Since reintroduction, 25 years of passionate watching has chronicled life, death and puppies
He remembers that the schoolchildren who had gathered were disappointed to see only trailers, with not even a glimpse of fur. However, Halfpenny and the other elated adults “were up there howling our heads off,” he says.Not everyone in the region was pro-wolf, though. Seven of the 41 genetic founders of Yellowstone’s Canis lupus population introduced that year and the next ended up being shot illegally.
Deep cultural memory entangles wolves and wilderness in all their terror and majesty. In Europe’s bouts of bubonic plague, “there would be people standing on the fortress walls watching their parents being eaten by wolves because they had died and been thrown out,” Halfpenny says. Yet wolves also tug heartstrings as cousins of humankind’s beloved dogs. In surveys of the Yellowstone’s winter visitors, “the No. 1 thing they want to see is the wolf,” he says. “In the summer, it’s bear, then the wolf.”
