Wild Animals and the Right Books

In the foreword to Waylon County, I briefly discuss my time living in Yellowstone National Park, where I encountered "many wild animals and plenty of the right books." This evening, while reading a review of Nate Blakeslee's new book, American Wolf, in the Texas Observer, I recalled one of those animal encounters.

In 1995, the year the wolves were being reintroduced into Yellowstone, I happened upon a chain link pen in the backcountry. That alone would have been unusual, but then, inside the pen, I saw a wolf trotting back and forth along the fence keeping pace with a wolf on the other side. Startled, the wolves looked up, and I had no idea what was going to happen next, for I had never met a wolf in the wild before. To my surprise, the wolf on the outside of the fence bolted into the lodgepole pines and disappeared. I don't recall what the wolf in the pen did at that point, but I turned around and headed back toward the road.

In the summer of '95, the wolves were the talk of the region. Environmentalists heralded the return of Canis lupus, and ranchers adopted the motto, "Shoot 'em, shovel 'em, and shut up." From what I gathered in the Texas Observer review, Nate Blakeslee deals with this complex subject with an even hand. I believe this to be a wise approach, and I look forward to reading American Wolf and seeing how the author, one of my former Southwestern classmates, tells the tale.


Here is a photo from the Yellowstone Park site.