Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez (English) Paperback Book

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FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Originally published in 1978, this classic exploration of humanity's complex relationship with and understanding of wolves returns with a new afterword by the author.Humankind's relationship with the wolf is the sum of a spectrum of responses ranging from fear to admiration and affection. Lopez's classic, careful study has won praise from a wide range of reviewers and improved the way books on wild animals are written. Of Wolves and Men explores the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing upon an impressive array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as extensive personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the wolf's preservation and immerses the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling portrait of the wolf both as a real animal and as imagined by different kinds of men. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can strengthen the individual and the community. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates careful scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions, allowing us to understand how this remarkable animal has become so prominent for so long in the human heart.

Author Biography

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. He traveled extensively in remote regions of the world, and his work has been widely translated and anthologized. He was a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science foundations; the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the John Burroughs and John Hay medals; and other honors.

Table of Contents

CONTENTSINTRODUCTIONI: CANIS LUPUS LINNAEUS1. Origin and Description2. Social Structure and Communication3. Hunting and TerritoryII: AND A CLOUD PASSES OVERHEAD4. Amaguk and Sacred Meat5. A Wolf in the Heart6. Wolf WarriorsIII: THE BEAST OF WASTE AND DESOLATION7. The Clamor of Justification8. Wolfing for Sport9. An American PogromIV: AND A WOLF SHALL DEVOUR THE SUN10. Out of a Medieval Mind11. The Reach of Science12. Searching for the Beast13. Images from a Childhood14. A Howling at TwilightEPILOGUE: On the Raising of Wolves and a New EthologyBIBLIOGRAPHYINDEXILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Review

"A remarkable book, both biologically absorbing and humanly rich, and one that should be read by every ecologically concerned American." —John Fowles"Animal Kingdom Of Wolves and Men is not only the best popular account of an animal I have read in a long time, but also something new — a bridge between books of the past and those of the future, which, it is hoped, will incorporate and expand the perceptions so eloquently treated here." —George Schaller"A splendid, beautiful book." —Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal"Fascinating....His book has a wealth of observation, mythology and mysticism about wolves that adds a colorful part to the still unfinished mosaic that defines the wolf." —Bayard Webster, New Fork Times Book Review"Eloquent....His own patient effort to understand a despised, feared and heavily mythologized beast induces a shiver, of strangeness, the sign of fresh, original work." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek"Unusually informative and sensitive." —Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times "Haunting....has something of value to say to all of us." —Boston Globe "Brilliant...a work of intelligence, dedication and beauty, deserving the widest possible attention not only for the sake of wolves but also for the sake of men."—Whitley Streiber, Washington Post

