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brother nearly bit the dust too,” he told me.
    â€œHow?” I asked.
    â€œAn owl.”
    â€œBut he got away?”
    â€œAlmost wish he hadn’t,” Blue Boy said with a sniff.
    This brother’s name was Sully. When Blue Boy dispersed from his pack—his third summer—Sully came along with him. That next spring Blue Boy mated with a wolf named Bess, who whelped the five pups he’d mentioned. His last memory of home was going out to get them some food with his brother.
    What happened, I now realize, was they were shot with tranquilizing darts and transported hundreds of miles south to a compound in Yellowstone Park. Coming to, they found themselves in a pen with collars around their necks. There were other Canadian wolves in other pens, but Blue Boy and his brother attracted the most attention from the humans. Perhaps it was their color. They both had the curious bluish tinge to their coats.
    The first thing Blue Boy did when the tranquilizer wore off was to try to rid himself of the annoying collar. He couldn’t scrape it off on the chain-link fence, however, and Sully wasn’t able to gnaw it off.
    â€œMaybe Bess’ll do better,” Blue Boy muttered. “Let’s go home.”
    But when Blue Boy crouched to attack the fence Sully pointed out wolves in other pens who were doing just that, losing fur and teeth in the process.
    â€œYou have such great teeth, Blue. Why sacrifice them when you don’t have to?” Sully nodded at a woodpile in a corner of the pen. “We can tunnel out under that.”
    Blue Boy had helped Bess dig a whelping den, but only because they’d been unable to find a pre-dug one. He considered digging to be for badgers. But he saw his brother’s point.
    They started tunneling after dark. The ground was marbled with roots and volcanic rock, but they kept at it night after night, trading shifts. Just before sunrise on the sixth night Blue Boy poked his head up between two pines outside the pen. He scrambled out, shook the dirt off his fur, and hissed at his brother, who’d conked out by the woodpile.
    â€œMove it, Sull! The humans’ll be up soon.”
    Sully stood and ambled over to the fence. “You go,” he said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’m fine here.”
    â€œBut don’t you want to escape?” Blue Boy said incredulously.
    â€œThey bring us food every morning. And by the look and smell of this place we’re an awful long way from home. It would be a killer trip. We’d probably get shot.”
    â€œBut we have to get back to Bess and the pups! That pack across the river’ll move in and slaughter them.”
    I later learned that the humans were about to release the wolves anyway. But, of course, Sully didn’t know that. Like most of us at decisive moments, he had only his character to fall back on. He wavered a bit when Blue Boy’s look of disbelief turned to contempt. Then the door of one of the humans’ trailers slammed, and the moment was gone.

    â€œHe was always lazy,” Blue Boy said. “That’s why he stuck with me after we dispersed instead of starting a family of his own. But I never thought he was a coward and a traitor.”
    Blue Boy was definitely neither lazy nor cowardly. When we came to the end of the Beartooth Mountains, we faced a long stretch of open country before the next mountain range started, and ranchers took potshots at him as we made our way across it. But he rarely broke stride, his eyes trained on the mountains that would lead him home.
    We were just coming into the foothills when a bullet caught Blue Boy in the neck. To my surprise, he didn’t fall to the ground. All that fell was the aggravating collar. Amazingly, the bullet had severed it. The collar must have blunted the bullet’s impact, for Blue Boy barely slowed down.
    I’m pretty sure I crossed my first state line that day, passing from Montana into Idaho. Blue