Order Rules This World

Yellow eyes gleamed in the Wyoming twilight as the gray wolf assessed its prey. It wasn’t the bison calf its ancestors had hunted for millennia, those had vanished, but something new. Something vulnerable. The ranchers of Johnson County, Wyoming would soon discover their missing cattle, blame rustlers, and never suspect the true architect of their misfortune.

Nature abhors a vacuum. When buffalo hunters decimated the American West’s bison herds in the late 1800s, they unknowingly orchestrated a cascade of consequences. The gray wolves, who had followed the bison for millennia, faced extinction as their primary food source vanished.

Then came the cattle boom.