What happens, finally, is you turn a corner – this one being deep in New Hampshire at the bottom of a frost-heaved dirt road over a Western ridge. There is a sign there, crude letters on simple planks. "Loki Clan Wolf Refuge," it says. And you turn that corner and then you see one. You see a wolf. Her name, you learn later, is Wayah. You're here to meet the man who saved her.

In a minute that man, Fred Keating, will watch you watching Wayah, and will begin telling you about her. To begin with, she is not entirely a wolf, despite everything your senses tell you. She's a wolf dog, a mix made by breeding wolves in captivity with dogs. (Wolves won't mate with dogs in the wild.) In most states, Wayah is illegal; in the rest, she's a bad idea for all but a very, very few. "People get them, thinking they'll be pets," Mr. Keating says, "dogs, but cooler. But they're not pets. They're wolves. Doesn't matter if their wolf blood is only 1 percent – that makes them as smart as a 12-year-old human, compared with dogs who are like 3-month-old infants. They're wolves, and that's how they act."

Which means they're in trouble. While no official statistics exist, advocacy groups estimate that some 500,000 of the animals – out of a population as high as 1.5 million in the United States – are at risk of maltreatment or euthanasia because of their temperament as adult animals. They need to roam (up to 40 miles a day), to be outside, to live in a pack, but many are chained, caged, or even abandoned. The problem is getting worse with Americans' growing taste for exotic animals. Keating, who rescued his first wolf dog 20 years ago, started Loki Refuge to save as many as he could. Since its construction began in the '90s, Loki has become one of the largest sanctuaries of its kind.

Today, Keating is in the midst of saving 94 individuals, as he will show you during the rounds of feeding them and looking in on the 24 separate packs – little families – spread out in the 24 chain-link fenced enclosures. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that Keating's work doesn't add up to much – 94 wolves saved (he always calls them "wolves") out of 500,000 animals at risk.

But here is Wayah, standing a few feet away in her territory, looking at once familiar and like something you've never seen before – the wind-carved head, the impossibly long legs, the almond-shaped eyes. Her coat is cream, oatmeal, and black – the skin of a birch tree. Her fur turns in the licking breeze.

As you look at her, she looks back at you better. She – what's the right word? – regards you, takes your measure. You see the steam of her exhaled breath. She is something past beautiful, and you can't help recalculating: Maybe saving just Wayah is enough.

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