Shadow Mountain

Part memoir, part meditation, part love story, Renee Askins's "Shadow Mountain" is as feral and unpredictable as the creature that inspired it.While doing an undergraduate research project, Renee Askins fell in love with a wolf puppy destined for a life in captivity. Ignited by her bittersweet experience with this animal, she spent the next twenty years working toward one goal: the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. The campaign's popularity with the American public aroused...
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Part memoir, part meditation, part love story, Renee Askins's "Shadow Mountain" is as feral and unpredictable as the creature that inspired it.While doing an undergraduate research project, Renee Askins fell in love with a wolf puppy destined for a life in captivity. Ignited by her bittersweet experience with this animal, she spent the next twenty years working toward one goal: the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. The campaign's popularity with the American public aroused the rage and fury of powerful Western politicians and ranchers, sparking death threats, years of contentious debate and political manipulations, and heartbreaking setbacks when colonizing wolves were illegally killed. In March 1995, Askins witnessed the realization of her mission when wolves were released into their native home in Yellowstone.Askins circles the conundrum of embracing wild nature, like a wolf in the shadows, navigating the soul of a topic that lies deep in the American cultural consciousness. "Shadow Mountain" is a meditation on how the connection with the wild can rescue or destroy, and how nestled therein are both the seeds of survival and the malignancy that could lead to demise.Roaming from wild wolves to the Westminster dog show, from sexuality to spirituality, politics to passion, Renee tells the tale of the U.S. entwinement with wildness, weaving the threads of the mythical and mundane into a riveting and provocative drama of American culture toda