Fangs are bared in Germany

The wolves are back, hunting in the night, skulking through gardens, making the farm dogs restless. Sleek and mystical, they have roamed through folklore and fairy tale, a bit of enticing danger at the forest's edge.

But Joachim Bachmann, a hunter with a wall full of trophies, is not so lyrical when it comes to the wolf's reappearance amid the birch and pine of the eastern woods in Saxony.

In today's Germany, the wolf is a "protected species." Mention these two words and you'd better duck, because Bachmann can't quite get his mind around how a sheep-eating machine should not be shot on sight. It bothers him even when he sits at the big table in his big house looking out the window to a damp land speckled with paw prints.

"What positive thing does a wolf bring to nature? Nothing," he says, cutting his schnitzel and salted potatoes.

There is something else out beyond the winter grass that perturbs him too. Down the road, past a church and through a forest so dense it seems like walking through the bristles on a hairbrush, a woman Bachmann describes as a misguided Little Red Riding Hood charts the personalities and nocturnal habits of wolf packs.

Gesa Kluth's boots are muddy and her maps are worn; to Bachmann, the biologist is an infuriatingly dedicated state-funded wolf lover.

She's not cooing about him either. Kluth points to a picture on her door of a sturdy white-haired man in a hunting hat peeking out from a stand of evergreens. It's Bachmann.

"He's our No. 1 enemy. We were thinking about getting darts to throw at it," she says.

Kluth spends her days and nights tracking wolves, where they sleep, play and hunt on a territory of about 115 square miles. She plans to trap a few, fix them with radio transmitters and follow their migrations, which appear to be drifting north and west. To her, the wolf is a stealthy, swift, misunderstood beauty.

"The problem is that hunters see themselves as the predators who control the animal population from overpopulating," she says. "But now the wolves have returned and they are the natural predators, which threatens the hunter's lifestyle."

Wolves were hunted to near extinction in Germany in the Middle Ages. They reappeared from time to time, between wars and other epochs that changed borders and rearranged forests.