MCCALL, Idaho (AP) - A pair of University of Idaho researchers deep within the state's Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness say that while wolves around their three-room cabin are making elk more skittish, the predators aren't decimating populations of the prized big game animals as some hunters fear.

Wolf researcher Jim Akenson, 48, and his wife, biologist Holly Akenson, 48, live and work at the Taylor Ranch Field Station as part of what's so far a nine-year study of wolf behavior. The ranch is 34 miles from the nearest road _ supplies come in by bush plane _ and may be the most remote year-round human habitation in the lower 48 states.

The Akensons concede elk have become harder to find, but not because wolves are killing them.

Rather, the presence of packs in the woods has made elk more leery of exposed ground. That has hunters mad, because tracking the big ungulates every fall during hunting season has gotten more difficult. An elk that gets spooked in wolf country typically plunges into a river or mountain lake, because wolves are at a disadvantage in water, the Akensons said.

"That is something you didn't see before wolves," Holly Akenson said in an interview with the Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Ore.

Idaho, along with Montana and Wyoming, are trying to get the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove federal protections for wolves, whose population in the region including Yellowstone National Park now tops 1,200.

Eventually, the states want to hold legal wolf hunts; Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials say this is needed to restore balance in some areas where wolves have gotten the upper hand.

With computers and an Internet connection to keep them connected with the outside world, the Akensons are studying how the growing number of wolves are interacting with other species in the region, too: cougars, big horn sheep, moose and bears.

"When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens," says Jim Akenson. "A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table."

Four years ago, he recalls, he was riding a mule on an icy mountain trail 200 feet above Big Creek when he encountered a dead cougar. In an instant, a pack of wolves appeared and began howling.

"We could not turn around," says Akenson. "It is the most precarious condition you can imagine, with wolves howling around you."

Akenson's saddle mule, Daisy, sniffed at the cat carcass, stepped over it, and led Cricket and Rocky, the pack mules, down the trail. When Akenson later returned, he discovered the cougar had been killed by another cougar _ not the wolves, as he'd expected.

Even surrounded by three packs at Taylor Ranch, the Akensons say they've never been threatened.

Still, they take precautions.

They don't allow Mica, their golden retriever, to roam unaccompanied. Wolves generally hunt in packs of eight to 12 and have killed several hunting dogs in Idaho in recent years. The researchers also don't let their horses graze in large pastures. Horses instinctively flee wolves, and could provoke an attack.

The mules are less of a worry, Jim Akenson said.

"Mules look at a wolf and say to themselves, 'Do I need to stomp it?'" he said. "Our mules love to chase bears, too."