The Tracker opted to nab the huge map at right, from a High Country News big ball of yarn by Michelle Nijhuis called Prodigal Dogs, precisely because it has such scale. The story itself is small in its essential scope – but enormous in soul. Nijhuis, for who’s writing I have not hidden admiration before in her ability to bore deeply into a contained piece of land and group of people and extract broad themes, recently spent some time on a Colorado private hunting preserve.

Now,  usually, giant private ranches with rich people running them and clients who like to take home stuffed trophies are the bad guys in stores that run in pubs popular with environmental activists. This is an exception. The rich guy and his rich wife are good guys. There are no bad guys. Just people who love the land.

The story, by the way, is about clear signs but not yet proof that an inevitable expansion of gray wolves out of the Northern Rockies has reached Colorado. It is an epic in this telling.

The piece rockets along through its first two thirds. It bogs a bit toward the end as Nijhuis attends to loose ends in detail, the broad context of wolf and predator ecoscience, and the unfortunate fact that for all her time on this private playground for the wealthy with its big staff and big lodge and big comfy leather chairs, she didn’t get to be there when a wolf in the neighborhood got proven real. But boy – what a reader this is.

p.s. I love that map. There has been talk for years of a Y2Y corridor, Yukon to Yellowstone. Looks like the ambition has grown.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.