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.

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.

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

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.

The cattle, for example, competed with elk for the best forage. Cattlemen and hunting guides had made common cause against the wolf, but the truth was that they were far from natural allies. There were maybe eight or ten cattle operations in Crandall and Sunlight, almost all of them enormous and well capitalized. Most of the rangeland was unfenced

Defenders of Wildlife,

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

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