Review Quote

Whitley StreiberWashington PostBrilliant...a work of intelligence, dedication and beauty, deserving the widest possible attention not only for the sake of wolves but also for the sake of men.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter One ORIGIN AND DESCRIPTION Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the wolf''s pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among stones where a year before he had cached meat. The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not appear so effortless. The wolf''s body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows. The wolf is three years old. A male. He is of the subspecies occidentalis, and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada. He is light gray; that is, there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine than there are black and brown. But there are silver and even red hairs mixed in, too. 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. He has heard no howls, but he knows the others are about, in ones and twos like himself. It is not a time of year for much howling. It is an easy time. The weather is pleasant. Moose are fat. Suddenly the wolf stops in mid-stride. A moment, then his feet slowly come alongside each other. He is staring into the grass. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches and he rears up and pounces like a cat. A deer mouse is pinned between his forepaws. Eaten. The wolf drifts on. He approaches a trail crossing, an undistinguished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sniffs the air as though aware of a possibility for scents. He sniffs a scent post, a scrawny blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on. The wolf weighs ninety-four pounds and stands thirty inches at the shoulder. 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. He has two fractured ribs, broken by a moose a year before. They are healed now, but a sharp eye would notice the irregularity. The skin on his right hip is scarred, from a fight with another wolf in a neighboring pack when he was a yearling. He has not had anything but a few mice and a piece of arctic char in three days, but he is not hungry. He is traveling. The char was a day old, left on rocks along the river by bears. The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His fur carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill ten days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smart snowshoe hare that eluded the wolf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening was home to porcupines last winter. It is now late in the afternoon. The wolf has stopped traveling, has lain down to sleep on cool earth beneath a rock outcropping. Mosquitoes rest on his ears. His ears flicker. He begins to waken. He rolls on his back and lies motionless with his front legs pointed toward the sky but folded like wilted flowers, his back legs splayed, and his nose and tail curved toward each other on one side of his body. After a few moments he flops on his side, rises, stretches, and moves a few feet to inspect -- minutely, delicately -- a crevice in the rock outcropping and finds or doesn''t find what draws him there. And then he ascends the rock face, bounding and balancing momentarily before bounding again, appearing slightly unsure of the process -- but committed. A few minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost forty miles per hour, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone. He trots away with it, his head erect, tail erect, his hips slightly to one side and out of line with his shoulders, as though hindquarters were impatient with forequarters, the cone inert in his mouth. He carries it for a hundred feet before dropping it by the trail. He sniffs it. He goes on. The underfur next to his skin has begun to thicken with the coming of fall. In the months to follow it will become so dense between his shoulders it will be almost impossible to work a finger down to his skin. In seven months he will weigh less: eighty-nine pounds. He will have tried unsuccessfully to mate with another wolf in the pack. He will have helped kill four moose and thirteen caribou. He will have fallen through ice into a creek at twenty-two below zero but not frozen. He will have fought with other wolves. He moves along now at the edge of a clearing. The wind coming down-valley surrounds him with a river of odors, as if he were a migrating salmon. He can smell ptarmigan and deer droppings. He can smell willow and spruce and the fading sweetness of fireweed. Above, he sees a hawk circling, and farther south, lower on the horizon, a flock of sharp-tailed sparrows going east. He senses through his pads with each step the dryness of the moss beneath his feet, and the ridges of old tracks, some his own. He hears the sound his feet make. He hears the occasional movement of deer mice and voles. Summer food. Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a wolf howls -- a long wail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, with several harmonics, long moments to a tremolo. He recognizes his sister. He waits a few moments, then, throwing his head back and closing his eyes, he howls. The howl is shorter and it changes pitch twice in the beginning, very quickly. There is no answer. The female is a mile away and she trots off obliquely through the trees. The other wolf stands listening, laps water again, then he too departs, moving quickly, quietly through the trees, away from the trail he had been on. In a few minutes the two wolves meet. They approach each other briskly, almost formally, tails erect and moving somewhat as deer move. When they come together they make high squeaking noises and encircle each other, rubbing and pushing, poking their noses into each other''s neck fur, backing away to stretch, chasing each other for a few steps, then standing quietly together, one putting a head over the other''s back. And then they are gone, down a vague trail, the female first. After a few hundred yards they begin, simultaneously, to wag their tails. In the days to follow, they will meet another wolf from the pack, a second female, younger by a year, and the three of them will kill a caribou. They will travel together ten or twenty miles a day, through the country where they live, eating and sleeping, birthing, playing with sticks, chasing ravens, growing old, barking at bears, scent-marking trails, killing moose, and staring at the way water in a creek breaks around their legs and flows on. This is the animal Linnaeus called Canis lupus in 1758. In recent years the wolf has been studied enough by biologists to produce this picture, but his numbers have dwindled and his range has shrunk, and as is the case with so many things, deep appreciation and a sense of loss have arrived simultaneously. Wolves, twenty or thirty subspecies of them, are Holarctic -- that is, they once roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere above thirty degrees north latitude. They were found throughout Europe, from the Zezere River Valley of Portugal north to Finland and south to the Mediterranean. They roamed eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Near and Middle East south into Arabia. They were found in Afghanistan and northern India, throughout Russia north into Siberia, south again as far as China, and east into the islands of Japan. In North America the wolf reached a southern limit north of Mexico City and ranged north as far as Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland, less than four hundred miles from the North Pole. Outside of Iceland and North Africa, and such places as the Gobi Desert, wolves -- if you imagine the differences in geography it seems astounding -- had adapted to virtually every habitat available to them. Today they have been exterminated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and throughout most of Europe. There are a few wolves left in northern Spain, some in the Apennines in Italy, and a few in Germany and eastern Europe. Populations in the Near and Middle East and in northern India are greatly reduced. The present, or even past, populations of Russia and China are undetermined. Mexico still has a small population of wolves, and large populations -- perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand -- remain in Alaska and Canada. 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). There is a very small wolf population in Glacier National Park in Montana and a few in Michigan''s Upper Peninsula. Occasionally lone wolves show up in the western states along the Canadian border; most are young animals dispersing from packs in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. The red wolf, Canis rufus, a little known but distinct species of wolf found only in America, has been exterminated across virtually all its former range in the southeastern United States. A small population of perhaps one hundred survives

Details ISBN0684163225 Language English ISBN-10 0684163225 ISBN-13 9780684163222 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 599.74 Illustrations Yes Year 1979 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Residence US Birth 1945 Short Title OF WOLVES & MEN REV/E Edition Description Revised DOI 10.1604/9780684163222 AU Release Date 1979-09-01 NZ Release Date 1979-09-01 US Release Date 1979-09-01 UK Release Date 1979-09-01 Imprint Scribner Author Barry Lopez Publisher Simon & Schuster Publication Date 1979-09-01 Audience General Pages 336 We've got this

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