By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — Barb Moore isn’t sold on the idea that the tracks in the snow in a gated neighborhood south of Interstate 90 along Mullan Trail Road in Coeur d’Alene were left by a wolf.

She thinks the deer carcass partially devoured along a neighborhood street between two homes may have been eaten by dogs, or coyotes.

She has her reasons.

The Idaho Fish and Game big animal biologist has seen plenty of wolf tracks in the wild. The tracks she inspected in the snow and mud in the well-to-do neighborhood east of Coeur d’Alene appear too small.

“When you see a wolf track in the mountains, it’s startling,” Moore said. “They are just so large.”

However, she won’t rule out that a wolf on Sunday nabbed a 15-pound dog from a front yard on the 2200 block of South Whitetail Crossing Court. Or, that a wolf may have hung around to kill a deer and eat part of it, and then maybe moved on.

“It’s possible,” Moore said. “It’s not typical.”

The tracks she inspected were smaller than usual, she said. She can’t rule out that the deer was struck by a car, limped down to the wooded area approximately 200 yards from the nearest home to die, and then was eaten — by something.

It could have been dogs, coyotes or a young wolf, Moore said.

“There’s nothing really conclusive,” she said.

Neighbors are pretty sure the animal that snagged the 15-pound dog from a yard behind an electric ground fence — the dog has not been found — and killed and ate the deer in the quiet neighborhood where people drive slow, watch for pedestrians and regularly walk their dogs, was a wolf.

Maybe there were more wolves than just one.

“It’s interesting to me that a wolf would be this close to town,” said Roger Dunteman, a Kootenai Health physician and Whitetail Crossing Court neighbor.

Dunteman said the tracks aren’t likely from a dog because all the dogs in the neighborhood stay behind electric fences and are walked daily by their owners.

The partially eaten whitetail deer carcass, Dunteman said, was not there, 40 yards off the road, a day earlier. Although he and his neighbors only have tracks, a missing dog and a half-eaten deer as evidence, Dunteman is pretty sure a wolf came to visit the hillside development that overlooks Lake Coeur d’Alene.

In the sequence of events, the dog went missing Sunday, Dunteman said. The deer was killed the next day. Its blood wasn’t yet coagulated when a neighbor found it, Dunteman said. Neighbors called Idaho Fish and Game Tuesday, which was also the day Dunteman placed trail cameras where he thinks a wolf might travel.

He concedes there is no hard evidence to place a wolf in the neighborhood just up the hill from Tony’s On the Lake and the old Beachouse location, but he sent images of the prints to a trapper who contracts with the federal government, and a mountain lion outfitter. Both men believed the prints to be wolf tracks.

By Friday, Dunteman hadn’t checked the trail cameras, but no more incidents have been reported, he said.

“It could have just been passing through,” he said.

Dunteman and Fish and Game agree on that.

“(Wolves) are curious animals,” Moore said. “It’s very unlikely they would spend a lot of time or hang out there.”