Never Cry Wolf

by Mowat Farley

For Angeline—the angel!

Preface

WHEN I BEGAN writing this book eleven years ago the wolf was cast in a rather minor role. My original plan was to write a satire about quite a different beast—that peculiar mutation of the human species known as the Bureaucrat. I intended the wolf to serve only as a foil for an exposition of homo bureaucratis—that aberrant product of our times who, cocooned in convention, witlessly wedded to the picayune, obsessed with obscurantism, and foundering in footling facts, nevertheless considers himself the only legitimate possessor of revealed truth and, consequently, the self-appointed arbiter of human affairs.

With malice aforethought, I deliberately set out to expose these new rulers of our world or, rather, to give them scope to expose themselves. But somewhere in the early part of the book I found myself losing interest in bureaucratic buffoonery. Without conscious volition I became increasingly engrossed with my secondary character, the wolf. Eventually the wolf took the book right out of my hands so that it became a plea for understanding, and preservation, of an extraordinarily highly evolved and attractive animal which was, and is, being harried into extinction by the murderous enmity and proclivities of man.

Never Cry Wolf was not kindly received by ordained authority. Because it is my practice never to allow facts to interfere with truth and because I believe that humour has its vital place even within the austere purlieus of science, many experts derided the book as a work of outright fiction, denying even that it was based on two summers and a winter during which I lived in the Arctic, closely associating with wolves. It gives me some small pleasure at this late date to note that almost every facet of wolf behaviour which I described has since been confirmed by “official” science. Unfortunately, my major thesis—that the wolf does not pose a threat to other wildlife, and is not a danger or a competitor of any consequence to man—remains largely unaccepted.

In 1973 several of the races of North American wolf—including the plains wolf, grey wolf and red wolf—are virtually extinct. In the whole of the continental United States (excluding Alaska) probably no more than 1,200 wolves survive. About 500 of these are in northern Minnesota, where they are partly protected by the Quetico National Park; but, in the autumn of 1972, the Minnesota State game authorities proposed a plan whereby 200 wolves a year would be destroyed by gun, snare, trap and poison—“until the wolf menace has been eliminated.” In the vast expanse of forested but unsettled regions of Canada there were, until recently, about 15,000 timber wolves. However, the rapidly increasing use of light aircraft and, in particular, snowmobiles, has enabled massive numbers of hunters to penetrate these relatively inaccessible areas—with an inevitable reduction in the numbers of moose, deer, elk and other big-game animals. This has brought about the familiar cry from hunters, outfitters, guides, lodge owners and other financially interested parties: “Wolves are destroying the game—the game that belongs to us! We must act at once to destroy the wolf.”

Who listens to this cry? Governments listen. Late in 1972, despite the contrary advice of his own biologists, the Quebec Minister of Fish and Game decreed a mass slaughter of wolves in the form of a contest open to hunters from Canada and the United States, with a goal of 5,000 dead wolves! Special prizes were to be awarded to the most successful hunters: the lower jawbone of a wolf encased in a block of clear plastic, suitably inscribed as an enduring testament to the skill, courage and hardihood of the human killer.

There is, however, a small ray of hope for the wolves. During the past decade a number of ordinary people have banded together to counter the anti-wolf pressure groups. They have had some successes. Largely due to the persistent efforts of the mere handful of people who constitute the Ontario Wolf League^*1 (supported by some of the new biologists who are more interested in the study of living animals than in the study of the dead), the Ontario government recently revoked the iniquitous provincial bounty on wolves. In similar fashion, the group known as Canadian and American Wolf Defenders^†2 may, just possibly, have forced the Minnesota government to drop its plans to exterminate the wolf in that State.

When this book was published in the Soviet Union the translators had a little trouble with the title. The version they finally came up with was: Wolves, Please Don’t Cry. I hope it is a portent of things to come. It may be that there is still time to prevent mankind from committing yet another in the long list of his crimes against nature—the elimination from this planet of a fellow creature which has at least an equal right to life. If we can indeed save the wolf it will, in some small measure, be a rejection of the strictly human crime…of biocide.

Farley Mowat

Isles de la Madeleine

1973

1

The Lupine Project

IT IS A long way in time and space from the bathroom of my Grandmother Mowat’s house in Oakville, Ontario, to the bottom of a wolf den in the Barren Lands of central Keewatin, and I have no intention of retracing the entire road which lies between. Nevertheless, there must be a beginning to any tale; and the story of my sojourn amongst the wolves begins properly in Granny’s bathroom.

When I was five years old I had still not given any indication—as most gifted children do well before that age—of where my future lay. Perhaps because they were disappointed by my failure to declare myself, my parents took me to Oakville and abandoned me to the care of my grandparents while they went off on a holiday.

The Oakville house—“Greenhedges” it was called—was a singularly genteel establishment, and I did not feel at home there. My cousin, who was resident in Greenhedges and was some years older than myself, had already found his mйtier, which lay in the military field, and had amassed a formidable army of lead soldiers with which he was single-mindedly preparing himself to become a second Wellington. My loutish inability to play Napoleon exasperated him so much that he refused to have anything to do with me except under the most formal circumstances.

Grandmother, an aristocratic lady of Welsh descent who had never forgiven her husband for having been a retail hardware merchant, tolerated me but terrified me too. She terrified most people, including Grandfather, who had long since sought surcease in assumed deafness. He used to while away the days as calm and unruffled as Buddha, ensconced in a great leather chair and apparently oblivious to the storms which swirled through the corridors of Greenhedges. And yet I know for a fact that he could hear the word “whiskey” if it was whispered in a room three stories removed from where he sat.

Because there were no soulmates for me at Greenhedges, I took to roaming about by myself, resolutely eschewing the expenditure of energy on anything even remotely useful; and thereby, if anyone had had the sense to see it, giving a perfectly clear indication of the pattern of my future.

One hot summer day I was meandering aimlessly beside a little local creek when I came upon a stagnant pool. In the bottom, and only just covered with green scum, three catfish lay gasping out their lives. They interested me. I dragged them up on the bank with a stick and waited expectantly for them to die; but this they refused to do. Just when I was convinced that they were quite dead, they would open their broad ugly jaws and give another gasp. I was so impressed by their stubborn refusal to accept their fate that I found a tin can, put them in it along with some scum, and took them home.