AMERICAN WOLF

A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

By Nate Blakeslee

300 pp. Crown. $28.

Because I often write about the outdoors, schoolchildren are quick to ask, “What’s your favorite animal?” Since cave painting days, humans have regarded animals in individualistic terms. We give them names, we seek to celebrate the biggest, or the most powerful, or the most beautiful. We see in them, as the poet Pattiann Rogers writes in “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict With Itself,” that which we wish to see in ourselves. (This seems to me an impossibility, a desire destined for heartbreak and confusion; for how can we, a few hundred thousand years young on the planet, truly expect to integrate with any degree of grace to the logic, order and function of ancient systems and species that have been here so many millions of years longer?)

Still, we persist. We name our sports teams after them, Rogers points out, we name the subdivisions that displace or eradicate them after them, we name ourselves after them. Our view of the world — still so new to us — is uni-centric, self-centered: one person, one animal. Habitat — what’s required to survive, and what’s required to prosper — tends not to be at the forefront of our thoughts.

When I try to tell the children this, they give me funny looks, as if I’ve scolded them. “I don’t have a favorite animal,” I say. “Not a wolf?” they ask. “Not a lion, not even a bear?”

No. What I love most is the landscape that produces the animal — the elk, the badger, the wolverine. Robinson Jeffers famously queried, “What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine/The fleet limbs of the antelope?” For each creature does not exist isolate, but is the sum of all the many moving parts: geology, vegetation, temperature, moisture, aridity, sunlight, nutrients, the shape of the land, the cycle and timing of the seasons.