The highly charged moral and ontological language of the following passage is characteristic of Rick Bass’s feisty, often polemical account of the return of wolves to Ninemile Valley, in the remote northwestern corner of Montana (his own home territory), after a sixty-year absence:

I have come away from following the Ninemile wolves convinced that to diminish their lives would be wicked; that it would involve a diminishing of a significant force in the world, that it would slow the earth’s potential and cripple our own species’ ability to live with force; that without the Ninemile wolves, and other wolves in the Rockies there would be a brown-out, to extend the metaphor of electricity; that the power would dim, and the bright lights of potential—of strength in the world—would grow dimmer.

Wolves had been systematically exterminated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the settling and domesticating of the American West by whites—that is, by those determined to bring culture and civilization to the rest of the new world. This land, of course, had long been occupied by the Indians, who had a highly developed culture of their own before the whites from the East came to claim it. As Bass is fond of pointing out, the wolf “problem” was related to the Indian and buffalo problem, and all three were dealt with in the same way and for the same reason: each stood in the way of progress and civilization (the American Dream) as conceived by the whites. Superior technology (guns, for example) made it possible to more or less eliminate the wolves and buffalo, and to either eliminate or confine the Indians—who depended upon the buffalo and had no quarrel with the wolves. What was at issue was the continued domestication and transformation of the wilderness into a “humanized” and “civilized” environment.

Bass mentions the Indians and buffalo, but he wisely confines himself mostly to the detailed story of the Ninemile wolves and, in a general way, to what has happened to wolves in Mexico and other parts of the North American West. It is good to keep in mind certain essential truths as one tries to think about this book—the story it tells and the argument it makes. At one time, wolves may have been largely in control of their own destiny in this country, just as other wild creatures and other natural phenomena were. However, the future of wolves is entirely under human control now. Whether they live or die as a species, and whether they are allowed to continue to exist in Ninemile Valley or are reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park, will be decided by us and our political systems—just as we will decide the fate of the remaining wild rivers, still-existing wilderness areas, other wild creatures, and nonhuman life forms in general. So, although Bass tells a very specific local story about a limited number of wolves in a remote area of northwestern Montana, he is also clearly addressing a much larger issue, which is the relationship between people and the rest of nature. More and more, this has become an adversarial, either/or relationship in which wild nature is always the loser. What Bass learned from his experience with the Ninemile wolves is that this relationship could, and should, be a both/and one.

The lesson begins in early 1989, when a black alpha female wolf suddenly appears in Marion, Montana. She is joined by a two-year-old gray male and an old gray male, both of whom are soon shot. After the female has three pups, she and two of them are captured, collared, and released by federal wildlife agents. The lone male pup is untrappable and is later shot; his two sisters, released in an area where there is not enough food, soon starve to death.

The black alpha female makes her way to the Ninemile Valley and is joined there by a gray alpha male and a gray wolf of unknown sex. The wolves settle in on the Thisted brothers’ farm, the alpha wolves mating and producing six pups. These nine wolves constitute the 1990 Ninemile pack and are the main subject of the book. Theirs is not a happy story, in spite of the efforts of the Thisted brothers and the Feds to protect and help them. By the end of the year, all of the wolves have either disappeared, been shot, or sent to a wolf haven.

However, over the next two years wolves appear again on the Thisted brothers’ farm. A gray female is followed by one gray and one black wolf (sex unknown) to form the 1991-92 Ninemile pack. The female has a litter of three pups who were still alive and well as of August 1992. Whether or not these wolves survive is entirely up to us—that is, to the state and federal fish and wildlife agencies, the ranchers and farmers, the hunters, and the other inhabitants of the area who may or may not shoot or poison wolves—for whatever reason, and in spite of the threat of a ＄100,000 fine and a year in prison.

Interspersed throughout this narrative of the Ninemile wolves there is a lot of wolf lore, both facts and myths: stories of wolf lovers and wolf haters, of wolf killers and wolf protectors; myths relating the demonizing of wolves; accounts of famous wolves; and especially the characteristics of wolves and wolf packs. In a style that is always personal and colloquial, Bass reveals his growing admiration for wolves and their ways. By the end, it is quite clear that he cherishes wolves because they are a different order of being from the human. He admires the wolves’ skills as predatory hunters, their nonhuman intelligence, and the way they learn from experience. He applauds their “spirit,” their “great hearts,” their creative and resourceful behavior, their playfulness, their power and strength, and their sociable nature as pack animals who live in family groups.

Do we have the right to exterminate such beings because they threaten and sometimes destroy our livestock and dogs, interfere with recreational and sport hunting, and stymie our plans for conquering and finally domesticating all of wild nature? No, we do not, Bass argues throughout this book, which is not just another piece of nature writing in praise and celebration of “wild nature,” nor is it a fanatical (or sentimental) animal-rights tract. Bass attempts to present wolves in terms of what they are: wild predators. The issue raised by this book is whether wolves have the right to continue to exist in the wild and, given the realities of modern civilization in North America (wolves were exterminated in Europe hundreds of years ago), whether there are any places where wolves can be allowed to coexist with human beings, except on Isle Royale on Lake Superior and in other wolf havens.

This is clearly a matter that goes beyond the killing of a few cows and sheep, or even dogs. As Bass argues in the quotation at the beginning of this review, we may need wolves and what they represent. If we domesticate the true wildness out of nature and, correspondingly, out of ourselves, we may paradoxically destroy other traits which enable us to realize our full potential as human beings (human animals). We may eliminate our kinship with the nonhuman world—the earth, and all other life forms on it—and with the very life force or source from which we all evolved.

The Ninemile Wolves is a spirited, angry, forthright book. It is also a sad book because, as Rick Bass knows, neither the odds nor history favor wolves.