For those who have not yet read Rick McIntyre’s The Rise of Wolf 8 and The Reign of Wolf 21, I strongly advise you to get busy reading these extraordinary two books because his The Redemption of Wolf 302 is scheduled to be published by Greystone Books in mid October of this year and you’ll want to be ready to begin reading it the moment it reaches book shop shelves.
Chronicling the reintroduction of Grey (sorry… “Gray”) Wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 – the first to live there once again since the last of their species to do so were killed in the 1920s – Rise and Reign recount the lives of their namesake wolves and their respective packs as they discover, adapt to, and become re-established in their species’ ancestral home.
Don’t allow the use of numbers as names for these wolves fool you. Far from dry, dispassionate accounts of conservation projects, Rick McIntyre’s skills as an observer and chronicler of the lives of these wolves (it is highly doubtful that any human being has ever spent as much time observing and documenting the activities of wild wolves as he has) brings to his books the perfect balance of science and subtlety, of data and drama, presenting them in all the complexity of themselves as individuals, as members of their packs, and as actors in the larger circles of their ecosystem.
Now, with the imminent publication of Redemption upon us, what shall we learn of the life of the ne’er-do-well young wolf with a particular flair for impressing females that we last saw at the end of Reign? I know that I’m certainly keen for the narrative of this grand story to continue, and I suspect once you’ve begun reading Rise and Reign in preparation for Redemption, you will be as well – and if you have already read these previous two books, well… I suspect you then already have an advance order for it in place.
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