(Reviews)

Scary Beast

Few animals have been more hated than wolves. Today the creature is making a vaunted comeback, due in no small part to a shift in attitudes.

By Hillary Rosner

Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
By Jon T. Coleman
Yale University Press, 270 pages, $28

If the recent state of world affairs isn't reason enough to feel heavy-hearted about human nature, Vicious bears down with the weight of natural history. Jon T. Coleman's ambitious yet relatively succinct work chronicles the sad story of Americans' treatment of wolves, from the arrival of the first colonists through the late 20th century, punctuating the seemingly unparalleled hatred that bipeds harbored toward their canine counterparts at the crown of the food chain.

It's hardly news that the colonists and pioneers—and the farmers and ranchers who came after them—despised wolves. Their aggressive and unrelenting campaign against the animals wiped out wolves in most of the United States, leading to the species' near extinction by the 1920s. Were it not for the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and the controversial Yellowstone reintroduction program in the mid-1990s, today wolves would be largely found only in captivity.

Coleman, a historian at Notre Dame, sets out to make sense of the vilification, a loathing so deep it led people—by the hundreds—to grisly acts of torture. Private citizens and the government resorted to such methods as catching wolves alive in traps and then slicing their back legs before releasing packs of dogs to tear them to bits, or feeding them meat laced with fishhooks. Generally, people watched the slow deaths with glee. "They died with fractured spines and severed hamstrings," Coleman writes, "gifts from a predator dissatisfied with mere annihilation. The brutality of wolf killing transformed bloody-but-understandable acts of agricultural pacification into deeds as inexplicable as they were horrendous. . . . Why was death not enough?"

His answer: a dangerous eddy at the confluence of "biology, folklore, and history." Wolves loomed in myth as big, bad, fearsome beasts. Since American settlers viewed their free-roaming livestock as "territory," they had no mercy on those who trespassed. And wolves' biology left them unable to reproduce fast enough to stem the marauding tide.

Coleman has written an unsparing account of the carnage. Yet is there really any other way to tell this story? He devotes only about 15 pages to reintroduction efforts—far too little, given their historical importance and that the rest of the book leaves the reader crying out for a narrative of redemption. But he gracefully emphasizes the importance of wolves' symbolism in both their destruction and their potential resurrection. Today wolves represent lost wilderness and a disappearing opportunity for awe. The "mythology of the last wolves engendered feelings of loss and longing at the same time that scientific observation of wolves generated evidence that contradicted the darkest vision of wolves as irredeemable murderers."

A 2002 survey of New York State residents about wolf restoration in Adirondack Park revealed a direct correlation between people's desire to bring back wolves and their level of factual knowledge about them. Enlightened attitudes toward wolves grow directly out of our increased understanding of them.

This is why Mission: Wolf—a Colorado rescue group for wolves bred in captivity that cannot be released to the wild—brings a few "ambassador" wolves around the country to visit schools and other groups, hoping that such benign face-to-face encounters will help spread the preservation ethic. I met a wolf ambassador. She licked my entire face and teeth—the typical greeting—while I held her furry head in my hands and stared into her deep green eyes. It was a surprisingly powerful experience.

Wolves are shy creatures that "used their keen senses to locate their enemies and run away from them," writes Coleman. How could people so misunderstand them? Despite his triad of myth, biology, and historical circumstance, he seems, finally, to blame human nature in the bluntest terms. "They may smile, hug, rescue kittens, write thank-you notes, and attend support groups," he writes of his fellow man, "but people are vicious at the core. . . . Wolf killing confirms people's knack for generating pain and suffering."

By revisiting a painful past, Coleman will help keep progress for today's wolves heading in the right direction. Of course, this means 21st-century humans will have to continue to keep their own bloodthirsty impulses in check.

Colorado-based Hillary Rosner writes frequently for The New York Times.

