THE Romans described dawn as “inter lupum et canum”. Humanity has lived for much of its history “between the wolf and the dog”, and between the realms of night and day. Wolves were once the most widely dispersed large mammals on the planet and our existence – along with that of the domesticated wolf that we have learned to keep as a companion animal, and to protect our homes, flocks and selves from wolves – has evolved side-by-side with them. Carveth Read, author of The Origin of Man and His Superstitions, says that “Man, in character, is more like a wolf . . . than he is any other animal”. My own all-too-fleeting experience of wolves, in Finland, suggests an animal of enormous intelligence and social capacity. And yet the wolf has a serious reputational problem. When Margaret Atwood says that all stories are really wolf stories, she tends to emphasise the night side. And we do the same; the journalists who pursued Princess Diana were “a pack of wolves”; a failing football manager is “thrown to the wolves”; single-actor terrorists are invariably “lone wolves” — these terms used with confidence by people who have never seen the animal in a wild state.

Nowhere is the animal’s reputational problem more acute than on the fringes of the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming where the wildlife protection and hunting lobbies bump up against one another with sometimes brutal consequences. Wolves do not recognise state lines and states’ rights mean that reintroduced animals – who need dispersal and connectivity to thrive, lest they inhabit only artificial “islands” without biological diversity – will stray into territory where hunting is, intermittently, allowed. It is politics, rather than biology, that sets the tragic tone of Nate Blakeslee’s extraordinary book.

Its central characters are a small group of wolf obsessives located round the Lamar Valley. All the observational material comes from the work of a man called Rick McIntyre and a woman called Laurie Lyman. The tragedy is sprung by a man who, for the purposes of the book and his own protection, is called “Steven Turnbull”. The central character is an alpha female, known to the world as O-Six. That she was also more briefly known as 832F and fitted with a radio collar is another component of the tragedy.

A certain cohort of wildlife obsessives will already be objecting to the naming of wild animals and muttering “anthropomorphism”, but such labelling in the Lamar Valley was simply a convenient shorthand. Neither McIntyre nor Lyman, nor Blakeslee, impose human values on the Lamar pack or the dramatically named packs (Mollies, Druids, Agate Creek) that surround and sometimes violently interact with them. Blakeslee is a fine writer. His first book Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town is investigative journalism at its finest and a vivid exploration of miscarried justice. Some way in to The Wolf he quotes McIntyre as feeling unready to write effectively about the wolves, unable to convey the experience of actually seeing them. And there is a momentary sense that this applies to Blakeslee, too, that like Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song he is weaving something elegantly compelling out of someone else’s experience and research. Blakeslee leans heavily on Lyman’s observation notes, and McIntyre’s more chaotic archive, years of wolf-watching without a single missed day. In a book without illustration, one starts to feel at a slight distance from the subject.

And yet, when the inevitable moment looms and hunter wins out over watcher among the human characters, I simply couldn’t face the pages that dealt with O-Six’s death, and only read them a week later. “The world’s most famous wolf” only really became so in death. There’s nothing vicarious about what follows. Blakeslee tracks down “Steven Turnbull”, swallows a rising anger and gives him his moment in the light. The writing is chilling and gripping by turns. The Wolf is a book that should be read, with care and twice, by anyone who has even casually entered the debate about reintroducing wolves, bears, beavers and lynxes into Scotland. We can’t dismiss “Turnbull” as a “blind assassin” but as Margaret Atwood says “All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”

The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee is published by Oneworld, priced £20