She can keep the other females in the pack from coming into season, so that she is the only one breeding. An alpha female can terminate her own pregnancy if she feels that it’s not a good time for breeding in the pack. An alpha can hear the change in the rhythm of your heart rate from six or seven feet away. The alpha is the one who tells everyone – including the big tough beta – what to do. The brains of the group, and too valuable to put him or herself in danger – he’s like the king not going into battle.

Betas are expendable they are the thugs in the mafia family. The first wolf you’ll encounter is not the alpha, but a beta – tough, comes rushing up to you, responsible for discipline in the pack. The first thing he taught me were the rankings of a wolf pack. They aren’t cold blooded killers they are very intelligent animals for whom nothing matters more than family. His job, as he sees it, is to bring people the truth about wolves, because they’ve gotten a bad rep. I went to visit him in Coombe Martin, at the wildlife park where he now keeps several captive packs of wolves, and got to meet him and his wolves up close and personal. Little did I know there was someone real who had done just this…Shaun Ellis, a British man who had lived with a wild wolf pack in the Rockies. At least, I THOUGHT I had created the character. That’s when I created the character of Luke Warren – a man who studies wolves not by observing them, but by living with them. I didn’t know how, but it seemed to me that there was a metaphor in here that was going to work with the story I was trying to tell. One morning I woke up thinking about wolves: how they seem to function as a family how the group is more important than the whole. But what about the father himself – the man whose life was hanging in the balance? I knew right away that one of the characters involved in the decision would be a prodigal son with a secret in his past and that his sister would be the more faithful child…who was too young to have a legal say in the decision. So I called that neurologist and said… “Remember me?” Luckily, he did! That led me to wonder what would happen if two children were fighting over whether or not to terminate life support for their parent. I said, “I’m not ready to write this book now, but one day I will be, so remember my name…because I’ll come calling!” Eventually, years later, I started mulling over the fact that although we often hear about parents and spouses who differ in their opinions about life sustaining care for a victim of a serious brain trauma, we rarely hear about two parties who have an equal claim to that decision. I was sitting next to a neurologist who dealt with these sorts of issues all the time. I first thought about writing about the right to die when I was on a plane over a decade ago.

Jodi picoult wolves