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Several years ago I was hunting an area of blow-downs for late season grouse with a large male GWP. We had hunted this area several times before with good success. A tornado had taken a good swipe thru this section of woods a few years earlier and between the cover of the blow-downs and the new poplar growth, it was grouse heaven. It also attracted deer in late winter. We had no sooner got started when all of a sudden the dog comes running back to my side and sits down......shaking. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get him to go back and hunt. I could tell something wasn't right. This dog lived to hunt and had never before refused to "go find". Going ahead I see two sets of tracks in the snow. They had the stride of a deer but with bigger feet. The dog did not want to cross those tracks. It wasn't until I determined they were wolf tracks that I put two and two together. The minute we got a distance away, the dog was his old self and started to hunt again. But every so often he would come back to my side and whine. Yep, sure enough, the wolf tracks were there too. Seems the pair of wolves was hunting the same blow-downs. From then on, till the day that dog died, you could tell whenever he crossed wolf scent, even when there were no tracks to see. I never saw that kind of reaction to anything else. He had never had any experience or contact with wolves other than scent and tracks......but he knew it was nuttin' good.
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