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Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild

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Overview

Part memoir, part meditation, part love story, Shadow Mountain is an impassioned commentary on how our connection to the wild can rescue or destroy us. While completing an undergraduate research thesis, Renee Askins was given a two-day-old wolf pup to raise. Named Natasha, the pup, was destined for a life in captivity. Through her work with Natasha and her siblings, Askins developed a deep, fierce love for the species. On the day Natasha was unexpectedly taken from her and sent to a remote research facility, Askins made a promise to the wolf pup: "Your life, your sacrifice, will make a difference." And it did. Renee Askins spent the next fifteen years in the grueling effort to restore wolves to Yellowstone, where they had been exterminated by man some seventy years before. The campaign's popularity with the American public aroused the rage of the western ranching community and their powerful political allies in Washington. She endured death threats, years of contentious debate and political manipulations, and heartbreaking setbacks when colonizing wolves were illegally killed.

Editorial Reviews

Naturalist Askins narrates what is both an autobiography and the story of one of America's most controversial conservation projects the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Idyllic childhood summer evenings in northern Michigan; interning at a captive wolf project in Indiana; spending time on the west coast of Africa, Yale University and Montana accent the author's exploration of her life story as an enduring love of nature. Askins accomplishes her task with fascinating anecdotes and insightful introspection. The reader learns about the writer's life-altering experience as a college student raising a newborn wolf cub. The heartfelt bonding of the young woman with her wild charge and the enduring memory of this incident helped form her character and direct her future. In 1986, Askins founded the Wolf Fund, whose purpose and function was to reestablish wolves into their proper place within the ecosystem of Yellowstone. The author is most engaging when she candidly recounts the emotional bruises from her sometimes naive misperceptions about both the brutal natural world and the rough-and-tumble world of Western ecological politics. In honestly detailing these revelatory episodes, Askins reexamines her scientific suppositions and her personal premises. Those interested in wildlife, ecology and especially wolves will find this a delightful read. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Renee Askins

Renee Askins founded the Wolf Fund in 1986 for the sole purpose of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park. She has been profiled in Time, Harper's Bazaar, Audubon, the New York Times, People, and Parade and her writing has been featured in Harper's Magazine and in the anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. She has traveled and lectured extensively on the topic of wildness in our culture. She lives in Wilson, Wyoming, with her husband, her daughter, four dogs, and three parakeets.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

747.47 KB

Number of Pages

336

eBook ISBN

9780385507080

Awards

  • Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Regional Book Award

Excerpt from: Shadow Mountain by Renee Askins

Prologue

DURING THE YEARS of writing Shadow Mountain people would ask me, "What is your book about?" I found that each time I would answer differently depending upon what chapter I was working on, or my mood that moment. "This book is about . . . keeping a promise, living a passion, loving an animal, not giving up, hope, living from hope to hope, heartbreak, incandescent joy, wolves, wildness lost, wildness found, wildness within, healing, wounding, restoring, common experience, uncommon experience, a place called Shadow Mountain, a wolf named Natasha." I now realize that all these were true, each a vital ingredient of the story of Shadow Mountain.

With many undertakings, especially those that are drawn out over years and involve self-examination, one finds that the person who began the journey is someone quite different from the one completing it. When I crested Togwotee Pass in 1981, glimpsing the panorama of Jackson Hole and the Tetons in the swirling mists of an early winter snowstorm, I wondered if the restoration of wolves to Yellowstone would take a full year. Fourteen years later I learned the answer: yes -- and thirteen more. It's rather odd to wake up one morning and realize that nearly a decade and a half has slipped by in the pursuit of a passion, one that you never intended to become your mission, or even your career, certainly not your identity. Likewise, when I began writing this book I thought it would be simple; I would just tell the story of returning wolves to Yellowstone, A to Z, but I soon realized I was uninterested in chronicling the Kafkaesque drama of meetings, memos, political wrangling, and philanthropy that I had lived for so long. I was far more interested in why, than I was in just who, what, and when. How, after all, had I come to this; or had it come to me? Did those years make a difference? Were they worth the cost and compromises?

The thread of a life is not stretched taut between two points. It twists in unexpected and mysterious ways, not so much weaving -- as poets would have us believe -- as snarling and catching, creating the tangles and knots which hold our stories and the keys to our understanding them. I at first thought this process would lead me to revelations that would be laid out like bright Easter eggs here and there along the path of my history. It turned out that I didn't discover the answers to my questions by systematically sleuthing through the calendar of my life. Rather, I found the truth buried beneath the surface of the story -- not the intellectual, rational, ordered truth, but the deep, resonant, singular truth of my heart.