By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Wolves are a rare breed. Few people get to see them except in Yellowstone National Park.
Since wolves were reintroduced to the park, Yellowstone is the unusual place where visitors can “reliably see wolves from the roadside,” said journalist Nate Blakeslee. “It’s a very special thing, a very unusual thing when people go there and see a wolf. They’re seeing something that hasn’t been seen in the landscape in very long time.”
Blakeslee has written “American Wolf” about the reintroduction of wolves told through the lens of one particular female wolf known as O-Six.
He will speak about the book and the ongoing controversy surrounding the reintroduction of wolves at the Wood County District Public Library, Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. Tickets are free and can be picked up at the library or through its website.
“When you’re watching them through the scope,” Blakeslee said in a recent telephone interview, “you have a sense of looking back in time to the 19th century. You’re seeing something you really shouldn’t be able to see in the modern world.
But when you watch them, their behavior is strangely familiar if you have dogs, or know anything about dogs. You’re seeing this exotic creature that’s strangely familiar to you.”
The star of the book is O-Six, a wolf who beat the odds to form her own pack which came to be known to researchers and avid wolf watchers as the Lamar Valley Pack.
O-Six became the most famous wolf in America through the writings of wolf watchers, especially, Laurie Lyman, who kept more than 2,500 pages of notes on her observations, and a documentary film.
When O-Six died on Dec. 6, 2012, it was reported the next day in the New York Times prompting world-wide outrage.
Blakeslee, a writer from Texas, had been considering doing a book on wolves, and he knew he had the material when Lyman shared her writing with him, and when the villain of the story, the man who shot O-Six the first day hunting wolves became legal again, agreed to tell his story.
“He was amenable to speaking to me,” Blakeslee said. He trusted the writer. The hunter had never been interviewed, nor identified — Blakeslee uses a pseudonym. “Nobody knew who he was. … He knew he was going to be the bad guy in the book.
This was something he’d done alone at dawn and the next day it was in the New York Times. It was surreal for him.”
“American Wolf” is Blakeslee’s second book. He’s a veteran journalist who started his career writing for the Texas Observer in Austin. It was “an old lefty political magazine that had been around forever,” he said.
Blakeslee had studied history in college but decided he was more interested in writing for a broader audience about the present rather than the past. His writing, though, shows a keen awareness of how the past shapes contemporary thought and action.
His first book, “Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town” grew out of reporting he did at the Observer on a police corruption scandal in the Texas Panhandle.
Since 2006 he’s been on the staff of Texas Monthly, a general interest magazine.
In college he and his college friends would travel every summer to Jackson, Wyoming and get jobs and live in the area. This was before the reintroduction of wolves.
Years later in 2007 on a whim, he decided to travel to Yellowstone in winter for a wolf watching class with Rick McIntyre, a park service employee dedicated to wolves and a close observer of O-Six.
Blakeslee was fascinated by wolves and Rick McIntyre. “He was the kind of character who cries out for magazine story.”
But that never came to be though writing about him and the wolves stayed in the back of the writer’s mind. He just didn’t know how to approach it until he read the story about O-Six’s death in the New York Times.
The challenge is to write a book in which a central character is not human. He, as do the researchers who study them, eschews anthropomorphizing the animals. They are not people.
Yet the researchers and “the subculture of hard core wolf watchers” come to know individual wolves. “They do have, for lack of a better word, personalities, Anyone who has owned a dog or more than one dog will tell you that no two dogs are the same,” he said. “You can predict what a certain dog will do in a certain situation.”
That’s true as well with wolves.”That was a revelation to me,” he said.
Lyman’s daily notes on this one wolf and this pack “became a treasure trove and indispensable in crafting the book.” Her work showed “it was possible to get to know individual wolves,” Blakeslee said. “They are not people, but they are not robots. They are very charismatic animals.”
