I reviewed this book, a birthday present from Gordon way back in 2011, on my old blog, and it’s the one I referred to in a recent blog post, ‘Animals in My Stories’.

‘In this astonishing portrait, Barry Lopez draws upon an impressive range of natural history, scientific fieldwork, and traditional folklore – along with his own personal experience living among captive and free-ranging wolves – to reveal the curious, controversial nature of Canis lupus. Originally published in 1978, and now with a new afterword by the author, Of Wolves and Men is classic wildlife literature at its best.’

This edition was published in 2004.

This passage in the introduction speaks volumes about the determination of the wolf to survive:
“In the winter of 1976 an aerial hunter surprised ten gray wolves travelling on a ridge in the Alaska Range. There was nowhere for the animals to escape to and the gunner shot nine quickly. The tenth had broken for the tip of a spur running off the ridge. The hunter knew the spur ended at an abrupt vertical drop of about three hundred feet and he followed, curious to see what the wolf would do. Without hesitation the wolf sailed off the spur, fell the three hundred feet into a snowbank, and came up running in an explosion of powder.”

The first part of the book, ‘Canis Lupus Linnaeus’, deals with the wolf’s origin and description, its social structure and communication, and its hunting and territory.

Mr Lopez’s description of the wolf’s movement:
“The wolf’s body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows.”

He describes, in exquisite detail, how the “wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through…”, from the seeds attached to his fur that will fall off some miles from where they originated, to the caribou he helped kill, which is now food for ravens, to the den where he was born, used by porcupines in the winter.

The wolf’s coat is “luxurious… consisting of two layers… By placing muzzle and unprotected nose between the rear legs and overlapping the face with the thickly furred tail, wolves can turn their backs to the wind and sleep comfortably in the open at 40° below zero.”

Wolves are incredibly friendly toward each other, something the naturalist, Adolph Murie, wrote about after years studying wolves in the 1940s. It’s not only the pups who spend their time playing, but adult wolves have also been observed indulging in playful behaviour, alone and in groups.
“I once saw a wolf on the tundra winging a piece of caribou hide around like a Frisbee for an hour by himself.”

When discussing wolves, the one thing most people mention is the howl, which “typically consists of a single note… can contain as many as twelve related harmonics…”

This, I found especially cute – when pups howl for the first time, usually around four weeks, the sudden sound startles them.

The second part, ‘And A Cloud Passes Overhead’, is the section of the book I found most interesting. Mr Lopez brings in observations made by Eskimos who live in the Arctic among wolves, and by Native Americans who lived alongside wolves.

He talks mainly of the Nunamiut people who live in the Alaskan interior and are a seminomadic hunting society. They “lead lives similar to wolves’. They eat almost the same foods… often hunt caribou the same way… Hunting in this country is hard and Eskimos respect a good hunter.”

When studying the wolf, Western people only look at what interests them; selected fragments fail to give a good enough understanding of the complete creature. As Mr Lopez wisely points out, “We cannot understand [wolves] except in terms of our own needs and experiences… to approach them solely in terms of the Western imagination is, really, to deny the animal.” He suggests spending time with people who “come from a different time-space and, who, so far as we know, are very much closer to the wolf than we will ever be.”

Makes so much sense; shame it doesn’t seem to be the accepted view.

I found the third part, ‘The Beast of Waste and Desolation’, the hardest to read. It deals with men ‘who saw nothing wrong with killing wolves, who felt it was basically a good thing…’

People have always killed predators but ‘the history of killing wolves shows far less restraint and far more perversity. A lot of people didn’t just kill wolves; they tortured them… poisoned them… on such a scale that millions of other animals… were killed in the process… they even poisoned themselves, and burned down their own property torching the woods to get rid of wolf havens.’

They killed wolves with ‘almost pathological dedication’ from the 1860s right through to the 1970s, targeting even radio-collared wolves that were part of scientific studies.

In the 1970s, L. David Mech, who studied wolves on Isle Royale and in Minnesota, found ‘seventeen of his radio-collared wolves were killed by human beings.’ Other researchers found the same thing, even in areas where there was more than enough wild food for them.

At the end of that section, I wasn’t any closer to understanding why they killed wolves the way they did and in such huge numbers.

The fourth and final section, ‘And a Wolf Shall Devour the Sun’, concentrates on the wolf of myth, legend and fairy tales.

Mr Lopez takes as his starting point, ‘man’s struggle to come to grips with the nature of the universe.’ Historically, that struggle and the ‘different ideas of the wolf’s place in the universe have existed side by side, even in the same culture… in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined.’

Along with the second part, this is another part of the book I return to time and again.

I appreciate the fact that Mr Lopez has painted the wolf as neither sinner nor saint, but merely as an animal making its way in the world.
‘The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination… Wolf-haters want to say they are born killers, which isn’t true. Wolf-lovers want to say no healthy wolf ever killed anyone in North America, which isn’t true either… In the past twenty years biologists have given us a new wolf, one separated from folklore. But they have not found the whole truth.’

To learn as much as we can about animals – ‘real knowledge, not more facts’ – humans need to let go of ‘the belief that there is only one reality, which is man’s…’

At the start of his book, Mr Lopez includes Harry Beston’s words (‘The Outermost House’), which I love:
‘For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained… They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.’

Non-Fiction Book Review - 'Of Wolves and Men' by Barry Lopez