GATLINBURG, Tenn. — The spine-tingling howl of the wolf, rarely
heard these days across most of this vast country, is fading
from another outpost. Sometime this fall, wildlife biologists
will trap the last four red wolves still loose in the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the Tennessee-
North Carolina border. Their capture will end a nine-year
struggle to reintroduce the endangered animals here, in one of
the largest tracts of wilderness left in the eastern United
States. About 75 red wolves still roam free on and around two
large wildlife refuges in northeastern North Carolina. But the
decision to remove wolves from the Smokies, announced in October
by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park
Service, marks a setback for the government's long-term goal of
restoring wild wolf populations in suitable remote places
nationwide. It wasn't politics but biology that killed this
experiment. While the government's effort to reestablish gray
wolves in Yellowstone National Park has r