The Night I Had a Red Wolf in My Crosshairs

ne night in the Texas darkness, Chester Moore found himself looking through the sights of a rifle at an animal he had every opportunity to shoot. He didn't pull the trigger. What Chester believes stood in front of him that night was a red wolf—an animal officially declared extinct in the wild across its historic Texas range decades ago. In this episode of Dark Outdoors®, Chester tells the story of that encounter and others he has had with mysterious wild canines over the years. Some looked remarkably like the red wolves that once roamed Texas and Louisiana. Others were harder to explain. The official story of the red wolf is complicated by hybridization with coyotes, disappearing populations and decades of debate over what exactly constitutes a red wolf. But what happens when animals resembling those supposedly lost wolves continue turning up in unexpected places? This is a journey into the swamps, forests and backroads of the Gulf Coast in search of one of America's most mysterious predators—and an exploration of the possibility that what people are seeing in the darkness isn't always what we've been told should be there. Sometimes extinction leaves behind ghosts. And sometimes those ghosts have four legs.