It's easy to get lost in this absorbing story. In context with the other books in the series, it is beginning to feel like a true epic.

> That was the first time I had seen 302 refuse to give up while fighting another male, even when his opponent had given him what must have been a very painful bite to the face. The wolf continued to surprise us with how he was changing. 302 had known three greatly accomplished alpha males in his long life: his father, wolf 2; his uncle, 21; and now his nephew, 480. They were all aspirational role models on how proper alphas should behave and it looked like 302 was finally beginning to emulate them. Can a tiger change his stripes? Can a person or a wolf change his basic character in his later years? Against all my expectations, it looked like 302 was starting to do just that.

> 302’s reactions to all this attempted mating activity impressed me. He acted like a chaperone, guarding 06 from the unwanted advances of the young males, and did not pester her like the others. I saw 302 gently lick 06’s back and lightly rest his head on her when they bedded down next to each other. She accepted his attentions and did not snap at him or bite him. Based on his many years of romancing females, 302 seemed to know how to treat them. In human terms, he was suave

> March 21 was the thirteenth anniversary of the release of the original reintroduced wolves. I had been out in the field for 81 percent of the days the wolves had been roaming free in Yellowstone. We were in the middle of a Golden Age for wolf research. During those years we had so many wolf sightings and were seeing so much intense behavior, some of which had never before been observed, that I often had no time to eat my lunch, even though it was within easy reach.

> the biologist overseeing a long-term study of wolves at Isle Royale National Park, was in Yellowstone at that time. Because that island is heavily forested, wolves are hard to see. Rolf told me that a researcher hiking around the park can go years without spotting a wolf. The park gets about eighteen thousand visitors annually and Rolf said that collectively they have about fifteen to twenty wolf sightings a year. In contrast, the open country in much of Yellowstone meant we could see wolves almost every day. At that time, I was in a stretch where I had seen wolves for nearly six hundred days in a row.

> wolves with black coats have an increased immune response that enabled them to recover from distemper, a naturally occurring virus, at a higher rate than gray wolves. All three surviving Slough pups were black. The research at UCLA also traced black coats in wolves back to a genetic mutation in an early version of the dog, likely after the last Ice Age about ten thousand years ago. Back then all dogs would have looked just like wild wolves since they were only a few generations away from their wild relatives and often interbred with them. The black mutation quickly spread through both wild wolves and dogs. Gray coats come with genetic advantages, as well. For reasons not fully understood, gray mothers have better overall pup survival than black females, even with the periodic outbreaks of distemper. The Yellowstone wolf population tends to be half black and half gray, and we found that our wolves tend to pair off with a mate of the opposite color.

> Mange is caused by infestations of parasitic mites just below the skin. Rebecca Raymond, a biologist who worked for the Wolf Project, had previously been a veterinary technician. She told me the mites live at the base of hair follicles. When a dog or wolf scratches at the spot, it pulls out fur along with the mites. The loose mites can then easily get on another wolf in the group and the infestation spreads much like lice in children. … Mange was a significant threat to Yellowstone’s wolf packs because wolves need thick fur to insulate them from extreme cold weather. Thermal images of wolves with mange indicate that the animals need to double their energy expenditure to keep themselves warm in winter

> In 1905 the Montana legislature passed a bill instructing the state veterinarian to oversee a program to capture wild wolves, infect them with mites, then release them “in hopes that they would return home and infect their fellow pack members.” The bill was entitled “An Act to provide for the extermination of wolves and coyotes by inoculating the same with mange.”

> I was struck by the number of cases where Yellowstone wolves were injured or killed while hunting elk and bison. Those incidents made clear how dangerous it is for wolves, who average about 100 pounds as adults, to fight with adult elk that can weigh from 300 pounds to 700 hundred pounds and bison that can get up to 2,000 pounds.

> Mike Phillips, the original lead biologist of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, worked in Alaska early in his career and did a study where he examined 225 wolf skulls. Twenty-five percent of them showed evidence of blunt force trauma such as broken jaws or damaged skulls, most likely inflicted by kicks from moose. An earlier study of 2,134 Alaskan wolf skulls by H. Haugen found that 36 percent had injuries caused by prey animals.

> The Blacktail wolves had figured out something about crossing the road that the Leopold pack never did. When wolves in that territory wanted to cross the road, they had to go through open country where they would be easily seen by people driving through the area. Many drivers would speed to the likely spot where the wolves would cross and stop in the middle of the road. That often caused the wolves to back off and try to cross elsewhere. I got a report that the Blacktails had found a place where the road crossed a small bridge over a creek. The pack took to traveling under that bridge to the other side of the road, completely avoiding any traffic. ( )