Most wolves that exist today fear people above all things, and if a dog, coyote, or strange wolf pops up in a pack’s territory, it is dead. Even the wolves of Ellesmere kill interlopers in their territories, and these wolves are believed to have experienced no (or at least very little) persecution from man. These wolves do, however, live in land that is very marginal habitat, and any territory that a breeding pair can procure will be defended aggressively.
The wolves of the Great Plains in those accounts were living in a productive ecosystem with plenty of prey. These wolves were very similar to how I would imagine the ancient wolves that were able form a relationship people. They could hunt large prey on their own, but they were curious about humans. These wolves were approaching people who lived off of American bison as a prey species. I can imagine those ancient wolves approaching mammoth and mastodon kills in search of some scraps and maybe a little companionship.
(And yes, I’m fully aware that the bison hunting culture of the Great Plains was a very short-lived culture, but it is just as likely that man and wolf had a similar relationship when they were living on other species. Both Eurasia and North America possessed ecosystems that were very productive and diverse the end of the Pleistocene. Then, agriculture gave rise to large numbers of humans, who then went after most of the megafauna that survived the effects of that climate change–like the aurochs.)
That’s why I continue to say that domesticating the wolf had to have been so easy that a caveman could do it. If the wolves of yore were like these animals, domestication would have been a cinch.
