Whatever else can be said of them, wolves are survivors. Even today they are out there, loping through the forests and across the barrens of the Northern Hemisphere. They hunt and play, feed and rest, bear their young and die, just as their ancestors have for millions of years. In fact, there are probably more wolves now than at any time in recent history. Their numbers are on the rise in several parts of the world, including the mountains of Italy and Poland; the woodlands of Russia and eastern Germany; the spruce forests of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin; and the rugges valleys of Idaho, Montana, Alberta and southern British Columbia. In 1986, when a female wolf from Canada found a mate, crossed into Glacier National Park and raised a family of pups (the first in that region for fifty years), the animals were quickly dubbed the Magic Park. Their quiet miracle, together with the welcome reappearance of wolves in other places, stands as a tribute not only to the animals' natural resilience but also to the dedication of their human well wishers.
It has not always been so. Just a few decades ago, sensible people dedicated themselves to killing wolves, not to protecting them. Back then, reports of increasing wolf populations would scarcely have been the occasion for public rejoicing. Instead, the cry would have gone up for traps, poisons and guns, under the banner of "Death to Vermin." The goal of this clear-eyed crusade was the complete eradication of the species.
The gray wolf, Canis lupus, was once among the most widely distributed land mamals in the world, at home in forests, mountains, deserts and plains throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Today the species is extinct, or nearly so, over much of its natural range, and the current small-scale recoveries, however heartwarming, cannot change this fact. From Scandinavia to Portugal, Italy to Israel, and Iran to Nepal, the story is the same: only small, scattered clusters of wolves remain. The few hundred wolves that survive and breed in the Apennine Mountains of Italy obtain much of their sustenance by picking through persists despite the near elimination of their natural food supply (the once plentiful herds of roe and red deer). Today, these wolves eat cows and sheep, together with poison and lead, all courtesy of local sheperds and cattle owners.
In all of Eurasia, secure populations are currently restricted to parts of eastern Europe, Russia and Mongolia. Nobody knows how many wolves are left. In Canada, where the species has been lost from about one-sixth of its original range, there may be fifty to sixy thousand. (Wolves are absent from the southermost "settlement belt" and the Atlantic provinces.) There are probably another four to eight thousand in Alaska. Across the rest of North America, estimates are easier to come by because there is little to estimate. About two thousand wolves live and flourish in northern Minnesota - still the only significant population of wolves in the contiguous states. Elsewhere, numbers are precariously low: fifty to sixty each in Wisconsin and Michigan; about the same number in Montana and Idaho combined; a handful each in Washington, the Dakotas and Wyoming. Farther south, the species is virtually gone.
Wherever wolves have become extinct, the cause has been the same - human persecution, aggravated by habitat loss - and people are still the principal agents of death in most wolf populations. For whether we are aware of it or not, our world is also inhabited by another kind of wolf, one that lives only in the wilderness of the human mind. A shadowy, half-demonic beast, it peers out slyly from the dusk of semi-consciousness. For too long, this fictitious creature has succeeded in persuading us that it is the real wolf. This, by and large, is the animal we have hunted and killed.
If we hope now to live well with wolves, we must understand why, for so long, we have failed to do so or even to try. If we were mistaken in our hatred, how did this error originate? Why did our ancestors hold to these distorted views with such conviction? Before we can see wolves as they are, we must first clear our minds.
Wolves need broad horizons. Their future is most secure where they have access to large, continuous regions of forest or tundra. Populations that occupy "islands" of wilderness (including most parks and wildlife reserves) become highly susceptible to extinction. Once considered a subspecies of the gray wolf, the red wolf of the southeastern United States is now recognized as a separate species, Canis rufus. Declared extinct in the wild in 1980, the red wolf has been reintroduced to parts of northeastern North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. As the human population has expanded over the last thousand years, the wolf population has declined. By nature, wolves are at home across the northern hemisphere, from the snow fields of the high arctic, through the northern forests, and into the woodlands and grasslands of the subtropics.