I believe in ghosts. They hide in plain sight, urging us to listen to the stories they have to tell.

Ash, a Mexican Grey Wolf paces in her enclosure at the El Paso Zoo. She circles through the shrubs, down a slope and back around the rock-lined pond. She pauses for a few seconds to stare at me and then continues her pacing. Ash may not know it, but she’s one of the last of her kind.

Mexican grey wolves such as Ash and her companion, Ivy, were once common throughout the mountain woodlands of central Mexico,  Arizona, southern New Mexico, and southwestern Texas. Vernon Bailey, in his Biological Survey of Texas (1905) describes the grey wolf as “still common over most of the plains and mountain country of western Texas.” But even in the early 1900s, grey wolves were being hunted by ranchers and professional wolf hunters. Bounties were high and wolf hunting was a profitable business. “There is a strong temptation,” says Bailey, “for the hunters to save the breeding females and dig out the young each year for the bounty, thus making their business not only profitable but permanent.”

Not quite permanent, though. In 1972, Dr. James Scudday published a brief report in the Journal of Mammalogy about two young wolves that were trapped in Brewster County in December, 1970. These were the last grey wolves seen in west Texas and pretty much the last seen in the southwest north of the border.

The Mexican grey wolf was put on the endangered species list in 1976 and captive-bred wolves—descendants of breeding stock captured in Mexico—were used to reintroduce the species to the wild in the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area of New Mexico in 1998. The recovery program has proceeded in fits and starts. Reintroduction of a predator such as the grey wolf has not been enthusiastically embraced by rural and ranching communities, making it an often contentious political, rather than ecological, issue.

Jason Mark, takes a look at both sides of the issue in his fascinating essay Can Wolves Bring Back Wilderness (Scientific American, Oct. 9, 2015).

“Can we find a way to live with the wolf’s wildness and share space together?” questions Mark. “Can we coexist, and come to see another carnivore as something of an equal, and not just an enemy? Or do we have to control it, and in that control limit its wildness, the very thing that draws us to it?”

Will the Mexican grey wolf always be shimmering and barely visible–a ghost from our ecological past?