Book #42

Never Cry Wolf
by Farley Mowat

I'm very glad I finally read this, because I've wanted to read it since I saw the movie when I was a kid and loved it so much -- and I wonder now just how much influence this movie had on me and my feelings about animals. I never saw Old Yeller or Free Willy and I barely remember Bambi; this was the one that made the impression. Maybe it's why I feel such an affinity for wolves. Interesting.

Anyway, I did try to read The Man Who Ate the 747 before this one, but I put it down. The author was relying on weird and gross world records to hold the reader's interest, and those things don't hold mine; I would have preferred it if the characters weren't annoying or scummy, and the love story was touching, and the underlying theme was something other than the achievement of glory through freakery. But none of those things were true. Alas.

So after spending a day or two working on that one, Toni convinced me to dump it -- I was halfway through it and hoping it would get better; I need to stop thinking of my book total when I read, since part of me wanted to finish it and put it on this list -- then I went for Mowat, since I still wanted to read something unlike Sookie but I was finishing up the last week of school with all of its finals and grading and madness, so I didn't want something huge or complex.

This book is great. Not only is Mowat an excellent writer, but it gave me some insight into wolves that I didn't know, about their hunting patterns and their family units and such. If I ever write werewolves, I'm going to make them match this vision of wolf life, with the inclusion of uncles in the family units, mating for life and practicing abstinence when the environment can't sustain another wolf pack, and treating humans as an object of curiosity as much as potential danger. And so on. It was incredibly depressing to read about the destruction of the Canadian caribou herds, just like the Great Plains buffalo, by a bunch of heartless bastards (I was going to say "fuckstains" but I decided that was too uncharacteristically profane for me -- but the sentiment is there) who shot them by the hundreds for small purposes -- like killing a caribou to use as bait to trap foxes. What the hell is that? I hated reading how those same trappers blamed wolves, and the goddamn government backed them and allowed them to continue killing the world while blaming someone else, and then using that as an excuse to kill more. Kind of like drilling in the Alaskan Preserve: since we have destroyed the natural habitat of our country by paving over it, now we should destroy one of the last natural habitats in order to keep driving on our lovely pavement. Man, we suck.

Despite the rage, I loved reading the book. Made me like wolves even more than before.