I went straight to bed last night. I remember turning out the light, putting my head on my pillow, and thinking…dammit, I didn’t write a journal entry. Joy was already on top of me, snuggled tight, and I could feel the sleep train leaving the station. So, I let it go. And now here we are, the next morning, writing about yesterday.
I finished The Reign of Wolf 21 yesterday. I was close enough to push through, so I did. It seemed a good way to unwind in the evening, which I needed. This week was busy busy. Stressful, for many reasons. But this weekend should offer some recovery, and some get-back-on-track.
The book was…well, it was really a mixed bag of amazing and disappointing. It’s based off the author Rick McIntyre’s daily field notes as he observed the Yellowstone wolves—and it reads like a long, book-length summary of field notes. Which is to say…not great. Insight, at least via the prose, is rare. The flow of the narrative is so relentlessly “and then,” “and then,” “one day,” “one day,” that there almost isn’t a narrative. Certainly not on a paragraph to paragraph, or often even a chapter to chapter level. So, so many observations are made that don’t lead anywhere because I can tell Rick is rigorously sticking to linearly representing his field notes day by day, in chronological order, and sparing no interesting detail. In the end, it makes for surprisingly simplistic prose that was hard to read at times.
But the story is incredible. What Rick does is incredible. All that real stuff that can’t be faked. The wolves are incredible. There is a very clear and compelling narrative in the aggregate, overall, and it made me cry, this book, alone in my living room with Joy on my lap and Cooper at my feet. I knew it would as soon as I bought the book, and it did. It’s a true story, and it ends in tragedy, like all stories that go all the way to the end. I found myself thinking a lot about that last night after finishing the book—that all stories are tragic ones in the end. It can be a depressing thought, but it is the nature of things, and that makes it feel important to consider, particularly as a storyteller. None of us get to cheat our own tragic end.
Wolf 21 lived a remarkable life. He had qualities admirable from a human perspective, and it was satisfying to see how those qualities we admire give him and his pack immense success. He died old. His mate, 42, died old, just a few months before him, and it’s hard not to see the connection there, and how quickly he deteriorated once she was gone. That feels very human. It’s hard to know. We share so much with our fellow mammals, but we’re also so different in many ways. It’s hard to know where to draw that line. But the fact is that he lost her, as he was always going to, eventually, and then a few months later he curled up at the base of one of their favorite trees, went to sleep, and never woke back up. And his pack, the Druids, were never the same after losing him or her.
It is a beautiful story. And even though Rick’s way of telling it leaves something to be desired, it’s still a worthy read. I watched the PBS Nature episode on them—“In the Valley of the Wolves”—last night, again, after finishing because I wanted to see 21 and 42. It was watching that episode last year that made me want to read the book. I’m glad I did. They were magnificent, even just weeks away from their end. They were each nine years old, I think, which is almost twice the age of when the average wolf dies. Pretty remarkable.
RIP.