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In the park, meanwhile, the wolves of the Lamar Valley were putting on a never-ending show that as many as thirty thousand visitors per year were witnessing. Guide services catering to wolf-watchers sprang up in Gardiner, near the northwest entrance, and cabins and motels near the park saw increased bookings even in the low seasons. Wolf tourism was booming.
Rick’s favorite such occasion was a visit from Cameron Diaz and the rapper DMX for an environmentally themed MTV show. DMX, who was raised in Yonkers, had trouble adjusting to the scale of Yellowstone. “I had no idea any of this was even here,” he marveled.
The pups, his new brothers and sisters, showered him with affection, but 21 seemed tense, pacing back and forth across Rick’s scope. Finally the wolf found what he was looking for: a troubled pup that he had recently taken an interest in. There was usually one pup who held the lowest rank in a litter’s pecking order, but this pup was different; he had some physical problem that held him back. Rick couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong with him, though his littermates clearly recognized that he was different and shunned him. But 21 seemed to have empathy for the pup, the way a dog seems to know
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Over years of watching wolves, Rick had become convinced that empathy was the single most important trait that an alpha could have, and 21’s capacity for it continued to amaze him.
But as Barry Lopez asked in Of Wolves and Men, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to root out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained? There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too—something more akin to envy:
