It was not until the 18th day that we broke our own rules. “No matter what we do, we cannot move from here,” my partner, Paul Nicklen, had told me at the beginning of our vigil. “The wolves know where we are, but they don’t like surprises, so they won’t like it if we move.”

And so we had been sitting quietly in our 8 x 6 blind on a small island off the coast of British Columbia every day from dawn to dusk, waiting for a pack of wolves to show themselves. These coastal wolves live a unique existence, hunting and scavenging on the fringe between rain forest and ocean.

From our vantage point at the edge of a