The Hour of the Wolf by Patricia Calvert

First published: 1983

Subjects: Coming-of-age, family, friendship, nature, and suicide

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Adventure tale

Time of work: The 1980’s

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Locale: The Iditarod Trail from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska

Principal Characters:

• Jacob (Jake) Matthiesen, a high school student with low self-esteem who is sent to Alaska to finish high school after a failed suicide attempt
• Danny Yumiat, an Athabascan Indian classmate who befriends Jake and interests him in dogsled racing
• Kamina Yumiat, Danny’s older sister
• Dr. Win Smalley, a veterinarian and owner of the Smalley Animal Clinic, who provides a home for Jake while he lives in Alaska
• Jake’s father, the best defense lawyer in the Midwest and a living legend whom Jake believes he will never be able to please

Form and Content

Unlike many authors who deal with the subject of teen suicide, Patricia Calvert downplays the events leading up to the suicide attempt and focuses her attention on the healing process as Jake Matthiesen learns to accept himself and take responsibility for his life. Unable to talk to his father, a successful Minneapolis lawyer who Jake claims is a living legend, and convinced he cannot be the kind of son who would make his father proud, Jake attempts suicide with his great-grandfather’s old pistol, which he finds in the attic. Jake’s father decides that the suicide attempt resulted from a combination of the pressures of living in a large metropolitan area and association with the wrong companions. After Jake’s recovery from his wound, his father sends him to live with Dr. Win Smalley in Anchorage, Alaska, where he hopes that Jake will learn self-sufficiency or, as Jake believes, become a son of which his father could be proud. Leaving his successful father, his high-society mother, and his preppy sister, Jake continues to be haunted by self-doubt when he first arrives in Alaska.

Jake’s life takes on a positive quality when he is befriended by Danny Yumiat, a popular Athabascan student who seems to be everything Jake would like to be. Danny asks Jake to work as his dog handler while he prepares to run the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, a 1,049-mile race from Anchorage to Nome. Before he can run the race, however, Danny dies in an apparent accident when he and one of his dogs fall through a section of thin ice during a training session.

Jake vows to enter the Iditarod as a memorial to Danny, but when he attempts to borrow Danny’s dog, he learns that Kamina, Danny’s older sister, has a similar plan. Jake is reluctant to challenge Kamina’s decision to enter the Iditarod because she is a strong-willed individual who, according to local rumors, earned the nickname “Crazy Kate” because she used a knife to intimidate a man who offended her while she was going to college in Seattle. Although Kamina has a low regard for Outsiders (people not born in Alaska) such as Jake, she relents because Danny thought so highly of Jake. She loans him enough dogs for Jake to enter the race, but she makes it clear that she will “beat his socks off,” a statement Jake knows is no idle boast considering Kamina’s greater knowledge of racing and her superior team of dogs. Kamina also tells Jake that Danny’s death was no accident; he killed himself because the pressure of living up to his plans to be a lawyer and leader of his people became too great for him to handle.

Because of his inexperience and lack of quality dogs, Jake is never a serious contender in the race. As Kamina and many other racers far outdistance him, the primary question becomes whether Jake will quit or continue on, in spite of the severe weather conditions and his own physical exhaustion. Whenever Jake is tempted to give up the race, however, the fact that he is running it as a memorial to Danny provides the incentive that he needs to continue following the pack of other racers. Near the end of the race, Kamina has to drop out because of a severely sprained ankle that she suffers in a fall from a cliff during a blinding snowstorm. After Jake rescues her, she loans Danny’s sled to Jake, and, although Jake finishes last, earning himself the “Red Lantern Award,” he does finish the race, something that many others who started the race were unable to do.

Critical Context

Patricia Calvert’s first young adult novel, The Snowbird (1980), was selected by the American Library Association as a Best Book for 1980. Since that time, she has continued to earn praise from critics and has won most of the awards available to young adult authors. Calvert’s protagonists, like Jake Matthiesen, are usually physically and/or socially isolated individuals who learn to take responsibility for their lives, accept themselves, and relate to other people.

Although there is no evidence that they have influenced each other directly, Calvert and author Gary Paulsen share a high regard for sled dogs and for the value of testing oneself under extreme conditions such as the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. Readers who like The Hour of the Wolf will probably also enjoy Paulsen’s novel Dogsong (1985) and his nonfiction accounts of dogsledding, Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod (1994) and Woodsong (1991).