Of Wolves and Men

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On warm days wolves dissipate heat by panting, a weary-looking but efficient method of cooling by evaporation. 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. 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.

They do exhibit some behaviour we understand, and some that we don’t They are alive, and have the very right to. The wolves that remain in North America today are often distinguished simply as tundra or timber (or gray) wolves, according to where they live. Social structure in a wolf pack has been observed in greatest detail among captive wolves, which makes extrapolating to wild wolves risky. As Mr Lopez wisely points out, “ We cannot understand [wolves] except in terms of our own needs and experiences… to approach them solely in terms of the Western imagination is, really, to deny the animal. The first part of the book, ‘Canis Lupus Linnaeus’, deals with the wolf’s origin and description, its social structure and communication, and its hunting and territory.His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hunt crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by just over four wide. 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. 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. In Alaska, where perhaps the biggest wolves are found, a wolf that weighs more than 120 pounds is uncommon. In the 1920s a Montana cattleman wrote that the wolves on his ranch "would lay up in the damp cool dirt among the reeds and cattails below some spring or in the cedar clumps and thickets on the north side of a high butte" on a hot day.

Canis was better adapted to running and had perhaps evolved a primitive social structure and some cooperative hunting techniques. All these creatures are wolflike but they are not wolves and it is right to keep them out of things. No matter how they scrubbed their hands, the residue of Red Hot Mama had a way of sticking round, as pesty and persistent as a chaperone at a high school dance. 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). The skin on his right hip is scarred, from a fight with another wolf in a neighboring pack when he was a yearling.Mr Lopez brings in observations made by Eskimos who live in the Arctic among wolves, and by Native Americans who lived alongside wolves. a wolf is wounded and a human being is later found with a similar wound—was the basis of proof in many werewolf trials. Some of this is centered in my own perspective, with the wolf as charismatic mega-fauna, but cruelty is cruelty. If that is so, I wonder what it is we know in fiction that is as true as what Lopez knows of wolves.

These days, I’m hooked on ABC’s Once Upon a Time, which has made me think of Red Riding Hood and the wolf in a different way. One of the strongest literary images I experienced was while reading from Of Wolves and Men by Barry Holston Lopez.Adolph Murie wrote that the strongest impression he was left with was of the wolves’ friendliness toward each other. 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.