Leslie Patten

Leslie Patten had seen grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes, deer, elk, and many other species in her years living next to Yellowstone National Park. Yet, like most visitors, she had never seen a mountain lion-the charismatic yet enigmatic predator also known as a cougar, panther, or puma. She had only detected their ethereal presence on the landscape, which left her pondering where they were and what they were up to. After five years, through her serendipitous encounters with their tracks and scat, the burning question remained: What is the essence of the mountain lion? To understand an animal no one sees, Patten conducted more than one hundred interviews with biologists, conservation groups, state wildlife managers, houndsmen, and professional trackers. Slowly, a picture of the lion’s elusive nature emerged. Ghostwalker presents a complete picture of mountain lions in the West today, uncovering the intimacies of their secretive lifestyle as well as the issues they face in our changing world.

Our human world has burgeoned so rapidly that it has completely consumed our earth. Wildness has receded into the shadows. Finding wildlife is akin to finding Waldo in a sea of human activity. And with less wildlife on the landscape, whole ecosystems collapsing, and extinctions becoming more common, our serendipitous encounters are vanishing too. Shadow Landscape recounts stories of my own animal meetings, some intentional, others unexpected, in the vanishing world of wildness. The majority of the stories included were written during the COVID winter, some in Arizona and others in Wyoming. But the events occurred over several years. Working for many years with plants and animals, I now consider the animal world like a troupe of jazz dancers. Wildlife sway and move to each other. They anticipate their partner's next maneuver; they are creative in their calculations and read with expertise every gesture, smell, and sign on the land. Meanwhile, we humans sit on the dance-floor bench with only the two-step under our belt. We are bumbling and awkward in our participation. Loud, fast, self-absorbed. Possibly the connection between all these tales is my own clumsy attempt to touch nature's heart, to understand the ineffable, to reach beyond my grasp and feel like I too am learning to jazz dance.

Koda lives in a remote valley where the first wolves left Yellowstone National Park after their reintroduction in 1996. Koda, a golden retriever, had to learn lessons about grizzly bears, moose, and other wildlife. But Koda's main story is what a dog needs to know when living among wolves. Koda works on a wolf study, meets Yellowstone's famous wolf '06, and sniffs out her pack after her death. A true story told in the voice of a unique dog.

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The Wild Excellence provides a personal look at an extraordinary landscape. Living on the edge of Yellowstone National Park, Leslie Patten weaves myth and science with history. She vividly relates her experiences as she digs out her clogged spring system, hikes and explores, copes with weather and isolation, and grows an intimate relationship with a place that her heart recognized on first sight as home. The author's curiosity leads her to investigate ancient Shoshone Indian sheep traps, help on a local wolf study, as well as learn about her wildlife neighbors--grizzly bears, elk and deer, coyotes and badgers. Patten speaks with scientists, land managers, archeologists and ordinary folk. In the doing, Patten poses valid questions about how we inhabit this earth, about the role of big expanses of wild land with intact populations of predators and other wildlife, and about what is really important in our lives.