Farley Mowat

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The Villains Wore Sheep's Clothing

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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."

None of this is particularly hard to believe, but where I found my own credulity twanging dangerously was over Ootek's ability to understand wolf language as easily as human. Ootek, the author was told, could hear and understand so well that he could quite literally converse with wolves.

This is a fascinating and captivating book, and a tragic one, too, for it carries a bleak, dead-pan obituary of the wolf family that Mr. Mowat had learned to love and respect. It is an epilogue that will not endear the Canadian Wildlife Service to readers of "Never Cry Wolf." We must presume Angeline—the angel—and her family to have been wantonly and agonizingly poisoned in the face of all the evidence which an impartial counsel adduced for them. Once more it is man who displays the qualities with which he has tried to damn the wolf.

Gavin Maxwell, "The Villains Wore Sheep's Clothing," in Book Week—The Sunday Herald Tribune (© 1963, The Washington Post), November 24, 1963, p. 6.

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