Very few animals travel this earth without some sort of mythological endowment.

The crow, for example, isn't just the common black bird that perches outside your bedroom window and caws and cackles you awake in the morning. For some, its flight overhead is a portent of doom; for others, including some Native American tribes, the crow carries the spirit of wisdom and the law.

From the tiny mouse to the enormous whale, animals can signify a level of meaning and importance that tran-scends their particular arrangement of DNA.

So, too, the gray wolf has assumed exalted status among certain folks.

Once abundant in North America and now extirpated from almost all of its historic range, the gray wolf fascinates scholars with the complex family structure of its roaming packs.

Armchair naturalists yearn for a sighting of the gorgeous, long-legged beast. New Age men undergo initiation rites where they howl like wolves out in the woods.

But while the wolf is the subject of study, dreaming and much romantic yearning (see "Dances With Wolves"), such was not always the case and in some quarters is still not the case. In mythology, the wolf was usually a reviled predator, eager to eat young children or compete with humans for the animals hunted for food (see "Little Red Riding Hood"). That perception reflected the wolf's actual hunting prowess, and fueled the drive by humans to hunt it into virtual extinction in many parts of North America.

Here in Maine, where state wildlife officials say the gray wolf was extinct by the 1890s -- an assertion contradicted by wolf advocates -- efforts by wolf-lovers and conservationists to promote the animal's reintroduction have met with strong resistance by hunters. They contend wolves are a threat to the deer populations they value.

And because of their endangered status, the fear among both hunters and forest managers is that if wolves are found in Maine, then hunting and logging operations will have to stop in order to protect them.

Thus, there are few animals whose existence in the state is quite as political as the gray wolf. They're either the Great Satan or the Great Angel and there's not much middle ground.

This week in this newspaper, writer Charlie Boyle detailed the effort of one woman, Laura Sebastianelli of Northport, to find out whether there really are wolves living in the wild in Maine's North Woods.

Sebastianelli, who runs adult programs for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, is an animal tracker. She's a gray wolf fan and she'd like to see them reintroduced in the state.

Sebastianelli is encouraged by the fact that there's a growing population of gray wolves along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec; she figures the Quebec population signals that conditions in Northern Maine would likewise now be hospitable to gray wolves.

So she's organizing volunteers to conduct "howling surveys" in the Maine woods as an initial step in assessing if wolves are there now.

She'll train volunteers to go into the woods, howl like wolves and then listen for responses and document them.

It's a time-honored method of detecting animal populations used, for example, by ornithologists looking for loons and owls.

We can imagine three responses to Sebastianelli's project. One is on our Web site, where a reader comments that wolves shouldn't be reintroduced in Maine because they "bite! ... kill game animals! ... kill farm animals!"

The second response is that Sebastianelli is a starry-eyed fantasist who needs to get her feet back on the ground -- jeesh, howling after wolves!

And the third is that it's a free world and why not spend some time in the woods trying to lure wolves out of the bush?

We're partial to numbers two and three. There's a role for dreamers in our world; they enrich the landscape and thus our lives.

We recall that more than 30 years ago, a young ornithologist at the Hog Island Audubon Camp imagined restoring puffins to the Maine coastal islands from which they'd long been gone.

Everyone told him he was nuts -- but three decades and a lot of hard work later, that dreamer presides over a chain of islands from Canada to the midcoast where puffins now thrive.

Likewise, we can imagine far more socially damaging ways to spend a day than out in the woods, howling like wolves. And if the howlers get a glimpse of Canis lupus, the glorious gray wolf that once prowled this continent in great packs, then so much the better.