Farley Mowat is a trained scientist with a skeptic's mind. There is need to recall this at the outset, because in ["Never Cry Wolf"] he strains his readers' credulity to a point at which it would certainly snap in less trustworthy hands….
To some, no doubt, it will be a surprise that he found every wolf fable a fallacy, and over the months developed a profound affection and admiration for his study subjects, which he found to be kingly creatures possessed of every virtue and no vice, neighbors who accepted his presence with neither fear nor ferocity. He had names for each of them, and the book is dedicated to the wolf bitch: "For Angeline—the angel." He found the wolves capable of something akin to speech—the conveyance, that is, of more or less complex thought between wolf and wolf. Their staple food during the summer months he found to be mice, and he confirmed what he learned from Ootek—that wolves kill only old or sickly caribou, thus tending to keep the herds in health. The slaughterer of the caribou was man, a conservative 112,000 head being killed by trappers in this area every year to feed themselves and their huskies, to say nothing of airborne "safaris" landing on frozen lakes and murdering 30 or so beasts for the sake of a single pair of antlers. He realized that these were figures he could not use in his reports "unless I wished to be posted to the Galapagos Islands to conduct a ten-year study on tortoise ticks."
This is a free excerpt of 255 words. There are 424 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Mowat, Farley (McGill) 1921–: Critical Essay by Gavin Maxwell Access Pass.
