Blakeslee - American wolf: a true story of survival and obsession in the West

In Nate Blakeslees riveting, endlessly adventurous narrative, the world of Yellowstone alpha wolf O-Six comes vividly alive and yet remains brutally wild. Gorgeously written, and offering stunning insights into both animal and human nature, American Wolf is a masterly feat of science journalism.

Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods

As in a great novel, we are swept along in a multigenerational saga involving matters of character, courtship, and shifting social relations. Except this is a story of wolves and wolf packs, as closely observed through the years by scientists, not nature poets. And in the background, the human fates and furies who control the animals destiny: hunters and ecologists and fanatics struggling to adapt an ancient mythology of wolf-terror to the modern American West.

Tom Kizzia, author of Pilgrims Wilderness

Heartbreaking frontline coverage of our war on the wild.Blakeslee hauntingly gives the victims faces, families, and stories. A quietly angry, aching, important book.

Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

A compelling environmental drama of the reintroduction of wolves to the Rockies, as clear-sighted on human politics as it is on wolf politics. As wolf packs battle one another for control of precious territory, unknown to them another battle is taking place, between the wolves supporters and those who would eradicate them.

Neil Ansell, author of Deep Country

Nate Blakeslees account of the Lamar Valley wolves, based largely on the two decades of meticulous notes kept by Yellowstone wolf watchers, is the Game of Thrones story of modern western wolves, and unfolds in just as riveting a fashion. It is an absolutely mesmerizing read.

Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

Wolves are neither gods nor demons. Real wolves are complex beings with personalities, ambitions, careers, andthanks to usmore than their fair share of tragedy. American Wolf gives us true profiles of wolf lives lived in their actual families. And when humans get involved, the trajectory of their lives forever changes.

Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

In an extraordinary feat of reportage, Nate Blakeslee brings us the wilds most storied animal as weve never seen it before. Here is the joyful wolf, the heroic wolf, the desperate wolf, the despairing wolfthe wolf as an individual as fully realized as its human allies and enemies. Written with heart but not sentimentality, American Wolf is nothing less than Shakespearean tragedy played out against the backdrop of our troubled relationship with nature.

J. B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World

Copyright 2017 by Nate Blakeslee

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: Excerpt from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, copyright 2000 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt from The Ninemile Wolves by Rick Bass, copyright 2003 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blakeslee, Nate, 1970

Title: American wolf: a true story of survival and obsession in the West / Nate Blakeslee.

Description: New York: Crown Publisher, 2017

Identifiers: LCCN 2017008953 | ISBN 9781101902783 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: WolvesYellowstone National Park. | Endangered speciesYellowstone National Park. | Wildlife managementYellowstone National Park. | Mammal populationsYellowstone National Park. | NatureEffect of human beings onYellowstone National Park.

Classification: LCC QL737.C22 B54284 2017 | DDC 599.77309787/52dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008953.

ISBN9781101902783

Ebook ISBN9781101902790

Map by David Cain

Cover design and illustration by Michael Morris

Cover photograph: Tom Murphy/National Geographic Magazines/Getty Images

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For Manny and June

It would be so lovely to not have to follow the scents of the politics, the laws, the cattle, the humans, the hunters, the roads. It would be so lovely to just stay in the dark woods and concentrate only on pure unencumbered biology: foot sizes and body weights, diets, range and distribution. It would also be fiction.

Rick Bass, The Ninemile Wolves

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Richard III

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.Think about it. Theres escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

A UTHORS N OTE

E very scene depicting wolves in this book was drawn from contemporaneous observations. I could not have accomplished this without the generous cooperation of Laurie Lyman, who lent me her notessome twenty-five hundred pageson the wolves of Yellowstones Northern Range. Lauries daily observations, supplemented on the occasions when she was absent from the park with notes she collected from friends, allowed me to get to know the Lamar Canyon Pack, and they form the basis for my descriptions of the life of O-Six and her family.

Rick McIntyre graciously provided me copies of his own notes from key moments in the life of the pack, which, along with my interviews with other observers, allowed me to draw those scenes more fully.

Rick and Lauries cooperation should not be construed as an endorsement of the ideasabout wolves or peoplefound in these pages. Those are my own.

Finally, the names and identifying characteristics of two individuals, referred to in this account as Steven and Wayne Turnbull, have been changed to protect their privacy.

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