I grew up without a television but with a library stuffed with tales of the American frontier. The hero I most aspired to was Davy Crockett, because at the Hillabee Massacre in 1813 he refused to participate in genocide. His life, and eventual death at the Alamo, were the long working-out of that refusal. Now, half a century later, lying in my narrowboat on the Grand Union canal, I find myself reading a similar heroic narrative with a very different protagonist. Rick McIntyre’s My Life With Wolves is described as a memoir but at its heart is an alpha male called Wolf 21, who, like Crockett, never finished off a vanquished rival.
McIntyre is one of the most remarkable field naturalists alive. The late great Jane Goodall called him the “ultimate guru of wolf behaviour”. Unlike some wildlife commentators, he’s always eschewed the intrusive close-up in favour of giving wolves “the dignity of distance”. There are only a handful of near encounters described across the whole of his Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series – of which this is the final instalment – and none of them were intentional, at least not on his part. His intimacy with wolves is that of being a witness, and if 10,000 hours makes an expert, he’s an expert witness and then some. He arrived in Yellowstone in 1994, a year before the wolves were introduced. Some thirty years later, on 19 May 2025, the date on which he opens the final chapter of this book, he logged his ten-thousandth dawn of wolf-watching, including 126,372 individual sightings, 217 kills witnessed and 147 matings. That period includes a fifteen-year unbroken streak, during which he didn’t miss a single day.
Wolf sagas are morality tales too
McIntyre brings this patient watchfulness to the writing of his memoir, which starts conventionally with his childhood, though it quickly becomes clear he’d much rather be writing about wolves. Similarly, when I try to set up a call with him about his book, it takes two months to track him down because he’s always in the field. When we finally speak at ten o’clock, Mountain Time, one morning in early June, Alpha Wolves is just about to hit UK bookstalls, but Rick just wants to give me a running commentary on the two wolves – “one black, one grey” – he’s observing through his Swarovski spotting scope. He tells me he’s been up since half past three, has driven the twenty-odd miles from his cabin at Silver Gate, and already put in five hours’ work. This from a man who is supposedly retired. The book opens with the same routine, on a much colder December morning in 2024. That day McIntyre watched an alpha female called 907 lead her six survivors (most had been shot by hunters outside the park) as a larger pack charged in attack across the snow. “This is both my story,” McIntyre writes in the book, “and theirs”. As readers will discover, it’s really the other way around.
We learn in the first chapter that on his first day of school Rick got on the wrong bus and had to walk a long way home alone through unfamiliar streets. “My mother did not notice… or ask why I was so late.” But such everyday experiences help explain his later empathy with lupine behaviour. The boy who found his own way home becomes the man devoted to watching “dispersers”, those wolves who leave their home and cross hundreds of miles of hostile territory looking for somewhere to begin again. Most of them die trying, though a few succeed in founding new dynasties, in which codes of conduct appear to be passed down through generations, much as with humans.
One of these is a small grey yearling called Wolf 8, who becomes an alpha by adopting a widowed mother and her pups. When Wolf 8 pins a much bigger rival in a fight, he displays Crockett-like generosity in letting him go, rather than killing him. McIntyre recounts this story to me when we speak as an example of how wolf personalities, like our own, are as much nurture as nature. Crucially, that fight was witnessed by one of the adopted pups, none other than Wolf 21 himself, who, McIntyre writes, grew into “the biggest and strongest male wolf I have ever known”. Not only was Wolf 21 always magnanimous in victory, but he also even pretended to lose wrestling matches with his pups; such generosity of spirit reminded the author of his own father.
These stories of individual wolves help us connect with them as we do with our pet dogs. It is hard to fathom that the French Bulldog snoring at my feet while I write is genetically ninety-nine per cent wolf, but Rick says he is helping people to see ‘the dog in the wolf’ rather than ‘the wolf in the dog’. In other words, that each animal is a being with its own personality and proclivities, capable of love and courage as well as jealousy and rage. He often weaves the kinship of wolves and dogs (biologically speaking, the same species) into his talks and reminds me during our conversation that the lifeblood of the Wolf Project is the belief that “facts don’t change people, but stories do.” The book’s final chapter, “The Power of Stories”, pivots on this sentence, borrowed from Doug Smith, the long-time head of the Wolf Project. It includes a vignette about a man who approached McIntyre at the roadside one day to confess that he had stopped hunting wolves since his wife gave him the Alpha Wolf books. Ultimately, McIntyre sees his life quest as that of a storyteller trying to win people over “to the side of the wolves”.
There’s one tale that supersedes all the others, a set-piece that builds across the Alpha books and reaches a climax here. The magnanimity that Wolf 21 learns from Wolf 8 by example he even extends to his rakish nephew, Wolf 302, a lifelong slacker who repeatedly sneaks into 21’s territory to mate with his daughters before slinking home. Such trespasses are usually the primary cause of male wolf-on-wolf fights to the death. “We couldn’t understand why 21 didn’t just kill him,” is how Rick puts it. But here’s the rub: 302 finally turns his life around and joins the honourable alphas. His last act is to die fighting an entire pack alone to save his pups, who are the direct descendants of both 21 and 8. Symbolically, 302 sacrifices himself to save the bloodlines of the wolf who spared him, and of the one who originally taught that wolf nobility. “Wolf sagas are morality tales too,” McIntyre tells me.
Rick’s prose is straightforward and no match for the meditative luminosity of Barry Lopez’s natural history study, Of Wolves and Men, or the visceral sensuality of Sarah Hall’s fictional Wolf Border. His field-note discipline, which makes his observational writing so illuminating, sometimes serves here to flatten his register. As with its structural defects as a memoir, however, its lack of adornment is in keeping with the stark, uncompromising contours of Yellowstone itself, which he has spent so many years tirelessly scanning.
McIntyre may not be the ultimate prose stylist but he’s a witness without compare. Ten thousand dawns – and counting – is not a job, it’s a vocation. My Life With Wolves is a testament to youthful vows faithfully kept. My childhood hero Crockett honoured his promises too, choosing to stay and face certain death at the Alamo, just like Wolf 302. What would he have given, I wonder, for someone like Rick McIntyre to have been watching.
“My Life With Wolves: How I Became the Storyteller for the Yellowstone Packs” by Rick McIntyre (Greystone Books 280pp £20) is out now
Peter Phelps is publisher of Perspective
