Wolf Interpreter

      THE FOUR MALE pups described in the prologue were born in the spring of 1994 in Alberta, Canada, east of Jasper National Park. Their family was known locally as the Petite Lake pack. At that time, I was in the extreme southern part of the United States, working as a seasonal naturalist for the National Park Service at Big Bend National Park in west Texas, the most remote national park in the lower forty-eight states. As I drove toward an abandoned Depression-era ranch near the Rio Grande river, where I was to lead a tour for park visitors on local history, I tried to figure out how to get around a major setback in my life.

      The previous day I had received a call from Tom Tankersley, the assistant chief naturalist at Yellowstone National Park. We had an understanding that I would have a job that spring at Yellowstone as the park’s wolf interpreter, and I would specialize in giving talks about the possibility of reintroducing wolves into the park. I would be the world’s only official wolf interpreter. But Tom had called to tell me that government funding had not come through for this new position, and the offer would have to be rescinded. He was sorry, but it could not be helped.

      As I continued driving through the desert landscape, I tried to come up with a plan to save that position. I passionately supported reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone, and I felt with my previous experience with wolves while working for the National Park Service in Alaska that I could help win acceptance for the proposal. Beyond that, I had a gut feeling that I just had to be there. A door had been closed, and I had to find another way through.

      An inspiration suddenly came to me. I led the walk, then rushed home and called Tom. I had a proposition: What if the position could be privately funded? After a few moments of silence, Tom said he would check. He called back the next day to say there did not seem to be any regulations prohibiting private funding, so my idea might work. He gave me an estimate of how much would be needed for the four-month position and a deadline for having the money in an account managed by the Yellowstone Association, the nonprofit that handled donations for the park.

      After thanking Tom and finishing the call, the reality of my situation set in. How were we going to get that much funding? By my standards at the time, it was a lot. Fortunately, I was about to leave on a lecture tour to publicize my recent book, A Society of Wolves, and I would be speaking to several large groups in California. The timing was ideal.

      It turned out that I was lousy at explaining the situation. I had trouble clearly stating why Yellowstone needed funding for the wolf interpreter position. In my first talk, in a Southern California community, I mumbled a few words about how people could support Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction proposal. If anyone wanted to help, they could speak to me after the program. No one did. Then I drove north to San Francisco to give a talk at the California Academy of Sciences. The deadline Tom had given me was a few days away. I knew this would be my largest audience, and if my plan was going to work, it had to happen there or I would have to give up on going to Yellowstone.

      Four hundred and fifty people showed up. I managed to make a slightly more coherent explanation of the Yellowstone wolf story and how people could help. After the program, a crowd gathered around me, and several people asked about funding the position. A few made small pledges. I was grateful for their contributions, but as I added them up in my head, I knew that I was nowhere near the goal I needed to reach.

      A young couple stood there quietly, listening to what I was saying. I sensed they had to leave. The man stepped forward, handed me his business card, and said that they would like to help. He told me to look at the back of the card. I did and saw that he had pledged $12.50. I thanked him and said I would let him know when I reached my goal. Other people asked me wolf questions. As the couple walked off, I took another look at the back of that card and saw my mistake. The pledge was not for $12.50. It was for $1,250. With previous pledges, that amount would bring me close to the figure Tom needed.

      That was the moment I knew the Yellowstone job was going to happen. I excused myself from the people gathered around me and ran off to find that couple. They were still nearby. Feeling somewhat awkward, I asked if I had read the back of the card correctly. The man, Gary, modestly told me I had. He introduced me to his companion, Trish. We talked about wolves and Yellowstone, and I thanked them for their generosity. The next day I called Tom and told him we had enough funding for the job. We set a starting date and began to plan how the new position would be structured.

      I packed up, left Big Bend the first week of May, and started to drive north toward Yellowstone. It would be a trip of about fifteen hundred miles, and I planned on doing it in three days. As I drove through hundreds of miles of barren west Texas countryside toward New Mexico, I had plenty of time to think about how events in my life had led to this new assignment.

      I WAS BORN in Lowell, Massachusetts, and spent my first ten years in the nearby small rural town of Billerica. We lived in a renovated schoolhouse on Concord Road. A farm was across the street and the surrounding land was full of woods, ponds, brooks, and fields. It was wild country, the perfect place for a kid like me. Looking back, I feel I had an idyllic childhood there.

      It was the 1950s and, to use a modern term, we were free-range kids. On summer days and weekends during the school year I would go wherever I wanted in the outdoors, either alone or with other guys in the neighborhood. Some days it was fishing in one of the local ponds, other days it was just walking in the woods. Sometimes it was biking along the endless back roads in our town. The common thread was being outdoors, and as I spent more and more time out there, I became increasingly fascinated with wildlife. I was drawn to the small fish in the brook behind our house and would occasionally catch some of them and keep them in a small aquarium. I found turtles even more intriguing, and I put a lot of thought and experimentation into figuring out how to catch them. After examining one, I always released it.

      I recently heard astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson say, “All kids are scientists.” That triggered a memory of something I did back then. The farm across the street had two dogs: Rex and Shepy. Like all farm dogs, they were never tied up and did whatever they wanted. I noticed that most mornings Shepy would walk off into the woods and come back late in the day, just like I often did. I wondered what he was doing out there, so one morning when I saw him set out, I followed him and watched as he wandered through the woods and fields, investigating various scent trails. He was exploring the country, much as I had been doing. We were kindred spirits. That day was a preview of how I would eventually study wolves in Alaska and Yellowstone many decades later.

      After