The Loop

There is no question but that the return of its top predator has been beneficial to America's Western Wildlands. No disputing the fact that local ranchers who extirpated wolves in the first place oppose their return. And since wolves can range for hundreds of miles local is a big territory and wolves are no respecter of park boundaries. They don't read maps and the ranchers whose stock they predate probably aren't excited about National Parks in the first place considering them a sop to useless city slickers seeking a bucolic vacation spot. To locals on both sides of the American border parks are lands where they can't hunt, trees are wasted for their scenic potential, mining and oil exploration are banned, and the tourists clutter their roads and local watering holes.

Its mythology makes of the wolf the stuff of nightmares. The fact that science has recorded no record of a healthy wolf attacking a human in no way diminishes the fear and loathing this animal invokes. The wildlife branch tasked with running interference for this ferocious predator have a thankless job seeking protection for a creature that is all too often its own worst enemy. That the animal is only doing what comes naturally doesn't wash well with local ranchers and their minders can't tell their charges to stay within park boundaries. Deer and moose on the contrary seem to know exactly where to go to remain safe during hunting season.

This book is the story of one such wolf/rancher encounter. It serves to make the controversy personal. That the writer lives in London probably doesn't make him sympathetic to real life ranchers. This is the second writer I've read this year who refers to a pickup truck as a car, that's like calling a fighter jet a passenger plane.

The novel begins by documenting the wolf attack and then backtracks to introduce the various players. The author has a tendency to get sidetracked spending chapters at a time in detailed the introduction of new characters before finally clarifying what they have to do with the plot.

The Loop can variously be interpreted as meaning an animal's territory, the circle of life in which the death of one creature sustains the life of another, or a cruel device designed for killing multiple wolves.

In the end it boils down to a balance between wolves doing what wolves will do and ranchers invading wolf habitat. Settlers killed off the wolves so they could run herds of cattle in their former territory. When government policy and environmental sense decreed the wolves should return to their former ranges it put them in conflict with ranchers. In a nation that exterminated and attempted to extirpate 100,000,000 indigenous peoples so they could settle the US the lives of a few hundred wild predators don't amount to much. Could we somehow make them sexy like the bald eagle?

Let us not forget that a bounty on Indian scalps matched that on wolves or that the buffalo were systematically slaughtered so that they couldn't support the Indians. Who of a certain age hasn't sheltered in a sled under a buffalo robe or kept warm in a wolf skin jacket?