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.”

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.

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

If he did skip a day, who knew what he might miss? The celebrated primate researcher Jane Goodall didn’t even have a college degree when she was assigned to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania, Rick liked to remind people, yet she was the first to record them using twigs as tools for fishing termites out of the ground, a discovery that upended the

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.

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.

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

Rick mourned 21’s death for a long time. In the years he’d watched the wolf, he felt he’d learned everything there was to know about him—his quirks, his moods, his strengths and weaknesses. He could guess what 21 would do before he did it. Rick liked to tell visitors that “21 never lost a fight, and he never killed a vanquished rival.” In fact,

Once he became a full-time Yellowstone resident and settled into his daily routine of watching the Druids, Rick found that he didn’t want to do anything else. Strictly speaking, he worked only forty hours a week, but he came to the park every morning regardless of whether he was on the clock. When he wasn’t officially on duty, he didn’t wear his