“Pimlott foresaw a time when wolves would be reintroduced to national parks in both Canada and the United States, and people would begin to see woulds "as they are --one of the most interesting and intelligent animals that has ever lived on our globe." Such thoughts, Pimlott assured readers, "are not mere fanciful daydreams.”
“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.”
“As healthy and viable populations of wild animals, wolves were gone from most of eastern North America long before the death of the last animals.”
“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.”
“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.”
“..."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.”
“In the span of three hundred years nationwide, but only seventy years in the West, hunters in the United States had managed to kill off the wild prey of gray wolves; settlers, farmers, and ranchers had occupied most of the wolves' former habitat; wolfers had poisoned them; bounty hunters had dynamited their dens and pursued them with dogs, traps, and more poison; and finally, the government had stepped in and, primarily at the livestock industry's behest, quite literally finished them off.”