DAWSON CITY – Bob Hayes is quick to tell his audience that, during his 20 years as a wolf biologist in the Yukon, he produced a lot of scientific studies and papers that were really boring.

"You wouldn't like them,” he told the 35 to 40 people in his audience at the Dawson Community Library in late October.

Fortunately, the knowledge that there was a story to be told, and the sense that he needed to find a more interesting way to tell it, led him to spend seven or eight years after his retirement finding the data and the voice to tell that story in a more interesting way.

"I wrote this book because I wanted to leave something for Yukoners,” he said of Wolves of the Yukon. "We spend millions of dollars studying wolves in the Yukon. It's one of the best-studied wolf populations in the world.

"We began in 1983 and went right through to 2000. Lots of research went on, but most Yukoners didn't really know what we did.”

Rather than being known for having collected a wealth of knowledge about wolves, many Yukoners and a lot of people from Outside simply knew the Yukon as a place where wolf control programs have been carried out on a regular basis.

Hayes wrote the book to tell the story of the wolf and its place in the Yukon, to acquaint people with what wolves are really all about, to show his admiration for these well-adapted animals, and to spread the word that most wolf control programs don't work.

In his talk and slide show, he broke the book into its two complementary parts.

The first seven chapters are about the history of the wolf in the Yukon, beginning not with the wolves we have now, but with the larger animals that competed with the other predators in Beringian times.

Each chapter moves forward in time, from the ice age up to the last quarter of the 20th century, showing the relationships between wolves and the human beings who have become their main competition.

The second part of the book, chapters 8 to 16, covers how the wolves of today live in nature; what they eat, who they compete with, what their role in the wild is and, finally, how humans have tried to control them.

"I didn't want to write a science book,” he said. "There are lots of good science books on wolves. I wanted something that would engage you and you would actually read it and learn about Yukon wolves, where you live.”

It seems to be working. The initial printing of 5,000 books was nearly half-sold-out by the time he came to speak in Dawson. A German version of the book will be published in April 2012.

Hayes said he didn't know how to write an engaging narrative when he began. He credits how well that turned out to his journalist daughter, Kelly, who taught him about story arcs and chapters and also edited the book for him.

Keeping it very much a family project, his other daughter, Aryn, did a lot of the necessary research for the book, and his brother, Barrie, who is a lawyer in real life, drew the illustrations.

A section at the back of the book lists several dozen people, from photographers to pilots and fellow workers, who Hayes feels assisted him in getting to the point where he could write his book.

Wolf control, as generally practiced, whether with poison, trapping or aerial hunting, does not have a long-term impact on wolf populations in his opinion and, he says, according to any objective look at the data. Within four years of a "successful” wolf reduction effort, the numbers are back to where they were before.

It's not politically popular to say so, but if human hunting is suffering in a particular area, it's usually because of too much human hunting. People need to be prepared to cut back or to move to different areas to get their meat, Hayes said.

In his opinion, the only wolf control that makes any sense at all is sterilization.

He acknowledged that literature has had a great impact on how we view wolves, and devotes a chapter to Jack London's depictions of the "primordial beast”. In the discussion after his reading, Hayes ventured opinions of more modern writers.

Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf) has had a lot of influence on how people think, and Hayes said. He believes his summer time observations about denning wolves are fairly accurate.

"He got that right,” Hayes said. "They really do focus on small mammals are that time of the year because they can't go far from the den.”

That doesn't hold for the rest of the year, though. Wolves thrive on caribou and moose once their young are ready to move.

"But they don't have big teeth and weight a hundred pounds just to kill lemmings.”

Barry Lopez (Of Wolves and Men) is a writer whose modern reportage about wolves had been very influential.

Hayes said Lopez didn't know a lot about wolves to begin with, but he talked to a lot of wolf biologists and he listened. He reported accurately what he heard and was such a good writer, Hayes said, that his work has had an impact.

There were many tales about wolves from the audience and the discussion lasted nearly as long as the original presentation.