Of Wolves and Men

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It seems possible that odors picked up in this way and carried to other pack members have some communicative function. In my opinion, a well-written scene can be incredibly meaningful and thought-provoking with the help of imagery, sometimes even more so than a photograph.

Here the air currents that moved strongly upslope in the afternoon reached them intact, not broken up, with the olfactory information they carried scattered, as happened when the winds blew through the trees. The first line of the first chapter is also imperative, and perhaps the most telling moment of the entire book: “Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods” (9).

Wolves, twenty or thirty subspecies of them, are Holarctic -- that is, they once roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere above thirty degrees north latitude. During hot spells wolves travel much less and restrict their hunting to the coolest hours of the night. The coat is thick across the shoulders, where guard hairs may be four or five inches long, and thins out on the muzzle and legs. Of Wolves and Men explores the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Although the lines of descent are not entirely clear, the wolf began to develop as a specialized genus of cursorial, or hunt-by-chasing, carnivore in the Paleocene, some 60 million years ago.

What I have to say on the literature section could fill its own section, but it does underscore Lopez’s overall premise to explore all ways of knowing—and all the ways we will fail knowing—the wolf. The largest concentrations of wolves in the lower forty-eight states are in northeastern Minnesota (about one thousand) and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior (about thirty). And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill ten days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A few minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost forty miles per hour, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone. His book has a wealth of observation, mythology and mysticism about wolves that adds a colorful part to the still unfinished mosaic that defines the wolf.Most white wolves are found in the north, though Lewis and Clark and many mountain men, explorers, and immigrants reported large numbers of very light wolves on the Great Plains in the early 1800s. 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.

The stories of the Inquisition, to how wolves fed the fear of the Dark Ages and most of the wolf stories I was familiar with, even to Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation. In My Antonia, for example, Willa Cather describes the landscape at a particular moment by saying, “One afternoon we were having our reading lessons on the warm, grassy bank where the badger lived. Wolves in thinly populated areas of Canada may move out if the human density is more than three persons per square mile.What’s interesting to me about Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is that the story pits two different charismatic mega-fauna against each other—cat and wolf—and we root for the cat. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winder darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. If no library near you owns the item, your local library may be able to borrow it for you via interlibrary loan: http://www. Today they have been exterminated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and throughout most of Europe.

Barry Lopez 's (1945-2020) books include Light Action in the Caribbean (stories), About This Life (essays and memoir), the novella-length fable Crow and Weasel , and Arctic Dreams (nonfiction), for which he received the National Book Award. Daily activities center around the mouth of the den until the pups are about eight weeks old, at which time the adults move them to the first of a series of rendezvous sites where they remain while the others hunt. Mexico still has a small population of wolves, and large populations -- perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand -- remain in Alaska and Canada. I’d taken a Norse mythology class in college (the benefits of going to a school founded by the Norwegians—it had an active Scandinavian department), so I knew the stories of Fenris and Tyr and Ragnarok. Douglas Pimlott, a Canadian wildlife biologist, believes the "extinct" Newfoundland wolf, for example, simply vanished from that island as part of a natural process, that it was not hunted out.Then, “meat drunk,” they may lay out in the sun until digestion is completed (in two or three hours), and then start again. All these creatures are wolflike but they are not wolves and it is right to keep them out of things.