Reimagining our relationship with wolves

LET ME PAINT you a picture: Imagine you're an ancient hunter surveying the icy tundra of what is now California's Sierra Nevada.

- SARAH O'ROURKE GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

DAWN VILLELLA Associated Press

A GRAY WOLF at Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minn. They may soon be excluded from the Endangered Species Act.

Covered in furs, armed only with the tools you've made by hand, and sporting a hefty mane of hair, you're the picture-perfect human of the Pleistocene era. You're also starving.

If you're skeptical of your ability to survive so far, you should be. Even with your ability to start a fire, life in the wilderness isn't likely to end well. Like something out of "Game of Thrones," you're facing steep competition from packs of Neanderthals, hyenas and other humans. There's a very real possibility you won't last long.

As you start a new hunt, wolves begin to emerge from the forests. They don't always snatch away your kills, but they're watching you as they move through the trees. They run past you, darting at the ankles of the mammoths you stalk as the immense animals thunder through the snow. You see how the wolves track prey and you even learn a skill or two from one another.

Before you know it, the wolf racing between snowbanks has become the wolf at your feet. You and your new friend share a pelt by the orange glow of a fire. Over time, you will gnaw on the same bones, rest in the same graves and, as you survive together, the Neanderthals and cave hyenas that hunted in company with you will either assimilate or die out.

Humans persist, and their canines have for centuries walked alongside them. But fast forward an epoch, and we're trying to get rid of their ancestors: wolves.