Farley initially meant to write a scathing recollection of the bureaucrats and scientists who made his career so very difficult. Wolves were to be a minor aspect of it. However, the more he became involved, the better he grasped wolves’ importance in the ecological system, the reality that they were not a threat to anyone, and that sport hunters and government lackeys were the real threat. Total wolf extinction, Farley expresses, has become a real possibility and, for some, a goal.

Farley recounts being five years old and entranced with three catfish he tried to keep alive. He put them in his grandmother’s toilet. In the middle of the night, she discovered the presence of the fish, which scarred her for life but also stirred Farley’s interest in creatures further down the food chain and how he could champion them.

He details his training as a biological scientist in Canada who receives a summons to Ottawa to work for the Canadian government in the Dominion Wildlife Service. While some of his colleagues study things like tooth decay in groundhogs, Farley finds himself assigned to investigate wolves. Canadian sportsmen had claimed that wolves killed so many deer that hunters had nothing to hunt.