American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

Bozeman, a bastion of progressive politics and environmentalism,

He worried that he couldn’t meet the high standard he had set for himself—to become the next Ernest Thompson Seton—but something else was holding him back, too. Once the first book was finished, he’d have to promote it, which meant he’d have to leave Yellowstone and go back out into the world.

Honnold had suggested in his brief for the judge. Projects like wolf recovery were about restoring ecosystems on a grand scale, not, as he now told the court, creating “postage stamp replicas of a world long gone.”

But the trouble with the agency’s management of wolves went much deeper, Honnold continued, all the way back to 1987, when the original recovery plan was completed. According to the plan, the existence of just one hundred wolves and ten breeding pairs in each of the three key states for three consecutive years constituted a recovered population. (W

In the course of his research, Rick found himself reading everything he could find on the historical treatment of wolves in the United States. The more he read, the more convinced he became that his ancestors had committed a terrible injustice. When the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, there were perhaps as many as two million wolves on the contin

He also liked Thoreau’s ideas about work, which aligned nicely with the way a lot of young people saw the world in the late 1960s. The goal was to do as little work as necessary, so that you could maximize the time available to do what you pleased.

After Rick finished A Society of Wolves, he traveled to western Colorado and spent two days in the land that had been home to one of the last wolves known to have lived in the state. Gazing out over the juniper and sage, he was moved to perform a ceremony of sorts in memory of the wolf, who was known as Rags the Digger. He played a song written by

Over the years, he learned to tell stories that suited whoever happened to be in his audience on a given day. For a busload of young cancer survivors, he had tales about wolves, like Limpy, who had managed to overcome their disabilities and thrive.

He always included plenty of facts and figures about wolves in his talks, but he found that stories about individual wolves were what moved people.