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

“No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

But I know none, and am therefore am no beast.” — Richard III

Shakespeare’s Richard III acknowledges that men are baser than beasts. Why? Because even beasts (according to Richard) possess the capacity for pity. Though Blakeslee draws careful parallels between wolves and humans in his work, this quotation hints at where his loyalties lie—with the wolves, not with the story’s often cruel and self-interested humans.

.“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that it. Anything else is sentimental drivel…Think about it. There’s 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

Atwood taps into the mythological nature of humankind’s relationship to wolves. By including this quotation as an epigraph, Blakeslee shows his sympathies for the idea that humans’ animus against wolves lies in a realm beyond the purely rational. Western culture has often portrayed wolves as evil, and while Blakeslee tips his hat here at their traditional symbolic value, he endeavors to write a story that shows them as quite the opposite, as a character the reader can root for.

“Hunting big game was what life in Wyoming was all about, as far as Turnbull was concerned. He couldn’t remember the last time he bought beef […] Meat to him meant elk.”

Blakeslee gives a lot of characterizing detail on Steven Turnbull in the Prologue, but this excerpt stands out. It demonstrates the centrality of hunting to Turnbull’s life and identity—and by extension to many of the inhabitants of Crandall and other towns near Yellowstone Park. The reliance on elk as a food source also helps readers understand the rational aspect to some hunting.

“At three and a half, O-Six had already reached middle age. Unless she found a mate soon, her prospects for survival were not good […] Few lone wolves of either gender ever found what they were seeking: They either returned to their natal pack or died alone far from home.”

There are several physical descriptions of O-Six (“a wonderful specimen”) as Rick observes her hunt in the opening chapter. This particular passage makes the stakes of her story abundantly clear: She must find a mate soon or risk death. It is tempting to consider whether Blakeslee is already establishing his parallels between wolves and humans. What of lone humans? How well do they fare?

“[G]ray wolves had been the target of a centuries-long campaign of trapping and poisoning—a war waged both for their valuable pelts and to protect livestock. They were all but eliminated by the 1920s across the vast majority of the Lower 48.”

This detail gives readers an idea of the scale of the wolf’s demise in the United States. It also points to humans’ role in it, with wolves just one of the continent’s species driven to near-extinction by settlers. It also sets up the parlous state of affairs for wolves in the late 20th century, when scientists first pondered reintroducing them to Yellowstone and elsewhere.

“Yellowstone had become a place where you might see something out your kitchen window that researchers elsewhere waited years to observe.”

Blakeslee mentions this during the chapter on the park’s first star pack, the Druids. It is an early indication of how successful the reintroduction of wolves is proving, leading to unprecedented opportunities to study and understand these much-maligned creatures. It also helps characterize Yellowstone as a place of cultural—and potentially commercial—significance.

“O-Six typically took the lead, flushing herds out of the trees and running back and forth across the hillsides, testing each elk to find the slowest animal.”

This quote exemplifies O-Six’s hunting prowess, as she teams up with 754 and 755 and must gradually teach them to improve their hunting skills. Blakeslee often characterizes O-Six with action like this, and the move proves effective. He builds a portrait of O-Six as a dynamic and formidable force who should prosper in the wilderness, even if the fight for survival is taxing.

“Nothing compared to the solitude of a crisp, cold Yellowstone morning. And yet wolf-watching was a social experience, too.”

Blakeslee, after introducing Laurie Lyman and Doug McLaughlin, establishes how much of a “pack” the wolf-watchers form. There is a real community around not only the wolves but also Rick. And the humans’ social behavior is really not all that different to the wolves’, which Blakeslee demonstrates with passages like this.

“Between [Rick, Laurie, and Doug] they knew more about the wolves of the Northern Range than even the Wolf Project biologists. The professionals recorded their subjects’ ages and weights, their ranges and diets, their fertility and longevity. But the watchers knew their stories.”

This passage shows the dedication of the wolf-watchers and foreshadows how the battle over the wolves’ well-being will shape up. Officials and activists will end up rejecting reason and science in pursuit of their various agendas. The ability to tell a compelling story about the wolves will prove decisive in shifting perceptions of them, albeit too late to save O-Six.

“As the elk numbers in Crandall came down, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department issued fewer and fewer licenses […] As a business, big game hunting was all but dead in Crandall, and it wasn’t coming back.”

This quote concisely summarizes the situation in Crandall for big-game hunters, and especially the businesses that rely on them, like Louie Cary’s outfitters. There is a pinch on hunting, which is making it harder for even a local amateur like Steven Turnbull to hunt. As mentioned in the Prologue, hunting is something he keenly feels is part of his identity and it pains him to risk losing it.

“Wolves were once the most widely distributed land mammal on earth, and every early pastoral civilization in the northern hemisphere outside of Africa competed with them for land on which to run livestock—and for the livestock themselves.”

This is the beginning of a vital passage in understanding the nature of human-wolf relations throughout history. Blakeslee charts just how deep-seated the competition between the species is and why it has made its way into a more metaphorical and mythological realm. That is say, the wolf has become a symbol of evil, of danger, far beyond its real threat. At the end of this passage, Blakeslee points out who supplanted wolves as the planet’s most widespread mammal: humans.

“Wolves weren’t special, not in Crandall. Wolves were killers.”

