolf is caught around a farmhous The old and wise , wolves are only be found away back from where man lives. Only the youngsters are venturesome enough to try sheep raiding. The theory that Mr. Ball was at- tacked by wolves probably about ten months old does not lessen the inter-' est In the story or také away any of the credit due him. He would have bad a harder fight if his assailants had weighed 160 pounds instead of half that amount, but the probability seems to be that no old wolf would ever have ventured to attack him. Mr. Ball has no fear of a wolf. But he thinks no one should be foolhardy. He makes it a practice to get out of the woods before dark, because he can't then see his rifle sights. For this reason he likes a shot gun in the | woods. He says no wolf will stand be fore a shot gun. Contrary to most people Mr. Ball believes wolves are hungriest when frost first comes and just before the lakes freeze over. THE KLAN IN CANADA (Toronto Globe) An Ontario 'man, Charles Monteith, Klux Klan organizer, has been arrested at Hamilton on a charge of carrying a loaded revolver. Tha police say that cards found on him' show that he had enrolled four women as Klan mem- { bers, at the rate of three dollars apiece. According to a Police Inspec tor this knight of the pillowship boasted that he Initiated over thirty Hamiltonians into the mysteries of the hooded order. His notebook show- perhops those which bave recently ed an item of $20 for burning crosses been displayed on the mountainside to set tongues wagging. The gun-toting charge is apparent: ly the only legal complication in which Monteith is involved. The Ku Klux Klan is not known to the Cri minal Code, and it would not be an | indictable offense to belong to it or' _uersuade others to join it. If a num-| | ber of "calithumpians cavorting around a cow pasture' 'as William | Allen White calls the Kilansmen,! choose to pull white sheets over their =% HH § le with Wolf Which Attacked Him | BUTCHER OF DEER (Ottawa Journal) i . Ernest Thompson-Seton made a line appeal at the Canadian Club luncheon in Ottawa Saturday for cone sideration for wild MHfe: He touched on various aspects of worthiness of wild life. whether of animal or bird, and pleaded for restraint in the des~ truction of ft. { Which reminds us of the butchery of deer which occurs every year In| this part of the world by driving withi 'ogs. A party of so-called hunters "ame back to Ottawa recently from 1 trip in the Gatineau country havy ng killed sixteen deer in the water 'nd fifteen of them were does. A vonderful sample of how to kill out wild life! Deer, when hunted dy dogs, mak for water. They can swim whe fast as any dog. Also deer, wi pursued, usually keep on fixed paths alias "runways" which are easily noted Accordingly the men who use dogs .. hunt take up their positions on runways leading to laks, before they turn loose their dogs. Hunted by the dogs, the deer make for the wa er, and are shot in the water by th {men who have been waiting near 'the runways. That sort of shooting is not sport, but butchery. In the woods & deen has a chance. If a man still hun 'that is if he hunts individually, en deavoring to see a deer before 19 sees him--he has his work cut out and a heap of exercise provided. I he takes part in a "drive," wher some of the party try to round u deer and scare them towards othe: ambushed near runways, he usuall gets only a shot at a deer going pas him at 20 miles an hour or so. In any| case, most everybody has to do a lo ,of stiff tramping. And there is som real sport to the hunting. But a 4 in the water is a mere pot-shot. Driving deer by dogs should prohibited. It is a means of slanght ler which sooner or later, it tolerated will extinguish the deer. Shooting of, does should be prohibited under alll circumstances. Such shooting is an- other sure way towards rapid extine. tion ot the deer. : U.S. EUROPEAN DEBTORS (New York Herald-Tribune) Poland is the fifth European sta to arrange for a funding of its debt to the United States... The others are Grest Britain, Finland, Hungary and Lithuania. That Poland should be able at this juncture to carry through such an agreement {s one of the most startling evidences of the capacity of European nationg to restore their finances .and discharge their war obligations if they have » real will to do so. Not long ago Poland had a worthd less currency and was plunged | financial embarrassments. Now sh has a currency maintained on of parity with gold, a balanced budge and a reestablished credit. Her ou standing public debt is small, sligh! ly in excéss of the government' estimated revenues for 1925. Under these circumstances she has prompts ly 'negotiated for a funding her |American indebtedness of 000 in bonds maturing over a period of sixty two years, bearing interest at 3 percent up to December 15, 1933, and 3% percent interest thereafter. WE WANT MORE PEOPLE (Medicine Hat News) { Canada is equipped with rallwayd and productive machinery adequatd to serve three times as many peo- ple as the present population of less than 9,000,000. Tax burdens Nave grown. enormously in recent years] without any proportionate Increase in population to lighten the load.| Canada's part in the war cost thel federal government about $1460. 000,000, according to the statemen of the Minister of Labor, from 181 to 1923, the annual Interest charg on the national debt increased fro $14,687,797 to 136,007,667. For sions alone, in 1923, the total Hal ity amounted to over $30,000,000. With this national obligation he met, the Dominion is im to look for mew settlers. 'There 'ay amount of room, too, for a treater population. Canada is arally endowed with great sources of wealth. There is no wis THE INDIAN PROBLEM (Ottawa Citizen) $178,660,