Making a comeback
Celebrating the return of wolves to Yellowstone
VANCOUVER — Wolves and humans have a long and fraught history. Most authorities agree that wolves were the first animals we domesticated, although their estimates about when this happened vary widely.
In any event, the descendants of the wolves who moved in with us became, over the millennia, everything from Great Danes to Pekingese, mastiffs to golden doodles.
Meanwhile, their wild cousins live on in human folklore and nightmare as creatures of demonic threat — fierce creatures howling in the darkness outside our camps and villages.
We have waged war on these creatures, putting a bounty on them and hunting them nearly to extinction. (In the US, the Trump administration wants to remove wolves from the endangered species list and in B.C. and Alberta provincially sponsored wolf kills happen regularly.)
In 1926, as part of the war on wolves, rangers in Yellowstone National Park slaughtered the last wolves in the area. In 1995, wolves from Canada were introduced to Yellowstone in an attempt to correct this error. Rick McIntyre, a wolf expert who has spent a lifetime observing them in the wild, tells the story of this reintroduction in his impressive new book, “The Rise of Wolf 8.”
Based on his own years of close and respectful field work, McIntyre, is a gifted and fluent storyteller who focuses on the first wolves reintroduced to the park and on their descendants, but the centre of his narrative is Wolf 8.
Wolf 8 was one of the first Canadian wolves settled in Yellowstone, and no one would have predicted he would become a successful alpha male. Smaller than his pack mates, 8 was regularly bullied by his siblings.
But in McIntyre’s telling, Wolf 8 rose above his early disadvantages to become a pack leader and the father of 19 pups, making him “the most successful breeder in the park.” Along the way he adopted other pups and displayed both hunting prowess and a playful, tender side with his progeny.
McIntyre’s book will make readers reconsider negative images of the wolf. Despite the moments of “nature red in tooth and claw” he recounts (including murder between wolf siblings, wars among the wolves and between wolves and other predators like bears, coyotes and cougars), McIntyre’s love and respect for wolves are persuasive, and his stories are compelling.
As winter darkness closes in, this book would be a great choice to read beside the fire.