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Never Cry Wolf (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

Never Cry Wolf is a short work (160 pages) that incorporates the truth about wolf behavior as Mowat interpreted it in his assignment to investigate “wolf-caribou-predator-prey relationships.” He himself called it a “potboiler,” and the Holt, Rinehart and Winston edition is marketed as juvenile literature complete with pedagogical materials. His critics sneered at the depiction of wolves as fanciful, but whatever the book's merit as a study of wolves, it sold more than 300,000 copies and established Mowat's reputation as a spokesman not only for wolves but also for nature in general.

As the narrator of Never Cry Wolf, Mowat is a young man whose vicissitudes are sometimes comic. His experience with his radio, for example, revealed an embarrassing gaffe by his Ottawa superiors: He had been supplied with an instrument meant for forest rangers and which had a range of only twenty miles. Nevertheless, Mowat rigged it up and sent his call sign, “Daisy Mae,” crying out into the “darkling subarctic skies.” As it turned out, he contacted an amateur operator in Peru, a Spanish speaker whose English was no better than Mowat's Spanish.

The substance of Mowat's story concerns his relationship with three wolves he names Angeline, her mate, George, and a solo male, Uncle Albert. One of his first discoveries was that wolves ate mice, of which there was a generous supply. The researcher's next step was to introduce mice into his own diet, and he created a dish he called Souris à la Crême. In many of his explorations, Mowat was accompanied by an Eskimo friend, Ootek, who interpreted wolf talk for him and helped track the three wolves and their cubs to their summer den. Mowat deflates some commonly accepted beliefs about wolves, especially the misconception that they always pose a threat to humans. Moreover, Ootek explains to him that a healthy adult caribou can easily outrun a wolf and that even a fawn is too fast for most predators. The wolf's usual victim is an aged or ailing doe, but even when successful, the hunter usually spends a long night traversing fifty to sixty miles of country.

Just before he returns to the city, Mowat hears George howling for his family, and it is to him “a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role. . . .”

Bibliography

King, James. Farley: The Life of Farley Mowat. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2002.

Lucas, Alec. Farley Mowat. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976.

Orange, John. Writing the Squib: A Biography of Farley Mowat. Toronto: ECW, 1993.

Thomas, Wendy, ed. A Farley Mowat Reader. Niwot, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1997.

York, Lorraine. Introducing Farley Mowat's “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.” Canadian Fiction Series. Toronto: ECW, 1990.