This remark comes from Steven Turnbull’s perspective, but it sums up the wolves’ reputation in Crandall. It does not bode well for the wolves. Blakeslee is characterizing Crandall as a very dangerous place for them. As reasonable as Turnbull can be, he is clearly on a very different page than the wolf-watchers.

“Whatever 754’s shortcomings in other areas, patience with his nieces and nephews was something he seemed to have in abundance […] He seemed to truly delight in the pack’s first litter.”

This is one opportunity Blakeslee takes to show the wolves at their most human—few species’ males take a role in raising infants. This is also a moment for Blakeslee to characterize the gentle giant 754 and show why he will become so beloved of watchers like Doug McLaughlin. His death, when it comes, will be all the more tragic due to moments like these.

“Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration with its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like: the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.” — Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men

In a survey of wolf literature, Blakeslee pulls out this quotation from Barry Lopez that reveals something key about the wolf-human relationship. Yes, humans have often destroyed wolves out of hatred. But Lopez posits that the origin of this hatred is a feeling closer to envy, as modern humans have been stripped of something they see as still extant in the wolf.

“Wolves had become one of those polarizing issues, like abortion or gun control or war in the Middle East, about which the country could not seem to reach a consensus.”

Blakeslee sums up how the issue of the Northern Rockies’ wolves has taken on a far larger dimension than simple conservation. Instead, it has become an issue of outsize national importance, as part of a culture war; one’s stance on the issue is a marker of identity. This is central to understanding the political aspect of Blakeslee’s book.

“[W]olves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world.”

Rick knows that the Wolf Project biologists are skeptical of crediting the wolves with human emotions or thoughts. But here he lists some of their behaviors that really do make them similar to humans. Throughout his story Blakeslee suggests it is this similarity that fuels both the fascination with and fondness for wolves from some humans—and the cruel conflict with wolves from other humans.

“More than anything, what wolf advocates fought against was the long-held notion that wolves were nothing more than killing machines. They were so much more, as the wolves of Yellowstone has demonstrated time and again to anyone willing to pay attention.”

This quotation reveals the battle that wolf-watchers like Rick, Laurie, and Doug face in the nascent culture war over wolves. With wolves’ centuries-long portrayal as evil, deadly creatures in myths and stories, they desperately need better PR. Hence Laurie’s efforts (and later Nate Schweber’s) to tell more nuanced stories about them, which has a powerful effect on public opinion.

“If Democrats were going to keep a toehold on power in Congress […] wolves needed to start dying in Montana, in large numbers, and soon.”

This line starkly lays out the political calculus that will end up fatally impacting the Yellowstone wolves. It also shows how a seemingly small or local issue can balloon into one of huge national significance. This goes some way to explaining why some politicians have sought to leverage cultural issues in their bid for power.

“The return of Yellowstone’s top predator was having repercussions up and down the park’s food chain […] At a time when species were disappearing from the earth at a rate faster than that of any period since the dinosaurs, here was a rare success story: Greater Yellowstone, the largest intact temperate ecosystem left in the world, was returning to its former glory.”

Doug Smith reflects on the so-called “trophic cascade” taking place in the park. Namely, the return of wolves has triggered positive change in all sorts of flora and fauna, with benefits scientists did not predict. It should be a huge victory, but just as researchers are beginning to understand the wolves’ environmental impact, the political situation for them is becoming more fraught than ever.

“The science was on Smith’s side, but it didn’t seem to matter to ranchers and hunters, or to state legislators. The debate wasn’t about science anymore, if indeed it ever had been.”

This quotation shows why the political situation has become so bad for the wolves. It also suggests that wolf advocates have misunderstood how the fight over this issue is playing out in the moment—that emotion has supplanted reason in political discourse. It is only by telling better stories that they can sway opinion in the culture wars.

“For years, anti-wolf forces had hammered away at the harm that wolf reintroduction—and the concomitant decline in elk numbers—had caused to the hunting economy. But what about the money lost when hunters killed wolves like 754?”

These are the thoughts of local tour guide Nathan Varley after the killing of 754. What is so important here is that Varley has spotted one way to counter the prevailing narrative in the debate of wolves. He is borrowing the language of the anti-wolf movement and turning it against them—speaking the kind of realist language politicians tend to understand, to boot. Reducing these wild animals to dollar valuations is distasteful to some of the wolf-watching community, but it is a vital way to push back against the threat facing them.

“He stood there, agape, disarmed by the otherworldly sound, by the sheer overwhelming sadness of the cry. She was their leader, he thought. She wasn’t just the black’s mate; she was the one they couldn’t do without.”

Even Steven Turnbull senses the enormity of what he has done after he kills O-Six and 755 leads the rest of the pack in howling by her dead body. While wolf advocates will wish this kind of sensitivity had afflicted Turnbull before he squeezed the trigger, it does point to his nuance as a character and his understanding of nature. Perhaps there is indeed something of the envy of the wolf here that Lopez posited.

“Famous Wolf is Killed Outside Yellowstone.”

This is the headline of Nate Schweber’s piece on O-Six’s death in The New York Times. It is picked up by agencies and outlets worldwide, and soon readers everywhere are learning about the wolf who captivated Yellowstone regulars for years. Telling O-Six’s story—treating her with some of the same individuality as a human character—sparks a huge outpouring of sympathy for her and outrage at the situation in the Northern Rockies. This moment helps swing more public support behind the wolves.