SHADOW MOUNTAIN

A moving and affective, if overwrought, tribute to the wild.

Askins, who led the wolf recovery program at Yellowstone National Park in the late ’80s and early ’90s, has never been a stranger to wilderness. She spent her youth in northern Michigan and then moved to the foothills of the Tetons, embracing nature in all its unpredictable and nurturing aspects: not just through coming to have a sense of place, but through knowing the independent presence of wild animals, being aware of the “other” that was nonetheless kith on some fundamental level. The author manages to intertwine the evolution of her philosophy—in part, to relinquish our need to control and give rein to the elemental spirit within us—with her passion for wildlife and her political role as a peacemaker/activist for the Wolf Fund. Askins was even willing to don the lobbyist’s togs in an effort to change attitudes toward the reintroduction of wolves to one of their native habitats—successfully so because she was canny enough to entertain the emotions on both sides of the issue, to seek solutions rather than compromises, and to keep her perspective when “the maze of ethics becomes complicated in the face of the potential loss of an entire species” (for example, when golden eagles are feast on the eggs of endangered sandhill cranes). Occasionally, she trots out preposterous generalizations (“The fox is to easterners what the coyote is to most westerners”); more often, in fact pretty much nonstop, she overwrites. It pains her to leave a noun undraped by a compound adjective, a lively adverb often enough thrown in.

Still, Askins’s work has helped reshape the relationship Americans have with wild creatures.