EDITORS' CHOICE

The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind
By Gary Ferguson
W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $24.95

In The Great Divide, Gary Ferguson brings to life the people who shaped the Rocky Mountains' cultural history. "The Rockies are as close as America has come to an archetypal landscape—a region that, although far removed from the core of society, reflected much about our most persistent longings," writes Ferguson, a naturalist and veteran magazine writer. In the 1800s fur trappers hunted beaver and miners dug for gold. In the 1960s conservationists and flower children came looking for spiritual nourishment. The Rockies were "a collection of things hoped for and lost," says Ferguson, a "province of dreams." One dream maker, Moses "Black" Harris, moved to the West after gaining his freedom from slavery and became a highly respected trapper and guide. The Great Divide is chock-full of tales about Indians, artists, politicians, missionaries, historians, explorers, and others who were inspired by the mountains to do great things. Today, with some of the Rocky Mountains' most majestic landscapes under assault from oil rigs and subdivisions, The Great Divide is a celebratory reminder "that human personality is scoured and shaped, and ultimately made bright again by the earth underfoot."

—Jessica Ebert

Sick of Nature
By David Gessner
Dartmouth College Press, 234 pages, $24.95

Don't let the zany title of this collection of essays fool you. The author is a certifiable nature junkie. In these pages he obsessively follows coyote tracks through snowy woods, and kayaks close enough to night herons to glimpse "their burning eyes." One early spring day he becomes excited at the sight of "insects floating lazily above the wrack line on the beach" because it presages "the return of our local bank swallows." So the man has not forsaken nature. But, oh, does he chafe at being pigeonholed as a "nature writer," as his attention-grabbing title shows. That's understandable, if silly: Gessner's last book, the well-received Return of the Osprey: Season of Flight and Wonder, which explores life's meaning on a Cape Cod beach, is positively Thoreauvian. Of course, Gessner doesn't really want to abandon the nature-writing genre; he just wants to expand it. So mixed in with his reflections on coyotes and terns are poignant tributes to literary heroes and teary-eyed marveling at his child's birth. Afterward, as Gessner joyously dances around with his newborn daughter, replaying the nine-month buildup, he wonders "how much time and energy we waste trying to maintain the illusion that we create our own fate. We play imaginary games, make charts and graphs, and sing ourselves reassuring songs. But it doesn't help in the end. The future is chartless." Gessner's essays tend to zigzag through the terrain of both wild and human nature, often at the same time and without a compass. But his writing is so sharp-eyed, you don't mind getting lost with him, wherever he ends up.

—Keith Kloor

On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth With the Peregrine Falcon
By Alan Tennant
Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $25

An occasional nature-tour leader and the author of several regional field guides on snakes, Alan Tennant joined a U.S. Army project on the Texas coast to trap and radio-tag wintering peregrines. The idea was to divine their spring migration routes from the direction they headed when leaving the coast. But this was the Army, and the project's ground rules were too restrictive for the author. So, in cahoots with an aging pilot who owns a creaky Cessna, Tennant schemes to track a radio-tagged peregrine wherever she takes them. This risky and even foolhardy venture, mixed with genuine animal-behavior discoveries, leads to Alaska. Presto, the scalawags are off on a new airborne peregrine pursuit, this time to the falcon's wintering grounds in Mexico, with Tennant and his cohort dressed in bogus Texas Highway Patrol uniforms to hoodwink any meddlesome officials who may want to see their nonexistent credentials. Thankfully, the author lives to tell the tale. He writes crisply and often eloquently, converting the stuff of boyhood thrillers into one of the liveliest natural history stories in ages.

—Frank Graham Jr.

Art of the Wild

Michael Forsberg's On Ancient Wings: The Sandhill Cranes of North America is the product of a 65,000-mile trek to document the often-challenging lives of these magnificent birds. Shot from the Arctic tundra to suburban Florida, the intimate, at times stunning, photographs of these striking gray birds present a rich natural history of one of the world's oldest avian species. Forsberg's own journey began in 1999 after he spent an afternoon watching the cranes at Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska, and culminated five years later with the self-published On Ancient Wings ($45). He writes: "Cranes are soulful birds and ambassadors of goodwill that connect habitats, cultures, and people beyond social, political, or economic borders."

—Jessica Ebert

© 2005 National Audubon Society

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