from the back cover

Tucked deep in Colorado’s Wet Mountains, where pine forests whisper with the wind and the night sky gleams with unfiltered stars, is Mission: Wolf; a place where the voices of wolves still echo across the ridges.

Within these pages, authors from around the world honor that spirit in tales that span the mystical and the modern, the feral and the familiar. From legends of the first howls to stories of companionship, sacrifice, and survival, Spirit of the Wolf explores the timeless bond between wolves and humankind. For wolves are the guardians of the wilderness and reflections of our own untamed souls.

Each story sings with the essence of the pack: loyalty, freedom, courage, and the enduring hope that even in captivity, the wild heart endures.

Proceeds from this anthology will be donated to Mission: Wolf, a sanctuary built on compassion and dedicated to the care and preservation of wolves and wolf-dogs, and to teaching respect for the delicate balance between humankind and nature.

So settle in. Listen closely. Somewhere within these pages, you may just hear the wolf’s call as it awakens the wild within your own soul.

by STeven lente:

This is a story of the struggle with the human concept of mortality through the eyes of one person with a terminal disease, but also of how nature copes with mortality without even thinking about it.

THE UNSATISFACTORY NATURE OF EXISTENCE (EXCERPT), PAGE 27

"Wolf M182 was dead, at least that’s what Clifton Stewart at the Minnesota Wolf Management Center in Ely presumed. Clifton had monitored M182 and his mate, M181, for over six years; their first catch-and-release radio collaring and physical exam suggested M182 was three years old then, which now made him about nine and over twice the average age of wolves in the wild.

"Notification of a death typically comes after three days of non-movement when a tracking collar sends a separate code known as the ‘mortality’ signal. The biologists who actually go out to search for the one-and-a-half pound collars often hope to find them simply stuck on a low tree limb or a bush, but Clifton’s long experience with observing this pack’s semi-annual comings and goings between Canada and the United States suggested otherwise; he was not as optimistic, and he started making loose plans to locate the source of the signal and investigate its cause before winter set in. However, with the holidays approaching, the search would more likely get pushed out to mid-January."