A coyote appears at the edge of a field. Another slips across a road after dark. Residents report them near the cemetery, along the Sugar River Bike Trail and around the wooded boundaries where New Glarus ends and the countryside begins.

The sightings can be unsettling. Coyotes are intelligent, elusive predators, and seeing one close to homes, pets and familiar walking paths is enough to remind people that the village does not exist apart from the natural world.

But the coyotes now prowling the outskirts of New Glarus are not the most imposing predators to have lived in and near our community.

There was a time when wolves also lived here.

Not an occasional animal wandering far from northern Wisconsin, but packs of gray wolves moving through the forests, oak openings, river bottoms and ridges of southern Wisconsin. They hunted deer, announced themselves across the darkness and followed trails that existed long before anyone called this place New Glarus.

Their howls would have carried through a landscape with few roads, fewer houses and long stretches of timber broken by prairie.