American Alpha

The title borrows a word that wolf biologists have spent decades walking back.

The popular picture of the alpha wolf, a top dog that fights its way to the head of the pack, came largely from studies of captive wolves. In 1999 the biologist L. David Mech, drawing on 13 summers of watching free-living wolves in Canada, published a paper that put it plainly: the typical wild pack is a family. The so-called alphas are simply the parents. The female leads in raising and defending the pups, the male in hunting and bringing food home.

In the lower 48, that family life hung on in one place. The lakes and forests of northeastern Minnesota sheltered the last wild wolves left in those states, and their descendants have since spread back into neighboring states. Recent state estimates put Minnesota's population between 2,200 and 3,000.

This is a color piece in cool blue-gray and tawny. The wolf stands on a snowy rock, legs straight, head turned to the right, amber eyes fixed on something past the frame. The coat is the classic mix: tan legs and chest, dark saddle, grizzled gray at the shoulders. Behind it a valley of snow-dusted conifers falls away to a pale stream, and steep mountainsides disappear into falling snow.