On November 19, 2013, employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered the carcass of a large mammal not far from the North Carolina coast. It lay twisted in a bed of twigs, the victim of an apparent gunshot. The government workers recognized its thick gray coat, which turned cinnamon around its slender snout and pointed ears, and the radio collar on its neck. It was a red wolf, an animal that is, by some counts, the most endangered wild canid in the world.

Despite the wolf’s precarious status, the shooting was hardly a surprise. Wolves have always been controversial wherever men have encountered them. Many people remember them as the sinister villains of old-time children’s tales and fear them as a threat to humans, livestock, and pets alike. In North Carolina, residents of the small communities on the Albemarle Peninsula, a tongue of swamp and farmland just before the crowded beaches of the Outer Banks, have been particularly on edge. “How would you feel letting your kids outside to play, knowing there are wolves out there?” Annie Liverman, a waitress at the Columbia Crossing restaurant in Columbia, asked me on a recent visit. Never mind that red wolves have never actually attacked a human. In the farming town of Fairfield, Frances Cuthrell said she leaves Christmas lights on her home year-round, hoping they’ll scare the wolves away. At her convenience store, C and C Groceries, she keeps her pet Chihuahua behind the counter. “I won’t even let her in the yard,” she said. Chip McCann, a local farmer who said he had no quarrel with the animals, put himself squarely in the minority. “To be honest with you, everyone around here hates them,” he said.

Before European settlement, the red wolf was the dominant predator in the southeastern United States, with a range stretching from Florida to eastern Texas and up to southern Illinois. By 1980, however, humans had persecuted them to the precipice of extinction. In response, the Fish and Wildlife Service launched a bold initiative. It captured the last surviving red wolves from the salt marshes along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas and transported them to a zoo in Tacoma, Washington, where their numbers could grow back in safety. It was the first captive-breeding rescue program in the agency’s history, following Congress’s passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and it has served as a model for high-profile programs to save other animals, including the gray wolf in Yellowstone and the California condor.

“The red wolf had always been a puzzle,” Robert Wayne, a biologist at UCLA , told me.

In 1987, scientists reintroduced four pairs of red wolves into the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the North Carolina coast. For days, the animals hung around their enclosures, but eventually they set out to explore, and for the first time in a century, wild wolves inhabited the Atlantic coast. Over the next 20 years, the number of wolves in North Carolina swelled to about 120—a happy outcome, except for the fact that they began to spread beyond the wildlife refuge and onto private land.

It is illegal under federal law to kill a red wolf, given their status as an endangered species. But since the year 2000, shootings have become the number-one cause of death among red wolves, decimating the population. Today, the number of red wolves in North Carolina stands between 50 and 75 animals —half what it was a decade ago. Once again, the red wolf is on the verge of disappearing from the wild.