Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

First published: 1963

Type of work: Nature writing and memoir

The Work:

Never Cry Wolf is a narrative, first-person account of conservationist-writer Farley Mowat’s two summers and one winter on the Arctic tundra as a researcher for the Canadian government. In his 2008 memoir, Otherwise, Mowat writes of the years 1937 to 1948, hinting that the events in Never Cry Wolf may not be sequential. Also, in the added 1973 preface to Never Cry Wolf, Mowat admits changing names and locations and reworking his stories to add humor; he denies, however, that the work is fiction. He says that he never allows “facts to interfere with the truth” and denies altering the basic information. Indeed, libraries classify the book as nonfiction.

In Never Cry Wolf, Mowat traces the beginning of his interest in nature to age five. In a somewhat humorous tale, he says that he had captured some catfish, brought them into his grandmother’s home, and placed them in the commode to keep them alive. His grandmother found the fish on a night visit to the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet.

In the book, Mowat employs the stylistic device of anthropomorphism. He assigns human characteristics, feelings, emotions, and behaviors to animals—especially wolves. Some scientists, however, consider anthropomorphism to be folk theory and misleading to readers. By contrast, Charles Darwin and other scientists have noted only one difference in degree between people and certain other animals.

In 1958-1959, Mowat had accepted an assignment from Canada’s Dominion Wildlife Service (DWS) to survey the barren lands area in the Arctic area of north-central Canada. For the DWS, Mowat conducted a census of the wolves, caribou, and fauna in the area; he observed the actions of the animals, gathered appropriate statistical and analytical data, and led a somewhat solitary existence. Mowat’s assignment came as a result of complaints made to the Canadian Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources. Gun and hunting clubs had bemoaned fewer deer kills, and they blamed wolf hordes for fewer deer. The hunters argued that wolves were regularly wreaking carnage on the deer population.

Mowat had begun his assignment by air force transport, but the plane’s motor failed, forcing the plane to land in Churchill, Canada. After several days, Mowat and his pilot secured a 1938 bi-motor plane and continued their trip to wolf country. However, running low on fuel, the pilot had to set the plane down in an isolated area; Mowat was about three hundred miles north of Churchill. He remained at this isolated location to conduct his studies until the government sent someone to retrieve him.

Mowat had few provisions, which included a radio with a battery that would last six hours, half a canoe, and cases of Moose beer. He soon found that he was not completely isolated from people: He had met Mike, a trapper. For the use of Mike’s rough cabin and his assistance—as needed—during the next three months, Mowat had given Mike an IOU for ten dollars.

Mowat soon found a family of four wolf pups. He named their mother Angeline, their father George, and an older wolf, who assisted in care and hunting, Albert. The wolves were nonaggressive—even oblivious—to Mowat, Mike, and Ootek, Mike’s native cousin, who acted as a translator for Mowat. The wolves began to respect Mowat’s “property lines” after he marked his territory with urine.

Mowat analyzed wolf scats, recorded the animals and vegetation he saw, and observed the wolf family. Among his findings are that wolves cannot outrun even a young caribou—instead, they separate the sick, infirm, and diseased animals from the rest of the herd and use these available deer as their prey. One wolf leaps to the shoulder of an impaired deer, knocks it off balance, seizes it by the neck, and brings it down to a swift kill. There is no evidence of “hamstringing,” a method of disabling an animal that many legends attribute to wolves. Mowat also found that the wolf family killed only one deer at time, ate what they could of its carcass, and stored the rest. With wolves, there are no massive slaughters, contrary to the hunters’ claims.

After the summer migration of the caribou to the North, the wolf’s diet becomes mainly mice and lemmings. To verify that such a diet is nutritionally complete, Mowat subsisted off the mice alone, as had the wolves. He cooked the mice whole—except for the hair—and supplemented this diet with no other food.

Controversially, Mowat also found that one village had killed 112,000 caribou during one season. He had witnessed the hunters’ slaughter of caribou, which had been shot from airplanes. Hunters, for the price of one thousand dollars per hunt from a plane, came to the area with a promise of a prime caribou head. Mowat had found that these hunts from a plane left decaying carcasses across the land. Mowat concluded in his report to the DWS that people—not wolves—had been depleting the deer herds.

To lend credibility to his field work and to convince readers of the false claims made against wolves, Mowat quotes from the numbers and statistics he collected during his time in wolf country. He had found only one wolf per six square miles; subtracting the area covered by water, there was only one wolf per two square miles. This sparse wolf population, he argues in the book, seemed insufficient to account for the diminishing supply of caribou. Mowat adds in a 1984 reprint of Never Cry Wolf that the caribou population of close to 5 million in 1930 had dropped to 170,000 in 1963.

Furthermore, fur trappers had told Mowat that they had been working hard to harvest wolves for bounties. One trapper reported killing up to two hundred wolves each year for the reward. Mowat determined that there were eighteen hundred trappers pursuing bounties in the Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and southern Keewatin areas alone. Mowat had estimated, even using the most conservative figures, that more than 100,000 wolves were killed by trappers in a given year.

Never Cry Wolf seems to have changed the treatment of wolves in Canada. In his added 1973 preface, Mowat reports that the government of the province of Ontario had repealed its bounty on wolves, and that Minnesota, in the United States, had been modifying its extermination plans.

Bibliography

King, James. Farley: The Life of Farley Mowat. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2002. Mowat contributed most of the photographs for this biography. King, his biographer, quotes from Never Cry Wolf and describes Mowat as having been a blundering young man when he took the assignment with the Dominion Wildlife Service. Also addresses the question of whether Never Cry Wolf is fiction or nonfiction, suggesting that facts are important only to transmit truth.

Mowat, Farley. Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of “Never Cry Wolf.” New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Mowat centers this autobiography on his life in Canada from 1933 to 1937. He discusses his early experiences with nature and his first efforts as a writer. Helps readers understand the evolution of Never Cry Wolf.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Otherwise. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 2008. Excluding some of his war experiences, Mowat draws from his own life from 1937 to 1948 in this memoir. Some parts of these earlier experiences—especially his encounters with wolves—duplicate those outlined in Never Cry Wolf.

Underwood, Lamar, ed. The Greatest Survival Stories Ever Told. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2001. Underwood reminds readers that death often lurks north of the Arctic Circle. This area, though, is home to a vast array of the living, including the Ihalmiut (inland Eskimos), wolves, and caribou. Includes a section from Mowat’s short story “The Snow Walker” (1975) in his collection of great survival tales.