Aldo Leopold's trip to the Rio Gavilan in the northern Sierra Madre 1936-37. Photo: U.S. Forest Service
In later years, Aldo Leopold would write about seeing a "fierce green fire" in the dying eyes of a wolf he had just shot in an Arizona canyon. Leopold traced his radicalization to that moment, but Lance Richardson writes that the truth wasn't that simple: "When he writes 'My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die,' he is conflating decades of evolving thought, in the same way somebody might summarize a turbulent courtship as 'love at first sight.'"
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