The great Pine Plains, beginning not far south of the junction of the Mohawk with the North River, are still infested by wolves, who harbour in its deep gorges, from which they sally out at night, on the sheep-folds of the farmers, and often put a whole neighbourhood in fear. The railroad track from Albany to Schenectady, passes over a part of these plains, which stretch away in the direction of the blue outlines of the Helderberg mountains. It is many miles across the narrowest part of them, and they reach down to the very outskirts of the city of Albany, where they have of late years, and since Buel's day, begun to cultivate them by sowing clover, planting fruit trees, and in other ways. They constitute the table land of the county, and send out from beneath their heavy mass of yellow sand and broken down sand stones, mica slates, and granites, many springs and streams of the purest and most crystalline waters, which find their outlets chiefly into the valley of the Tawasentha, or, as the river is called in popular language, the Norman's Kill, and are thus contributed to swell the noble volume of the Hudson. These springs issue at the precise point where the arenaceous mass rests on a clay or impervious basis. The effect, in ancient years, has been that the sand is carried off, grain by grain, till a deep ravine or gorge is formed. The sides of this gorge being composed of mixed earth and some mould, and free from the aridity of the surface, bear a dense and vigorous growth of hard wood trees and shrubbery, and are often found to be encumbered with immense trunks of fallen pines and other forest rubbish, which renders it very difficult to penetrate them. It is into these dark gorges that the wolves retreat, after scouring the plains and neighbouring farms for prey; and here they have maintained their ancient empire from time immemorial. Such, at least, was the state of things between the settlers and the wolves, at the date of this story, in 1807. Sometimes the whole country armed and turned out _en masse_, to ferret them out of their fastnesses and destroy them; and truly the forces assembled on some of these wolf-hunts were surprising, and, in one respect, that is to say, the motley and uncouth character of their arms, they would have put both Bonaparte and Wellington to flight. There was nothing, from a pitchfork to a heavy blunderbuss, which they did not carry, always excepting a good rifle, which I never remember to have seen on these occasions. Indeed, these formal turn-outs were better suited to frighten away, than to kill and capture the foe; so that there was no just cause of surprise why the wolves remained, and even increased. They still kept masters of the Plains--sheep were killed by dozens, night after night, and the alarm went on.