Crying Wolf : THE GREAT AMERICAN WOLF.<i> By Bruce Hampton</i> .<i> Holt/John Macrae: 298 pp., $29.50</i>

Bruce Hampton, the author of “Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877”, a wildlife biologist who has served as a field biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, has written an even-handed, judicious book (lacking a sorely needed subtitle) with a marvelous biography. It is a detailed historical account of practically every wolf killed in America, from Colonial times to the present.

We learn everything we need to know about the way the American wolf has been maligned, misunderstood, persecuted and nearly hunted to species death, only to make a recent spectacular comeback. Along the way are some haunting stories. What the book lacks is an attempt to interpret these stories or to see them in a larger context. This is not Hampton’s intent, so one cannot blame him for not doing what he never set out to do, but some of these stories cry out for more than just balanced retelling. One trusts Hampton, and that is precisely why I wish he had been willing to go out on a limb, just once in a while.

For example, he tells the story of how a magnificent 122-pound male wolf was released with a radio collar in Yellowstone Park. He mated with a female, which became pregnant. An unemployed carpenter shot the male, threw the collar away, cut off his head and left. The carpenter’s hunting companion turned him in a few days later for the $13,000 reward that Defenders of Wildlife offered for the capture of the wolf’s killer. Meanwhile, the female gave birth, under a tree, to eight pups not far from where the male had been discovered, without preparing a den site. Evidently, she was waiting for her lost mate to return.

I miss a comment on this story. What does it mean in terms of wolf behavior? I suppose Hampton thinks the facts are eloquent enough, but it would have been invaluable to have somebody with his knowledge explain it.

There was a time when the wolf, along with the human, was the most widely distributed land mammal on Earth. But the number of wolves alive today is astonishingly low. When, last year, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone Park, fewer than 30 were released. Outside Alaska, there are only a few thousand wolves alive in the United States, not enough to make up a tiny village.

Hatred of the wolf took such hold of the American people that President Teddy Roosevelt could regard wolves as the “archetype of rapaciousness” and their eradication every civilized man’s desire. What a sea change: Today, from classroom to tourist lodge, the wolf is an object of worship.

We can see this astonishing change mirrored in the life of the great American naturalist Aldo Leopold. When Leopold graduated with a degree in forestry from Yale, he held all the stock opinions. In 1920, he spoke of how New Mexico’s wolf population had been reduced from 330 animals and called for continued perseverance “until this job is finished.”

But Leopold underwent a deep transformation. While living in the Southwest, he chanced upon a female wolf and shot her: “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountain.” He was done with “ecological murder.”

How can we account for this irrational hatred? The enmity came primarily from hunters and ranchers.

The hunters were jealous that the wolf was taking away game they thought only they had the right to hunt. This sense of entitlement was neither logical nor founded on any argument. The ranchers thought they had a reason for their hatred: Wolves were endangering their livelihood by killing off livestock. But when actual studies were conducted, it was found that only a minuscule number of livestock deaths could be attributed to wolves. In fact, the ranchers were like the hunters: They wanted to slaughter their cattle and resented competition. The wolves, at least, were not killing out of greed.

People used to speak of “the wolf problem” the way they spoke of “the Jewish problem,” and the solution was the same: genocide. This parallel occurred to me more than once as I read this stimulating book. The scientific name of the Mexican wolf (in the 1980s, there were only 10 to 30 left in Mexico) is Canis lupus baileyi, named for Vernon Bailey, the biologist who played the major role in the attempt to eradicate this small wolf from the American Southwest. This would be like insisting that Jews be called Hitlerites.

Hampton, I’ll bet, is as outraged as I am, but it is just not his style to comment on something like this. I suspect he has divided loyalties--to the scientific world to which his degrees entitle him and, given his engaging and clear style of writing, to a larger public. He is so balanced that it is sometimes difficult to tell where he stands.

The real heroes of this book are two Native American tribes. In a traditional poem of the Oneida, one of the original nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, we read of how their people moved to an area already occupied by wolves. They knew that, with great effort over a period of years, they could kill all the wolves, but this would make them a changed people, no longer members of Earth’s natural order. So they chose to move away and leave the land to the wolves. In later years, whenever they were faced with a critical decision, somebody from the tribe would rise up and ask: “Tell me now my brothers! Tell me now my sisters! Who speaks for the wolf?”

The other tribe, the Nez Perce tribe of Idaho, agreed to the request of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help monitor the wolves that would be released in Yellowstone National Park. The schoolchildren named one of the wolves Chat Chant, meaning “Older Brother.” At a ceremony honoring the return of the wolves, a tribal elder and leader of the ancient Seven Drum religion offered this blessing: “We ask the Creator that wolves may be allowed to run free again, that they be able to live, to be a part of us, to be a part of our land, to be a part of the creation for which they were intended.”

We owe a debt of gratitude to Bruce Hampton for reminding us of this noble and enlightened view, one now shared by the majority of thinking people in America, just in time to save wolves from the genocide our ancestors had planned for them.