This week's programme in the series on Man and Science today.

"It was a memorable experience of being attacked. Fear, surprise, and I felt a certain degree of satisfaction in that he stopped attacking me when I behaved submissively. I had a strange feeling I was dealing with a very highly evolved animal, and in a sense it was a privilege."

It was while filming his work on wolf behaviour that the attack on Dr Fox occurred. He's one of a group of scientists appearing in tonight's programme who are studying the fast-vanishing packs of wolves in the wild. They are trying to penetrate a veil of legend and superstition: to understand more of the wolves' behaviour, what of value they feed on, and whether it would ever be possible to manage them in the wild.

Yet this work is a race against time. Although on the US government's list of endangered species, the wolf is still hunted in Alaska, the only place with a viable population of some 3,000 animals. With the Russians hunting their few remaining packs as a risk to agriculture, the wolf is yet another species in danger of extinction.