Of Wolves and Men

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During the years of the Inquisition, the Church sought to smother social and political unrest and to maintain secular control by flushing out “werewolves” in the community and putting them to death. In the next few paragraphs, Lopez follows this ecological dynamic into the realm of play, and relates stories of how ravens and wolves have been observed to tease one another and engage in games of tag, for fun (67–68). The inclination of white men to regard individual and social motivations in themselves as separate led them to misunderstand the Indian.

The social structure of a wolf pack is dynamic—subject to change, especially during the breeding season—and may be completely reversed during periods of play. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—a name that comes from Norse mythology, found in the Poetic and Prose Eddas.Part of the tragedy—and it was a tragedy—was that wolves who bothered no cattle were hunted down by men who largely wanted to prove to other men that they were no fools. But taxonomic distinction among wolves is probably most valuable for the way it distinguishes among factors other than size and color. Other subspecies in Asia have probably disappeared, but this is hard to prove and even harder to give meaning to. 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). The red wolf, which inhabits hot, humid areas on the Gulf Coast, has a short, coarse coat and large, pointed ears in contrast to the short, rounded ears of tundra wolves.

It is early September, an easy time of year, and he has not seen the other wolves in his pack for three or four days. His fur carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. 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. This is a common tactic throughout Of Wolves and Men, by which Lopez reminds his readers that, finally, the real environment of this text is not the behaviors and habitats of wolves, but rather the (un)knowing human mind in relation to all things wolves.Originally, distinctions were made among subspecies on the basis of cranial features, pelage (fur), relative size, and geographic distribution. There are no records I know of for albino wolves, but an aerial hunter told me of one he killed twenty-five miles east of Umiat on the arctic slope in April 1957. The Cascade wolf had to contend with deep snows, the British Columbia wolf with forty to fifty inches of rain in the winter.

That moment, that last sentence of the previous paragraph, is an excellent place to begin the second section of the book, which develops different ways of knowing the wolf. The author really captured all of Christopher’s intentions and motives towards everything he did by getting into the mind of a young man looking to escape. An alpha animal may be alpha only at certain times for a specific reason, and, it should be noted, is alpha at the deference of the other wolves in the pack. During hot spells wolves travel much less and restrict their hunting to the coolest hours of the night.

Malamute and wolf were about the same in the neck, twenty inches around, but the malamute was bigger in the chest by a few inches. 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. There are a few wolves left in northern Spain, some in the Apennines in Italy, and a few in Germany and eastern Europe. The wolf's ability to regulate its body temperature no doubt helped it survive in a wide variety of climates, each with a wide range of temperature.

Humanity has dealt the wolves great injustice, blaming them for everything under the sun (and the moon), and then some more.Each tribe will understand the wolves differently and they will have developed relationships and ceremonies unique to that group of people and the particular bioregion they inhabit. Wolves in thinly populated areas of Canada may move out if the human density is more than three persons per square mile. The wolf's coat ranges in color from almost pure white through various shades of blond, cream, and ocher to grays, browns, and blacks. They eat almost the same foods… often hunt caribou the same way… Hunting in this country is hard and Eskimos respect a good hunter. The wolves that remain in North America today are often distinguished simply as tundra or timber (or gray) wolves, according to where they live.