Booktv is television for serious readers. Keep watching for more of the latest nonfiction books. Tonight we are welcoming Eli Francovich to talk about his new novel the return of the wolves an iconic predators struggle to survive in the american west. Eli is a very busy journalist. Some of you know that. He has a ton of stories on his byline and he covers the environment, conservation, Outdoor Recreation for washington, Washington States second largest newspaper, hes a busy guy and if you were a wall of his home territory would probably be smoking, washington, despite his journalistic workload, he has thankfully saved some of his writing energy, drive and talent to write a book about a phenomenon he was seeing, something larger happening when he was reporting the return of the wolf and while that was happening. As he covered the wolf after introduction to the paper he found the publics passionate response reveals a more complex underlying story, a story that he followed to create this book. Erica barry is the author of wolfish which is an excellent book, a book that tries to understand our myths about wolves and tracks one legendary wolf through the mountains of oregon so thank you for being part of the event tonight. If you think of a good question during the conversation and reading today, hold onto it because hopefully we will have time for question and answer so hold onto that. As you have noticed, cspan booktv is here tonight to record the event, that means we will have audio for the questions so if you have a question and get called on, wait for the audio guide to put the mic therefore you. It is easy for us to capture that audio. Finally, afterwords, eli will be appear to sign books for you, you will line up over here to get your book signed and be able to leave that way. Reminder that we do close at 8 55 so lets go ahead and welcome Eli Francovich. [applause] thank you so much for coming, really appreciate it. Great to be here in an iconic and unbelievable place to be, reading a book that i wrote. I will read a section from this. Like most born to this age, nature is a distant amenity to me. I find more time than many outside. I like to go hiking, skiing, climbing, hunting, even occasionally bird watching. Theres no urgency in my relationship with the natural world, no necessity, no deep union. My times outside our sojourns between the next warm meal and engaging netflix series. I soon discover working with a horse requires a different level of commitment. Daniel curry and i ride up the narrow road through downed trees and hacking and encroaching vegetation. We stop often, i practice mounting and dismounting, it is hard work made harder by a son that is burned through the Morning Cloud and left the air heavy with moisture. Curry describes horses as one thousand pound thirdgraders and treats them as such, employing a brand of progressive discipline that would make the most conscientious parents look like capricious fools. He also doesnt use bits. About his generally high and carted approach, the horse will learn to trust and respect you. I try, but i keep getting stuck in the first half of that description, the one thousand pound detail. This is a big animal. I am beginning to understand. An animal that could be gone faster than i could holler out in surprise. I am lax with the discipline. Turns out raven, like many handsome creatures skating by on good looks doesnt like to work hard. When he is compelled to carry. Reporters he likes to eat. We take a few steps and then he stops and his graceful neck and nipples, i try making a little kissing sound, snags ravens attention is if a gun had gone off. Smooch smooch, i go. Raven just keeps on chowing down. So it goes for several hours. Raven trembling along slowly, eating often and occasionally heating my requests. By my standards this is a victory. The 1000 pound thirdgrader has allowed me to live another day. When we turn around i breathe easier. Raven too is excited to go home and suddenly the lethargic pace he has maintained turns into an excited trot. Hes leading the way on his horse and this keeps raven from bolting altogether but it is quickly evident that i have lost what little control i had, heading down one particularly steep hill raven guns it, dragging me through lowlying tree branches. I squeeze my eyes shut, branches with in my face and remind myself i have medical insurance. Smooch smooch, goes curry, raven stops, years attentive, eyes on the prairie, the perfect picture of obedience. Face scratched, im pleased not to have been thrown to the ground. Raven needs to listen to you, curry tells me, but you only listen if he respects you, to respect you he needs to trust you. I pool some woody debris from my hair. For the next hour we work on discipline and a we walk the same section of trail over and over. I ask raven to start. He doesnt listen to me. I ask him to back up, slowly raven gets the picture. This is important, curry says. Went out in the real mountains raven must obey. Otherwise raven might get raped. The left the hill drops 50 feet to a raging creek jammed with logs which makes me wonder what truly treacherous terrain looks like, you might get hurt. It is slow, frustrating work for raven and me. Curry for his part teaches an extra ordinary amount of patients. When we finally returned to camp raven cant get the saddle off, get under the tarp, raven cant wait to get the selloff, get under the carpet eat some hay. But thats not the plan. Instead we will rest for an hour and head out again. Curry is giving me a crash course in horsemanship after all. At the end of our break during which ien curry paces around the camp the rain returns number ravens tether to the horse trailer with a thick line of rope. I approach him to put his reins on, a job i have by now learned to do somewhat efficiently. First i untie the thicker line and retired around the back of his neck but then i start to place the reins on raven, a stout rope that sits on the snout. He snores, shakes his head and backs up. Line titans on the back of his neck, rising on his hind legs and Going Forward, curry senses the disturbance from the other side of the trailer and yells get away from him. No need to say it twice. Raven box again, slips his neck from the line, free, he starts to run. It would be a beautiful sight if i werent