Sublime

Defenders of Wildlife,

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

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 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

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 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

To Rick, the Druids were like the Kennedys, American royalty.

O-Six’s great-grandmother had been one of the first wolves reintroduced to the park, captured on the plains of western Canada, eight hundred miles to the north, and ferried south by plane and truck in the winter of 1995. By that time, Yellowstone had been essentially devoid of wolves for almost seven decades. Once found in virtually every habitat b