“According to the Iroquois, when the Creator made the animals of the earth, He shot each one in the left hind leg so that humans would be able to catch them, but He missed the wolf.”

“From that time forth, whenever a critical decision had to be made concerning the future, the Oneida considered "how much was enough and how much was too much." Someone would rise and pose the question: "Tell me now my brothers! Tell me now my sisters! Who speaks for Wolf?"Like other Native Americans, the Oneida were soon overwhelmed by an invading culture that had scant understanding of such a sense of nuance toward the earth, plants, and animals, and in particular, wolves.Centuries would pass before anyone would venture again to speak for Wolf.”

“Even as they sought their destruction, many considered them [wolves] "possessed of near human intelligence," according Stanley Young, one so refined and subtle that it "at times caused the greatest wonderment.”

“Writing to A. Brazier Howell, Murie admitted that he had grown "very fond of native mammals, amounting almost to a passion," and thought of the wolf as a "noble animal, with admirable cunning and strength.”

“For centuries the wolf was North America's beast, an animal transmogrified into a mythic and blood-lustful killer, pursued by every conceivable means, reviled with such savage vehemence that nothing short of wholesale extirpation was imaginable. Today, the symbolic power of the wolf remains while our perception of the animal, as well as ourselves, has vastly changed.That such a transformation was ever possible at all is the ultimate triumph of wolf recovery.”

“..."we have been fed for so many generations on tales of the Wolf's ferocity, treachery, rapacity, cowardice, and strength" that most people have a "wholly wrong picture of this most interesting animal.”

“One day during his time in the Southwest, Leopold and several companions chanced upon a female wolf ans shot her. "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes --something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”