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

Wolves might have been a novel sight on the Diamond G in the 1990s, but the contest Debbie described—dog and shepherd versus wolf, with livestock as the stakes—was as timeless as any in recorded history.

In the rest of America, hunting was dying. Rates of participation had been declining for decades—only 6 percent of Americans still hunted. But in the Northern Rockies, it remained integral to the culture—Montana had the highest number of hunters per capita, and Wyoming wasn’t far behind. Women hunted, kids hunted, even wildlife biologists hunted. F

The males wanted to come with her, but they couldn’t conquer their fear of the mysterious surface and its inherent strangeness, oddly elevated and flat, with no cover, smelling like nothing they’d ever known. And, of course, the road was where the cars were, and the people. It seemed that whatever pack the brothers had been born into had seldom enc

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.

Bozeman, a bastion of progressive politics and environmentalism,

many, if not most, bulls were taken purely for the trophy mount—but

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

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

It wasn’t that Smith believed his wolves were sacred. In fact, almost every year since reintroduction, he had reluctantly approved the shooting of a handful of Yellowstone wolves who had attacked livestock grazing near the park. Such culling wouldn’t normally have been allowed under the Endangered Species Act, but a special concession had been made