The final workshop in the series was held in Montague. In the old community hall, Vardaman and her colleagues listened as the locals chanted, “Shoot, shovel, and shut up!” The meeting seemed to be a lost cause. Then an older rancher with a graying mustache and ruddy cheeks interposed himself between Vardaman and the protester who had interrupted her. The two men squared off, chest to chest. Vardaman saw them clench their fists.

“These people aren’t the enemy—they’re just here to share information,” she recalls the older man saying. “You can say your piece, but if you can’t be respectful, you need to go.”

For a few moments, the room was silent. Then murmuring among themselves, the anti-wolf ranchers filed outside. The workshop resumed, with only ten people in the audience. A little later, though, Vardaman saw three of the protesters slip back in. They stayed until the end, listening.

That same year, in Montana, Vardaman took a few range-riding courses herself. She’d been a competitive equestrian as a teen-ager, but in dressage, not Western riding; now she learned wildlife tracking, horsemanship skills, and the basics of low-stress livestock handling. Afterward, she bought her own horse—a three-quarters Friesian rescue animal from Holland, named Trienke, who arrived headstrong and untrained. Two or three weeks each month, Vardaman commuted to Northern California, for the Working Circle. When she was home, she spent time with George and the dogs and worked with Trienke.

The Working Circle grew and changed. Several ranchers asked it to assess their operations; a few more, including Breanna Owens, took range-riding lessons in Montana. The challenge was broadening the circle. At a meeting one day, Vardaman described the initiative as a “community-based” organization. Gently, Owens disagreed; she pointed out that the Wolf Lady and her colleagues were still in charge. Vardaman mulled this over. She knew that ranchers liked working with each other, rather than with outsiders, and that she would always be an outsider. She decided to change the way the Working Circle was organized. In January of last year, she created a small board of ranchers called the California Council, and put it in charge of growing the Working Circle. Owens would run the Council; Vardaman would be its secretary. Now the Working Circle’s outreach efforts would be predominantly rancher-led. Not long after, in June, 2018, Vardaman took a job in Denver with Defenders of Wildlife, the nonprofit that had published the wolf photo she had used as a screensaver eight years earlier. Instead of commuting to California, she worked in the field or drove into Denver, where the Defenders kept an office suite decorated with photographs of wildlife.

And yet Vardaman’s move turned out to be short-lived. The summer and fall after she joined Defenders, ranchers in Lassen County, just south of Modoc, lost three calves and one cow to the Lassen Pack—the only confirmed wild wolf pack in California. (Biologists believe that the pack consists of an adult male—a son of OR-7—an adult female, and around ten juveniles; producers have lost eight cows and calves to its wolves since it was first detected, in 2017.) In December, also in Modoc, an unrelated wolf from Oregon was found killed, and a criminal investigation into the killing began. The argument about wolves in California was only growing more rancorous.

Vardaman was fifty-five. Part of her wanted to spend the rest of her career advocating for wolf-livestock coexistence at Defenders of Wildlife, a well-funded nonprofit, where she’d be surrounded by conservationists whose ardent commitment to wildlife matched her own. And yet she felt called to finish what she had begun with the Working Circle. Around the same time, Breanna Owens and the California Council were considering separating the Working Circle from the California Wolf Center: their affiliation with a conservation group was creating unease in the ranching community, and they wanted to build an independent, wolf-friendly organization firmly rooted in the ranching world. The donor who had originally funded the Working Circle agreed to continue supporting the project only if Vardaman would return to run it. She agreed to go back.

This past March, I visited Karin and George Vardaman in Colorado. Their house was finished—a handsome prefab construction built from golden-hued cedar and stone façades. When Vardaman opened the door, Snuggles and two other dogs tumbled outside. A wall of windows in the living room overlooked a snowy meadow crisscrossed by wildlife tracks; mountains spanned the Western horizon.

During my visit, perhaps in response to pressure from the livestock industry, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would seek to remove the gray wolf from the federal endangered-species list. Lawsuits are likely to delay the change; even if it were to succeed, the killing of wolves would remain illegal under California law. Still, sitting on her living-room couch, Vardaman read the news and cried. Beyond the Golden State, in places such as Wyoming and Idaho, wolves have already been federally delisted; state agencies are allowing more trapping and hunting of wolves. In Idaho, a private hunting group is offering bounties. The potential collapse of federal legal protections only underscored the urgency of the Working Circle’s mission to ease the conflict between wolves and ranchers.

“If I didn’t go back, I’d always regret it,” Vardaman said, perched on a stool in her kitchen. “I’d feel like I’d cheated myself and cheated the wolves.” She also felt a duty to the ranchers. They’d opened their lives to her; she meant to reciprocate. She felt that they weren’t the villains they were seen to be. She owed them her care.

California’s total prohibition on “lethal control” remains unpopular with ranchers. Many producers, including some of Vardaman’s allies, argue that they should have the right to have problem wolves eliminated as a last resort. Vardaman believes that the Working Circle should maintain a neutral position on lethal control. She hopes to make further inroads in Lassen County, and to create a version of the program in Colorado, as well.

At home, Vardaman walked downstairs. In her office and an adjoining room, she kept mementos from her coastal, pre-wolf life: a few trophies and medals from competitive equestrian sports, waterskiing, ocean swimming, and triathlons; a commemorative coin celebrating one of the Ocean Institute’s tall ships, which she had sailed; a frame displaying her captain’s certification for piloting hundred-ton ships. More recent talismans hung on a wall next to her desk: a looped lariat, two weathered cowboy hats, a wolf photograph. A bright blue cloth lay folded on the windowsill. She shook it out, revealing a scarf which she’d received as a gift, emblazoned with the family brands of ranching women.

We drove to visit Trienke, who is boarded twenty minutes away. Vardaman strode eagerly toward a rust-orange corrugated-metal horse barn. The musty smell of grass, tinged with horse manure, hung in the air. She approached a stall in the corner.

“Hi, girlie!” she called out, in baby talk.

Trienke, a glossy black horse with liquid brown eyes, pinned back her ears. Then, abruptly, she turned and left through a back door.

“She gets really mad at me,” Vardaman said, laughing. It had been a few days since she had visited.

Vardaman tied her hair back and zipped a pair of fringed black suède chaps over her gray riding breeches. Outside, she mounted Trienke from a step box in a single smooth motion. They practiced Western-style trotting and cantering and then, in a nearby pasture, communed with the cattle.

After I’d gone home, Vardaman e-mailed me the photograph that had started her wolf obsession. I made it the screensaver on my own laptop. It’s an intimate portrait of a gray wolf. The wolf’s coat has reddish-brown undertones, and there’s white, beardlike fur around its muzzle and jaw. Its golden eyes gaze outward—beacons of wildness. The wolf is striking, in part, because it’s so self-possessed. It’s just an animal being itself—a pure soul. It doesn’t know it’s so passionately hated and loved.