From Amazon
In the summer of 1948, young biologist and budding writer Farley Mowat, "infatuated with the study of animate nature," joined the Dominion Wildlife Service and, after enduring a few bureaucratic mishaps, was assigned to study a population of wolves in the subarctic highlands of southern Nunavut and northern Manitoba. Those wolves and their kin, Mowat's superiors believed, had decimated the once huge population of large mammals in the region, so that, as one worried official put it, "more and more of our fellow citizens are coming back from more and more hunts with less and less deer."
Mowat found his wolves, followed them, learned their ways, and in a very real sense became part of the pack. As he did so, suffering plenty of misadventures along the way (and performing odd experiments that involved, among other things, subsisting on a lupine diet of field mice, for which he includes a recipe or two), he concluded that human hunters, and not wolves, were the cause of the ungulates' decline. The news, he writes, was not well received in Ottawa and Winnipeg. "I received no reply," he writes, "unless the fact that the Provincial Government raised the bounty on wolves to twenty dollars some weeks afterwards could be considered a reply."
Never Cry Wolf was first published in 1963, a time when the welfare of Canis lupus was far from most readers' minds. Attitudes have changed, and Mowat's book now has many companions, books that pay honour to wolves and urge their protection. A close-up look at the lives of wolves in their native domain, it still stands at the head of that well-stocked library. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Publisher
Hordes of bloodthirsty wolves are slaughtering the arctic caribou, and the government's Wildlife Service assigns naturalist Farely Mowat to investigate. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their waves. Contact with his quarry comes quickly, and Mowat discovers not a den of marauding killers but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young. As Mowat comes closer to the wolf world, he comes to fear with them on onslaught of bounty hunters and government exterminators out to erase the noble wolf community from the Arctic.
Never Cry Wolf is one of the brilliant narratives on the myth and magical world of wild wolves and man's true place among the creatures of nature. "We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be -- the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer -- which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself." -- from the new preface to
Never Cry Wolf.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.