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Reviewed by Gail H. Scoates for Readers' Favorite
In 926 Raindrops: Gift of the Wild, Gloria Straube tells the heartfelt story of her journey from childhood in Key West, Florida, to her later work with the Black Wolf population in Yellowstone National Park. She found an early connection between Key West and Yellowstone in Ernest Hemingway’s stories of his times in the Park. She describes her childhood as challenging, and found strength in the unique world of nature that surrounded her: in the raindrops, with frogs and fish. She categorizes her memoir as “a nature-inspired wanderlust for all things wild, entangled with fate and a twist of true love.” In college, she completed an assignment and wrote about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. This experience was pivotal and helped to create the path to her experiences later as an observer of Black Wolf 926, wolf packs, wolf cubs, and grizzly bears in Yellowstone.
Gloria Straube’s 926 Raindrops is quite poetic and almost mysterious at times. Straube describes a dream of being surrounded by wolves, and instead of fear, she felt warmth and comfort in their presence. Her writing is threaded with her thoughts and feelings and she weaves this into her life experiences and her observations of the wildlife in Yellowstone. She describes a parallel between wolves and grizzly bears and her thoughts about pain, grief, loss, motherhood, and more. I learned why tracking these animals is so important. Straube provides the reader with factual details of the ancestry and the death of Wolf 926 at the end. The book is a testimony to Straube’s love of nature and the importance of preserving wildlife in its native habitat.
