The one constant was 21 and 42. Rick never tired of watching the alpha pair, especially 21, who was unlike any wolf he had ever seen. Even before 21 left his natal pack, Rick had known he was unusual. One morning in the spring of 1997, two years after Doug Smith and Carter Niemeyer rescued 21 following the death of his father, Rick watched the hand

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.

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

The last wolves believed to have been born in Yellowstone—a pair of pups discovered near Soda Butte Creek, about fifteen miles east of where Rick was now standing—were shot in 1926. They were killed not by poachers, but by park rangers. Almost from the time the park was created, in 1872, early superintendents had pursued a rigorous predator-control

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

As his collar indicated, 10 was indeed dead. He had been shot by a local man named Chad McKittrick, who, after being arrested and charged with a federal offense for shooting an endangered animal, claimed he had thought he was shooting a feral dog. It wasn’t the perfect crime; a friend of McKittrick’s had disposed of 10’s collar in a culvert filled

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

Turnbull couldn’t contain himself. “You weren’t lucky!” he shouted angrily, as the man listened in stunned silence. He found calves ripped apart by wolves every spring, Turnbull told him. Wolves weren’t special, not in Crandall. Wolves were killers.

Defenders of Wildlife,