After he left the Marines he contacted a Native American biologist, Levi Holt, and from their meeting he was able to spend several months living at the Wolf Education and Research Center on Nez Perce tribal lands in northern Idaho, United States as a volunteer in a project studying wolves at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. They taught him how to observe wolves, and he was able to get into a pack of wolves and live among them. He recorded wild wolf howls and gradually learned to identify individual pack members and began to realise that wolves are highly intelligent and instinctive individuals that show trust and balance within their pack's social structure.