Saying, “Living With Wolves by Jim and Jamie Dutcher with Helen Cherullo and James Manfull is forever in my heart,” only scratches the surface of how much I loved it.

Because it wasn’t just filled with facts about wolves and clearing up some of the misconceptions about them. It was also about how the authors conveyed the way they’d come to feel about wolves based on their experiences. In my case, I’d read other books about wolves so the hard part with me was done – I’d already fallen in love with wolves by the time I read this nonfiction story.

But this loving feeling, or getting closer to it, is what the Dutchers ultimately strive for by the time any reader turns the last page.

What better way to do this than to show the camaraderie between the wolves themselves and the Dutchers, at times, through pictures filled with the breathtaking beauty of the environment around them? To learn the words that went along with those photographs and feel the many bonds that were created, to inch closer to wolves for some of the similarly human ways their family groups work, to feel the healthy respect for their wild behaviors and see just how important wolves truly are to our world.

Complete with a life-size gallery of pictures to the scale of a human hand at the end of this book, the Dutchers not only give the gift of clarity and knowledge about wolves but share the chance to “listen to the voices of the Sawtooth Pack” through the compact disk they made when they lived, together, with wolves.

For me, this was a beautiful way to close because it made me smile to see how my hand was just a little smaller than their paw prints. I loved imagining how I could almost feel their fur and how some of it floated to the ground with each stroke… 

and thought about how extraordinary it would’ve been to be there with the Dutchers.