Is a killer wolf still on the loose?

When a lone wolf strolled across the snow-covered ice of Chignik Lake on Tuesday, a ripple of fear went through the village of 100 people halfway down the remote Alaska Peninsula. At other times in other places, the sighting of a wolf near a village in the far reaches of the north would not cause much of a stir, but Chignik Lake has been living a horrible fairy tale.

"They figure that's the one that got the girl,'' said Virginia Aleck of the traditional village council.

The "girl'' was 32-year-old Candice Berner, who came north from her hometown in Slippery Rock, Penn., to teach in the Alaska Bush. She'd taken a job traveling between a cluster of villages 450 miles southwest of Anchorage to work with children with special needs.

On March 8, she was in Chignik Lake to teach when she decided to take a run on the road that leads from the village to the airport. She was, her father later said, training for a race. As with so many who run in America today, it appears she was wearing headphones and listening to music as she ran. Her father told the Slippery Rock Herald she would sometimes slip into a meditative state when she did that.

Thus she might not have been paying full attention to the dangers around her when she jogged out on the gravel road that day, or she might simply have been unlucky. Whatever the case, she fit the profile for the victim of one of the rarest of animal attacks in North America -- an attack by wolves.

Berner stood only 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and she was marathon-runner thin. Her father described her as "small and mighty," a boxer and weight lifter. But no matter her strength or ferocity, she would have posed little threat to a pack of wolves accustomed to taking down 1,000-pound moose that can flick out hoof-armed front feet with a speed and power that would make Mohammad Ali jealous.

Berner possessed no such bone-crunching fighting ability, and she carried no weapon with which to protect herself. No one noticed her missing until snowmachiners riding back to the village came upon a blood spot in the road and her gloves. There were human tracks mixed with wolf tracks. Where the human tracks ended, there were the tracks of wolves dragging something bloody down a little hill.

Alaska State Troopers were summoned. They found Berner's body and eventually concluded she'd been killed and partially eaten by wolves. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game promptly launched an aerial hunt for the killers. On March 15, two wolves were spotted about five miles west of Chignik Lake and gunned down.

On March 17, Fish and Game issued a press release claiming "the wolves killed match the description of the wolves that killed Candice Berner,'' although no one witnessed the attack on the teacher and thus no one could provide a description of the wolves that had killed her. There had been reports of as many as four wolves together in the Chignik Lake area, but Fish and Game believed only two were implicated in the attack on Berner, based on the tracks at the site of her death.

"One a light grey and the other a dark grey,'' the press release said, the dead wolves were approximately the color and size of those seen near the village earlier, and one was bigger than the other. Two wolves, one bigger and one smaller, was consistent with the tracks found near Berner's body.

"Based on statements of eye-witness observers, observations made at the location of Candice Berner's death, physical characteristics of the two wolves killed, and the proximity of the two wolves to the location of Candice Berner's death, I conclude that it is highly likely that these wolves killed Candice Berner,'' the press release quoted area biologist Lem Butler proclaiming. "After conducting a 2-day search for other wolf sign and finding none, I also conclude that there is a low likelihood of finding additional wolves in the near future if the search is continued."