I

      January 12, 1995

      A helicopter tops a line of spruce and skims the open snow. A man leans out, a gun at his shoulder, and then is lost from sight in a blur of swirling white and terrible noise.

      The mother wolf and her daughter are running as fast as they can. The man shoots, a dart makes a hole in the snow, he shoots again and the dart sinks into the big wolf ’s thigh. The world slows down, grows quiet, grows vague, the light dies.

      The small wolf sniffs at her mother’s lips and open eyes, looks up in terror to see the helicopter returning, low above the snow, the roar unbearable.

      There is a long, slow time until the blades droop and stop, and a man and a woman rush to the large black wolf. They tie a nylon mask over her eyes and wrap her gently in an old quilt, then do the same with the small pale wolf. The small wolf is wearing a radio collar. The man and woman carry the bundles across the snow and load them into the helicopter.

      The mother wolf lies curled in a tight ball on a bed of straw inside a chain-link cage. She opens one eye to see her daughter in an adjacent cage. She looks out for only an instant. People are hurrying back and forth with metal things, cameras, medical bags, two-way radios, flashlights, lanterns. There are sounds of motors starting, cars and trucks leaving, the camp growing quiet. The sun goes down, a few electric lights come on.

      A man approaches the cage, silent, holding a broomstick with a hypodermic needle taped to its tip. A quick jab and once again the black wolf ’s consciousness dims. Masked again, she is aware that people’s hands are lifting her body and she should be afraid but she is not. They carry her on a stretcher to a corrugated metal building and lay her on a steel table. The lights are bright as summer noon, people are swarming over her, but their voices are soft. Mark Johnson, chief veterinarian of Yellowstone National Park, tells his assembled staff, “We’ve got to handle these wolves gently, respectfully, with love.”

      Network news videographers cluster around the medical tables, their white lights flaring. Reporters scratch at their pads, murmur into microphones. Flashes flash. It’s a big story, the restoration of a race exterminated in its ancestral home seventy years ago.

      The American biologists here, and the technicians, the officials of the United States Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, all are holding their anxiety and fear at bay with a stiffened sense of duty and professionalism, which lends their voices a military brittleness:

      “Body temperature 101, pulse 110, SpO2 ninety percent.” (That last is oxygen saturation in the blood.)

      “More straw for Pen Four, please.”

      “Right away.”

      “Fuel supply?”

      “Adequate so far.”

      “Lights up, chopper incoming.”

      Equally if not more anxious and afraid, the conservationists who have come in their fragile confidence that this is really happening hug each other, trying not to celebrate too soon, knowing that at any moment, even now, all this can be shattered by a court order.

      “What do you think they’re up to?”

      “God only knows.”

      The silence is what is so terrifying.

      It is thirty below today in mid-Alberta, the sun a pale disc in a featureless sky, barely clearing the treetops at midday. Out from the mountains in scraggy cut-over woodlands, a provincial park maintenance camp has been temporarily transformed into a nerve center, dead center of concentric circles of worry and hatred hundreds and thousands of miles across: Decades of struggle to return the wolf to Yellowstone have culminated here.

      The enemies of the wolf are legion and strong. Hatred of the wolf is centuries old and needs no reason. Hatred drove the wolf to extinction throughout the lower forty-eight United States but for a tiny remnant in Minnesota. The federal government itself exterminated the wolves of Yellowstone. The last two were killed in 1926. For twenty-five years the wolf ’s human friends have argued for restoration, and for twenty-five years the wolf ’s enemies have fought back in the courts, in politics, and in the minds of ranchers and hunters and anyone else who would listen.