In the late 1970s, wolf biologist Diane K. Boyd tracked a lone female wolf named Kishinena in country around the North Fork of the Flathead River in Montana. As Doug Chadwick writes in his foreward to this book, most people think wolves were first brought back to Yellostone National Park in the mid-1990s, but by that time Diane and her colleagues had been studying them on the North Fork country, in Glacier National Park and surroundings, for well over a decade.

Kishinena was pioneering a colonizing of her own, returning her kind to a place that had long been wolf country until they had been eradicated by human colonizers. Diane was following Kishinena, both she and the wolf breaking new ground, and "A Woman Among Wolves" tells the story of how this courageous woman persisted for decades in her studies aimed at wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies.

In her memoir, Boyd proves to be a wonderful storyteller. In the first chapter she describes how one day an excited woman pulled into the Polebridge ranger station of Glacier National Park and reported to Diane that someone was illegally trapping wolves in the park. The angry woman had seen a gray wolf in a trap along the road and it needed help. Diane was the trapper, and the wolf was in no danger, but she rushed out to drug the wolf, process it for her study, attach a radio collar, and release it.

The woman had said “gray wolf” but when Diane reached the trapped wolf it was black, so she thought there must be another wolf in one of her traps further up the road and she should get to it as quickly as she could. She lightly drugged the black wolf, fitted him with a radio collar, and backed away, expecting him to come to and take off, but he didn’t.

Anxious to move on to what she thought was the next wolf, she picked up the limp wolf, placed him in the back seat of her truck, and headed up the road. The jolting of the truck brought him back to consciousness, and she describes what happened next.

The wolf sat up abruptly in the back seat, awake and alarmed to find himself in a Ford F-150 on the way to Kintla Lake with some distracted blond woman driving a bit roughly. When I saw his face suddenly in the rearview mirror, he was sitting up like a big German shepherd, looking over my right shoulder. I hit the brakes and swerved to the side of the road. I grabbed my catchpole from the back of the truck, cautiously opened the rear door, slipped the noose around the wolf’s neck, and gently pulled. He resisted a bit but finally stumbled out onto the dirt road as I released the catchpole. He wove his way through the willows and was gone.

She jumped back into her truck and raced up the road, finding no “gray wolf” in any of her sets. Puzzled, it finally dawned on her that the woman who had reported the trapped wolf knew it was of the gray wolf species even though black in color.

“Communication!” writes Boyd. “When it comes to wolves, it’s all about communication in so many ways.”

Reading this story, I was hooked. I follow the wolf controversies of today closely and was sure there would be more great stories and insights from 40 years of working on wolf recovery, and I was not disappointed. Boyd’s journey with wolves started in Minnesota where she volunteered for David Mech’s Wolf Project, studied wildlife management at the University of Minnesota, and became a wolf technician in the remote rural community of Northome, Minnesota. There she developed her wolf trapping skills, defying the expectations of rural folk who doubted she could succeed in the man’s world of wolf work. She succeeded, sometimes trapping and radio collaring wolves for research, at others trapping wolves who had preyed on livestock and turning them over to be enuthenized, a part of the work she had to do but certainly did not enjoy. Her alliegance was with the wolves.

Then it was off to Montana and the North Fork of the Flathead, where she worked on wolf research for decades and had many adventures she shares in wonderful stories and anecdotes. Her first home there was a 1909 homestead cabin, and she ran into some tough characters among the fur trappers and log truck drivers, but also found great companions among her research colleagues and volunteers. She learned many lessons in her first year.

“Be careful; there are things out there that can kill you. Cross the icy river in waders in January with caution; you only fall once. Don’t shoot pack rats inside your cabin or the ricocheting bullet might get you, too. Be a good teammate and your pack will help you. Nature always wins.”

The work was hard, lonely at times, but she grew increasingly to love it, participating on the on-and-off Wolf Ecology Project and eventually earning masters and doctoratal degrees as a student of wolves. Many books have been written about wolves, but few describe the life of a field researcher with such humor, deep feeling for the wolves, and for those who study and live with them, as Boyd does in "A Woman Among Wolves."

Eventually, with her extensive experience and research credentials, beaten up by years of wading icy rivers and skiing through thick forests following wolf tracks, she came in from the field and found herself in the fraught world of wolf politics.

Wolves were returned to Yellowstone, dispersed across the Northern Rockies and Northwest, and she writes, “The politically difficult times brought by such a successful wolf recovery cast a shadow over the latter part of my career.” In 2016 she was hired as a wolf and carnivore specialist with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and encountered “wolf madness” in the human, not the wolf, population. More stories, but of raucous hearings about wolves in western Montana and her encouters with wolf haters. Of a hearing in Trout Creek, Montana she writes, “The rhetoric I heard in Trout Creek felt like something out of the Dark Ages. It was disturning to realize that some things don’t change, no matter how much effort you put in. ...And yet, in the larger picture, wolves are winning their recovery battles.”

Perhaps so, and perhaps not, because in a chapter titled “Dark Times Return” she describes how the wolf politics in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are resulting in a wolf slaughter that threatens the recovery that she had worked for over decades.

“The old Western paradigm that ‘the only good wolf is a dead wolf’ has been resurrected, aided by the modern technology of night-vision goggles, spotlights, electronic calls, and snowmobiles and ATVs — used for running wolves down.”

It’s a grim scene and a book that had been a mostly a pleasant and positive journey with a pioneering wolf researcher takes a dark turn. She lays out the details, concluding the chapter as follows: “So where does this leave wolves, other than in the literal and figurative crosshairs of the public and policymakes? I cannot say, but I can hope that the wolf’s future survival is guaranteed not necessarily by human endeavors, but by the wolf’s impressibve resiliency.” She describes its resilency in the concluding chapter.

Reading this book was entertaining, informative and, in the end, infuriating. It portrays a world in which there is deep love for wild creatures like wolves, but where there is also a deep-seated hatred for them. Why is this, she asks, and the answer is complicated, but she notes as the writer Barry Lopez once observed in his book "Of Wolves and Men," “wolves are often made scapegoats for the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.”

Diane Boyd is retired, so she can say what she wants about this situation with no repurcussions from bureaucrats and politicians and even scientific colleagues, and based upon four decades of her work with wolves, she expresses her outrage. Anyone who cares for wolves will enjoy reading this book, and at the end will feel a renewed resolve to work on behalf of their survival. Thank you, Dr. Boyd!