It actually provided great opportunities, as opposed to limitations. One of the greatest joys of being a fiction writer is that you get to transform yourself into someone else and transport yourself into a different world. You get to make believe, and even more so if you tell your story from an unusual perspective. When I write, I more or less become Kaala, and am really moving through her world and seeing things from her perspective. And, of course, one of the greatest tools in a writer’s box is defamiliarization, because both you and your readers get to see things afresh. Writing as a young wolf was a great way to make that happen.

Even the limitations I did encounter ended up helping me, because they forced me to be disciplined about choices that I made as a writer. For example, writers are often told that we should avoid metaphors that have been used before and make up our own, but it’s really hard to do that. Telling the story from the point of view of a wolf forced me into new metaphors. I couldn’t say that leaves blanketed the ground, because wolves don’t have blankets—the metaphor was inappropriate. So I had to find something new—a pelt of newly fallen leaves. And I was really, really, really bad at descriptions when I started writing, and all my early readers told me that I needed to describe the wolves’ world better. But I couldn’t do it. I knew I should describe a tree or plant or river, but I didn’t know how, so I’d say, “It’s a tree. It’s green. What else do you want from me?” Then I started thinking about how those things would look (and smell, and sound) from a wolf’s perspective and suddenly I was able to describe them.

It helped in so many ways. One of the most important was that I learned that writing is hard work. I published nonfiction books for a professional audience, and so all of the authors I worked with were already very successful in their fields. They approached writing as if it were another business task. I would see an early draft that had a lot of flaws, and the author worked and worked until it was right. So I learned that you can take something that isn’t working, and craft it until it does, and that keeps me from panicking if I don’t like something I’ve written. I still go deep into the creative realm and let myself play with the magic of writing, but then I am very workmanlike about the craft part of it, especially revision. Another helpful thing I learned is to keep your audience in mind as you write. Your story has to come from yourself and what you love, but if you want others to enjoy it, too, then every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence has to be written keeping in mind the question, “How will my readers experience this?” Remembering that keeps me from getting too self-involved and too serious about myself.

The biggest downside is that I can be too professional and stuffy about my writing, and can take myself way too seriously. I have to remind myself sometimes that writing is make-believe and I’m supposed to play and have fun. It doesn’t matter if there never were predatory elk—I can make them up if I want to.

Wolf conservation requires constant vigilance. There are people fighting hard to keep wolves safe, and people fighting just as hard to get rid of them. At the time I’m writing this, in July of 2009, a very important population of wolves will lose endangered species protection unless court challenges and citizen action are successful. It’s a fight that has been fought before and will have to be fought again. Here’s how it happened:

Wolves were completely eradicated in the Lower 48 states after a concentrated extermination program in the 1930s. Gray and red wolves were eventually placed under federal protection by the Endangered Species Act, and in 1995 and 1996 gray wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone and central Idaho. On March 28, 2008, the federal government removed Endangered Species Act protection from the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population, despite the fact that scientists do not consider their recovery complete, and in spite of the fact that state governments immediately started putting in place extremely aggressive wolf-killing programs. A coalition of nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit to halt the delisting and was successful—for awhile. Now wolves are at risk of being delisted again. Under the delisting rule, as much as two-thirds of the current Northern Rockies wolf population can be killed—including pups and nursing mothers. The wolf conservationists are taking it back to court, and I hope that by the time you’re reading this, the wolves have gotten their protection back.

You can find out more about this from Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Other than that, different populations are protected or not in different ways. The red wolf is still on the endangered species list (there are only a hundred of them in the wild), as is the Mexican gray wolf.