40 years of living with wolves

Biologist Diane K. Boyd has had a front-row seat to 40 years of wolf recovery in the West, but her new memoir reveals that entanglements with humans in Montana were often tougher than dealing with the four-legged predators.

There’s a proud literary canon of women telling their stories of studying wildlife in remote places — Mardy Murie in Alaska, Jane Goodall in Tanzania, Dian Fossey in Rwanda. Now, Boyd’s memoir, “A Woman Among Wolves — My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery,” runs in that pack on the strength of her personality and the drama she documents in both the natural and human worlds.

Boyd was raised in Minneapolis, where her suburban upbringing included regular escapes to local swamps and a zoo. At the zoo, alarmingly, one of the caged wolves bit her dog. Nonetheless, Boyd emerged enamored with both wolves and the wildness they represent.

After becoming a biologist, Boyd found a mentor in the famed wolf researcher David Mech, working with him in the upper Midwest. A woman of statuesque frame and Nordic features, Boyd stood out in a field dominated by burly alpha males, all studying wolves that were then an endangered species.

Her career gained momentum when she moved to Montana in the 1980s, just as wolves were trickling into Glacier National Park from Canada. These wolves would reset the ecology of the American West and, along with it, set a course for her life.

The main setting of Boyd’s book is Montana’s North Fork of the Flathead River, which remains a remote valley flanked by fir forest and glacier-sculpted mountains. This is one of the only places south of Canada that still has all the native predators it had before settlers arrived — grizzlies, mountain lions, wolverines, lynx and more. It’s so spectacularly scenic that Hollywood Westerns have been filmed there, yet so remote it still lacks electric power, pavement and phone lines.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the North Fork of the Flathead was also a unique natural laboratory. A decade before the Clinton administration and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt began relocating wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the animals recolonized the North Fork on their own. Boyd and her cohorts were there to document their dispersal, compiling data while force-feeding wood stoves to heat drafty cabins in subzero winters.

Boyd’s memoir vividly paints that place and time, spiced by tales of derring-do — trapping wolves for radio-collar research, surviving close calls with grizzly bears, crossing icy rivers and flying small planes low over dangerous terrain. It also paints colorful portraits of fellow scientists along with neighboring hermits and poachers, outfitters and loggers.

In those early days, scientists weren’t sure that wolves would regain a toehold in the American West. By the end of Boyd’s career in 2019, the population of wolves had grown from a rumored few to thousands of animals.

The wolves proved resilient, reproducing faster than the rigors of the wild and the hand of man could limit them. From a conservationist’s perspective, recovery of the animals has been a remarkable success of the Endangered Species Act.

Yet Boyd also illustrates the dark side of that story. Some of it is personal — a man who grabbed her leg and tried to assault her in the backwoods of Minnesota; two pursuing men she scared off with a hunting rifle at a remote cabin.

Nearly as unsettling is her more recent tale of representing the Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks at contentious public meetings in rural Montana. Elk and deer numbers go up and down like the stock market, but when numbers of game animals seem low, wolves are the favorite scapegoat.

At times, Boyd and her colleagues had to stand before a crowd of armed and angry men, fueled both by alcohol and politically driven disinformation. Such can be the reality of being a public servant in today’s West.

“Wolf management is people management. Period,” Boyd concludes. “My hope is for a more tolerant world, with wolves living out their lives as a valued wildlife species. We can live without wolves, but the world is a much richer place with wolves in it.”

Reading Boyd’s memoir, it seems we’ve come a long way, though wolves still have a lot of enemies who wish they’d disappear.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that aims to spur lively conversation about the West. He is the author of “Hunter & Angler: Field Guide to Raising Hell,” and can be found online at conservationforth ewin.org