so worried about those hooves. Curry wastes no time. He follows raven, not running but not exactly walking either. Come on, he says, calm down. Raven roar through the camp, briefly becomes a tangled in the line holding up the green tarp and ripping himself free again. Curry follows. In the woods, theres a large hole of old wells full of trash. Curry cats between raven and the deathtrap and using the combination of stops and smooches, pushes the fed up animal away from camp to the hill into thicker brush and out of my sight. Im left alone, worrying my mistake will hurt curry or raven or both of them. Im soaking wet, my pants are torn, boots soggy, this is not the kind of drama i expected to find when i came looking for the world. [applause] im so glad you read that portion because it is a really good advertisement for journalism, i think. And also an advertisement for this book which both you walk away with such a conference of understanding of how we have gotten to where we are and also looking at the future but also it is joyful to read in a way that i think a lot of old wolf adventure stories are and you are very much not writing that sort of book but you are on the ground and with you in a way that is such a compelling example of storytelling so thank you for this book. That is really good to hear. I was hoping to make it engaged and readable. Differently. This book will resonate with so many people and i am very excited to hand this to my taxidermist, antiwolf Bumper Sticker on clan conservationist uncle which speaks to the project of this book. So yeah. I wrote a wolf book that came out in february and when i did that, he wrote another wolf book, my First Response was oh gosh, are there enough wolf facts to go around and i have to say of course reading your book i was jealous because you have these Amazing Stories you are capturing in here. So i feel like this is a really vital new sort of wolf book, the will book shelf and powells is full of book, focusing on territory there. I think one of the things when i think about this book is the path forward that you offer. And the novelistic portraits we get of people like daniel curry who is briefly introduced in what you read, who eats one meal a day among other details about his life and i wonder if, first i should ask how are you feeling, it has been out a few weeks, it is an intense thing. We were talking before this, i have read this book so many times it even now reading it i dont want to read that again because i have been over it so many times. Im thrilled other people are reading it and liking it. I want to talk about how you put together this book and reported it and your goals with it and how it is starting to replant resonate but didnt just start, you are reporter, working on feature stories about wolves. And you decided to leave the topic behind and write a whole book about it. In eastern washington, it is really in a city of a thousand people, covering a regional area thats quite rural so whenever i would write a wolf story, newspaper story about wolves, i would get flack from both sides which in journalism that means you are doing the right thing, people yelling at you, which is not, thats a hard thing to realize but in the wolf topic in particular that kept happening and i felt i was missing some deeper story that i wanted to get at, to do that, to get at that story i scheduled an interview or a day with a biologist, rancher, and politician representing ranchers in that region and we spent the day driving around the use roads like a hot august day and it was fine. I learned a lot of facts like you mentioned about wolves but it didnt feel, there is no sort of it didnt feel like there is any necessity. It was just sitting a truck looking up at these hills werewolves and towards the end of that day we came across this camp. I will never forget it. Two horses tethered under the only spot of shade and a tent in the blazing sun and we pull up and this 63 guy, all muscle, runs out of the tent to see who we are and this is daniel curry and he is a ranger rider. So he spends most of his year out in the woods in northeast washington trying to keep wolves from attacking cattle and hes not directly working for the ranchers but for nonprofits and he struck me, you can tell he had serious integrity and he was on the ground doing the work in a way that i hadnt seen, living this very intense life and doing it, like living that life. So as the story. Is a character i was hooked on him immediately wanting to get to know him better. That was through the beginning of this and that turned into a newspaper story that morphed into this book. Host i wonder what your process of sly, immersing yourself the way you did . Journalism is funny because you spend a lot of time with people and try to get to know them but you are not hanging out like you are, you are there to do a job and i was very upfront with him, i want to write a story about you and the way i want to do it is spend time with you but i need you to be okay with that because thats quite a lot of access, and they are not promoting themselves so i had to be upfront with him and it is the most intense source relationship, three years ive spent knowing this guy and i like him a lot. I had to remind him this is doing a job here but my initial thing was just be very honest and upfront about what i was trying to do and he responded well to that. He respected that. Reporter there are moments you disagree with daniel and vocalize that and i think an example of how conflict, it doesnt need to be a fixture where you turn away from each other. Hes an idealist living this life for 10 years and is very critical of how washington and other Western States have handled Wolf Management even though if you look in a more rational by the numbers way, washington is doing pretty well, in the broader Wolf Management world. That is some we have some disagreements there but it was never like that a blowup. Host you talked about your relationship with the outdoors, as someone who hunts and goes climbing. When i was working on my wolf book people thought i must either really levels or really hate wolves and i think you have a very similar line and i do which is you are trying to understand why people are so fascinated with them and i wonder if you can speak about how your particular identity