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You are here: Home / Politics / First Wolf in Yellowstone

First Wolf in Yellowstone

December 4th, 2018 by Sallie Bingham in Politics 1 Comment

Spitfire - photo by Deby Dixon

Spitfire – photo by Deby Dixon

We saw her last January, leading a string of wolves across a blank white hillside, unaware of the throng of cameras aimed at her, leading her life as the daughter of the Alpha female of the Lamar Valley pack. Her mother had ceded her the leadership before being shot by a hunter outside the park. Now Spitfire, Wolf 926F, has been killed by a hunter too.

Wolves don’t know the meaning of park boundaries or of death-dealing labels like the one Spitfire wore on her collar. The label allowed her to be shot on sight if she strayed onto private land.

It’s been two decades since I wrote a poem called “First Wolf in Yellowstone” about their re-introduction to the park after years of absence, a re-introduction that caused protests and much political action to create even the park’s zone of safety. It is generally know that wolves don’t kill healthy cattle, and so it seems to me that there is something more basic behind this endless resistance.

D.H. Lawrence as a young man searched for a woman to love who would not eat his soul and regretted that “There isn’t a wild she-wolf in the length and breadth of England.” Had there been such a woman, she would have needed to hide her wildness in order to survive.

There is something about the fierce wordless independence of the female wolf that stirs an atavistic antagonism.

But there are wild she-wolves now, women who don’t eat souls and range as freely as Spitfire did, and are perhaps nearly as endangered. There is something about the fierce wordless independence of the female wolf that stirs an atavistic antagonism. Wildness in female wolves and in all females must be stamped out.

Not foreseeing this outcome to their reintroduction, I ended my poem with a statement of faith:

“From now on, she knows no boundaries:
Trapped, then freed,
She can never be trapped, or freed, again.”

Or only in death.

[If you’d like to send a message to Congress in support of federal protection for wolves, please visit the Environmental Action website.]

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In Politics Yellowstone National Park

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Douglas Conwell says

    December 4th, 2018 at 10:42 am

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K_YQZheKr4 This is a wonderful video of how wolves in Yellowstone actually helped regenerate the entire ecology! Thanks for posting this Sallie

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Taken By The Shawnee

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