This was truly, we soon discovered, the night of the wolves. His gait was particularly peculiar: Rolling his shoulders and swaying slightly, he lifted both feet on each side of his body simultaneously the way camels do, rather than alternately like other canids. With his back arched and hairs bristling, he stared at us briefly with lowered head, then sauntered away, sniffing the ground and scent-marking the roadside bushes. All at once the creature emerged from the curtain of high grass only yards ahead. Slowly it stalked around us in a deliberate arc, eyes glinting between tall grass stalks, measured footfalls crunching cautiously on dry blades.
The laser eyes seemed to bore through the darkness even as the animal’s form remained shrouded in shadows. Jolted, I rapped lightly on the car as Mark glided it to a halt, switching off the engine. Just as these clouded thoughts drifted through my mind, a pair of bright orange-red eyes suddenly caught my light, shining back from the gloom like surreal laser beams. Too weary to feel disappointed, I yearned only for a few hours sleep before resuming the search for the animal. The comments I repeatedly encountered in maned wolf literature-"rarely seen," "hard to observe," "poorly known"-began to make more and more sense. But even though we saw tracks everywhere, we had experienced nothing on our trip but a few fleeting glimpses of the creature. Shy, secretive and little studied, the enigmatic animal captured our imagination long ago. Scientists classify it as a single species within its own genus. Adaptable and resourceful, individual maned wolves range through enormous territories where they live off everything from rodents and birds to venomous snakes and berries.Ī NOCTURAL PREDATOR that is skilled at locating prey (pouncing, above) in the open savanna of central Brazil, the maned wolf is, in fact, neither a wolf nor a fox.
Scientists do agree that this mysterious hunter leads a solitary, mainly nocturnal life in open savanna scrublands throughout central Brazil, spilling over into small parts of Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and northern Argentina. "Untangling the evolutionary and taxonomic relationships of this species to the rest of South America’s canids has not proved to be an easy task," says University of Maryland researcher James Dietz. Scientists currently classify it as a single species within a single genus (Chrysocyon brachyurus). South America’s largest wild canine, in fact, is neither a fox nor a wolf. Yet it is so slender that, at 50 pounds, it weighs no more than a small basset hound. Standing three feet at the shoulder, it is taller than some Great Danes. The object of our quest was the maned wolf, an oversized yet incredibly graceful doglike creature with rufous red coat and legs so spindly it is sometimes described as a giant fox on stilts.
From long before sunrise until after midnight, this had been our search pattern for almost two weeks during the July dry season, using binoculars by day and spotlight by night. Scanning the darkness, I leaned as far out of the car window as I could while my partner Mark Jones drove slowly along the dusty track. Numb from cold and groggy with fatigue, I swept my spotlight fruitlessly back and forth across the grassy landscape. THE MOON had long since set and myriad stars shimmered icy blue in the sky over Emas National Park, a 500-square-mile reserve in the central highlands of Brazil. In the grasslands of central Brazil, the author gets a rare glimpse into the secretive life of South America's largest wild canine
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