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

Over years of watching wolves, Rick had become convinced that empathy was the single most important trait that an alpha could have, and 21’s capacity for it continued to amaze him.

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

A manufacturer in Cody made a rifle that could supposedly kill an elk at a thousand yards. To Turnbull, that wasn’t ethical. For him, fair chase, the notion that a hunter should eschew any technique that gave him or her an improper advantage over game, was more than just an empty slogan.

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.

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

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 conven

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

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

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, Ric