Based on this series of books, Wildlife Biologists must be some of the most courageous people on earth.

Alex Carter doesn’t just have a blasé laid-back attitude towards wolves, bears, and snakes wandering fearlessly through the forests of Northeast Washington in search of the elusive – and mostly extinct – mountain caribou. She takes in stride eviscerated female park rangers left to scare the locals in a park on main street of the nearby town; tree-sitting eco-feminists 200 feet in the canopy, determined to wait out old growth loggers; threats from misogynistic chainsaw-wielding loggers; crazy shotgun-toting hermits who live in underground tunnels, setting up booby-traps to catch trespassers; unidentified flying crafts that pursue women through the remote woods at night, shining paralyzing lights and blasting ear-splitting thunder at them; driving narrow hairpin mountain roads without guard rails during rain and hailstorms so bad that the upper turns slide down onto the road in front of her – to say nothing of having to dodge the escaped load from a logger’s semi and change a bullet-induced flat tire in the storm.

As well as anxiety-inducing nightly calls with her best friend, an actress on a haunted movie set; and her father, who is painting in the Grand Canyon and shares stories of tourists who just take on more step back for a photo and fall to their deaths.

Oh, and the continued long-distance wooing of her (friendly) series-long stalker, an assassin for hire who has taken a shine to her and follows her around playing Deus ex Machina when it seems there is no way out of the crazy situations she finds herself in. (He arrives a little late in this one.)

Alex does manage, despite these few distractions, to find, tranquilize, and photo-collar the exceedingly rare and shy mountain caribou and save one of the last stands of old growth forest in the lower 48 – all in her first week on the job there in Eastern Washington.

Ah, all in a day’s work for the humble wildlife biologist.

It never ceases to amaze me how, despite trauma-inducing experiences in each of these books, Alex shakes it off, dons her pack and tramps off alone into the deep wilderness, where she can commune with nature, gaze at the wildlife she has come to study, and lie in her sleeping bag under the stars, wondering at the beauty of the universe and reflecting in long monologues about climate change and clear-cutting. Despite being woken out of a sound sleep by the mysterious craft that chases women through the woods and almost dying from the chase, Alex is happy to go right back out there alone. Even when it becomes clear that the woods are harboring serial killers who hunt down women traveling alone, Alex has no problem being alone out there.

Wildlife biologists must have souls of Kevlar.

All that said, I am still enjoying these books. I like reading about the different environments Alex finds herself in and about the animals she is studying. If the chase scenes are somewhat wildly unbelievable and Alex unrealistically fearless¹, they are fun to read and, I guess, no more unrealistic than Sigourney Weaver grappling with the Alien or Bruce Willis climbing around the elevator shafts and airducts in Die Hard.

So take it with that grain of salt – and a huge pinch for the lectures about saving the earth² – and enjoy!

Oh, and if you meet a wildlife biologist, be kind – based on this Alex’s adventures, they are probably putting up with some pretty scary shit on a daily basis.

1. Perhaps she has that condition, the kind where you don’t feel fear? ↩︎
2. Something I support – I just don’t need to hear about it all the time. ↩︎