The gray wolf originally had one of the most extensive distributional ranges of any recent mammal. Unregulated killing and federally sanctioned predator eradication programs effectively eliminated the gray wolf from most of the Western US between about 1880 and 1935.

After years of contentious debate and a four-way war between conservationists, local ranching and hunting interests, Idaho

Fish and Game, and the federal government,the first gray wolves were reintroduced to central Idaho in 1995 with the first

litters born in May of 1996—the same month and year I was also born in the same state.

Nature, like woman, is seen as powerful, uncontrollable, and threatening, on one hand, and inferior and subordinate on the other...placing nature on a pedestal as ultimately uncontrollable merely renders her as a worthy opponent. The problems of animalizing women and feminizing animals are not discrete; the violence of one depends on and reinforces the violence of the other; so much of Western Civilization was built on both.

I render my own girlhood in an existence outside of patriarchal society—I am free, self-sufficient, and fearless in my own imagined history of the American West—a place and history usually depicted as masculine. Neither the girl or the wolf shy away from the viewer, nor from teh reality of their undomesticated environments. We are unapologetic, rebellious—the main characters in tales of adventure where girls are normally excluded. We become our own Lost Boys, Outsiders, and Kings of the Wild Things.