help shape the project of this book and inquiries, how you go up and the way you interacted with wilderness. I grew up in northern idaho, in the tail end of this incredibly rich mining district and it is a politically conservative area but my father was University Professor and my mother owns a yoga studio so you can guess their politics but i kind of grew up. I was in two worlds in some ways and i think that more than anything set the stage for how i think about the journalism i do and what my goal in this book was which was to try to understand the polar opposites in the argument sometimes, try to figure out where are both sides coming from and find that middle ground even if you might not agree at the end day but at least listen so that informed it growing up with that context. Makes me think one of the first reporting trips our livestock producers in some way but also i was in portland and i remember reporting on wolves in eastern oregon, to wear flannel and dont say youre from portland. I dont know. I was curious how you dealt with going into these situations, such a heated topic, you say are reported on wolves and people are instantly i dont know, what was that process like, navigating, building these relationships with people who feel very different things. It came down to time, spending time, i talk to ranchers and they would be skeptical right off the bat and i had to prove to them i wasnt just flying in and flying out, that i actually wanted to understand where they were coming from and spend the time with them. That the main thing. I found most people, if you give them that respect, they will respond, not everyone of course, but people even if you are different from them. Wanting to be listened to. For the most part it was about showing i was willing to put the time in and really listen to them. You appear in the book sort of you become in certain ways we can imagine that first scene that you all heard where on the horse, shows the real challenge of Wolf Management, theres not a wolf in that scene and this is a surprising first scene there s not a wolf in a book about wolves and yet it is the actual challenges of doing that. In a place like northeast washington, oregon, most likely not going to see a wolf. I know people who spend their whole times in wolf county and want to see wolves that have not seen one. I was lucky enough to see one. In a way, its necessary to tell the story that way. Host in the first chapter you have a line, wolves inside the kind of passion usually resolved for war and infidelity, passions that highlight deep political and social divides. You do such a good job overviewing how we got to this polarization point and what wolves and humans are like as species and why we are in competition, social, cultural and biological realities. This is a very large question, why are wolves and humans in a special relationship . That is a huge question. I hate when people ask me so im asking you. Maybe you can solve it. Guest we coevolved, we are pac oriented, we rely on social connections to survive, humans are not the strongest or fastest animal out there. I think weve been in the same, parallel paths in evolution, there is another part, the part ranchers. 2, wolves can really mess up your life particularly, a wolf attacking your sheep is a big deal, you could starve to death. Not the case so much anymore but that cultural memory is still there. I was listening to something today from dan lopez, who writes a lot about wolves as well and he was talking about the fact that we domesticated dogs, they are reflecting us back to ourselves in some way and this is a little more philosophical or esoteric, we are seeing our relationship with this animal in our pet dog but not our pet dog but a wild animal and that triggers strong reactions on both sides, great love and great hatred. Host i thought of that phrase you are either with us or against us, this idea that the wolf is not the dog, doesnt care what we are doing by and large, that is hard for humans to put aside their egos to face that. Host you mentioned being agnostic about wolves and that is how i felt. I couldnt understand the strong feelings either way and that changed a little when i saw a wolf in the wild and had this sort of i was driving down a Forest Service rd. Early in the morning and saw this flash of movement running off the road and so i jumped out of the car and walked down to this cut in between the two road and there was this wolf a hundred yards downhill and we made eye contact probably for second or two but it felt like a couple minutes and that is a common denominator when you talk to people who have seen wolves, they lose all track of time and i felt this strong connection like we were staring at each other. It was intense. My heart was going and i think wolves, their predators and they have their own wills and desires and it is not connected to what humans want even though it looks similar to dogs. Host i love how you talk about this eye contact, its bigger than we can understand anyway. I started thinking about this book as a book that came out of the pandemic and that speaks not only to the reporting but i am sure you were doing during the pandemic, your own challenges but also the ways the wolf conversation has potentially changed the last few years, you have a lot more urban folks moving out, do we see these political tides everchanging and you have a great quote. Is clear that the old model of coexistence, you live there, i live here, wont work. Theres no there anymore, no here. I am wondering your perspective on how writing this book of the last few years, you give a couple examples of how that influenced wolf conversations. I got into the meat of this reporting, june 2020, i took a sabbatical from my day job and it was like sort of the severity of the pandemic was still unknown and all the political dimensions were starting to come up and then you saw this thing where a lot of higher income people were moving into rural areas and working remotely and that was changing the dynamics so youre getting a lot of tension there and it all felt like kind of tense generally speaking, tension, and i think that infused, the wolf debate was a metaphor for that in some ways but was preexisting but the tension didnt have to do with wolves. There was a quote that wolves are just,