55 pages • 1 hour read
Farley MowatNever Cry Wolf: The Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Geographical Context: Canadian Arctic Wilderness
Most of the narrative takes place in that part of the Canadian wilderness called the Barrens, more commonly referred to by non-Canadians as frozen tundra. Only the top few inches of ground thaw during the summer. The landscape is treeless, and vegetation is largely limited to moss-like ground cover. There are abundant small lakes connected by rivers that flow eastward to Hudson Bay. These waterways and repositories formed in past millennia because of receding ice sheets that also created long ridges of sand and gravel called eskers.
Apart from wolves, there are few large animals in the Barrens permanently. There are foxes, hares, and rodents in abundance. Another animal that is rarely found in the Barrens is the human being. Based on Mike’s report, Farley calculates that only about a dozen individuals live in an area of about 10,000 square miles. The Barrens is vast, comprising about 20% of Canada’s total land area. Beginning in late fall and lasting until late spring, all water freezes, and snow blankets the earth.
While there is little variety in the vegetation and topography of the Barrens, the various seasons result in temporary changes in the animal population. The early summer brings forth plagues of flies and mosquitoes. In mid-fall, wolf packs stake out areas along the migratory paths of the caribou herds that summer in the far north, then head south to winter in forested landscapes of southern Canada. Though substantially less numerous than in the first decades of the 20th century, there are roughly six to eight of these herds. There are varying estimates of migratory caribou, but most list over 100,000 animals.
Socio-Political Context: Governmental Polity
Farley describes in detail the process of his appointment as the director of The Lupine Project, resulting in a solitary year in the wilderness, studying the life cycle and hunting habits of arctic wolves. Readers have no trouble detecting Farley’s cynical attitude toward his supervisors and their superiors, Royal Canadian governmental ministers. He characterizes governmental employees as narrowly focused, insularly protective of their own positions, bound to the hierarchy of authority, and uncommunicative with those in other departments. He implies that, as a new employee with no assigned position, The Lupine Project fell to him because no one else wanted it, and none were willing to surrender their own carefully guarded assignments. His direct supervisor in the Dominion Wildlife Service of the Canadian government in Ottawa “had been studying rates of tooth decay in groundhogs ever since he joined the Department in 1897” (14). Farley uses this example of a minister who had studied one moribund scientific topic for almost 50 years to demonstrate the mindset of the typical governmental employee he encountered.
Governmental polity is not confined to federal employees but also considers how a democratically elected government relates to civilian voters. Farley portrays the elected officials and the government employees as bowing servilely before the government’s loudest critics and, in turn, expecting newer employees to act with equal obsequiousness. To this end, Farley receives a warning from his boss that a minister who suggested wolves were not responsible for decimating the caribou herds endured such criticism that he retired from public service. When Farley completes his time in the field, he fears that his supervisors will not accept his report, which states that a healthy, unmolested wolf population is necessary to maintain the state of the caribou herds; thus, the wolves need to be left alone.
Cultural Context: Roots of the Environmental Movement
Farley’s book holds an interesting historical spot in that, chronologically and in terms of influence, it served a purpose similar to the writings of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson in the US. These were environmentalists whose observations, research, and popular writings paralleled those of Farley. Leopold’s interest was primarily in environmental pollution caused by the introduction of industrial chemicals from manufacturing concerns. Carson focused on the impact of artificial chemicals, particularly pesticides, in broad-spectrum use. Farley, like the others, received strong criticism from special interests and, like the others, continually reasserted the validity of his ecological message.
During this same period, the awareness of environmental issues intensified, not only in North America but globally. This ecological focus resulted from the nuclear arms race and numerous cataclysmic ecological events: the large-scale mercury poisoning of Japanese citizens and the Cornwall and Santa Barbara oil spills. Within a decade of the publication of Carson and Farley’s books, the US government founded the Environmental Protection Agency, and American citizens began the annual observance of “Earth Day.”
As popular as Farley’s book has been in his native country, however, protection for the Canadian wolf population today is at best sporadic and not uniformly policed. Apart from the country’s national parks that offer wolves sanctuary, hunters and trappers still kill many wolves annually; in some areas, there are no game limits. Additionally, some critics argue that the refuges set aside for wolves are inadequate in size for their hunting domains, forcing them to move outside protected areas. In some provinces, the hunting season for wolves extends to nine months.
Related Titles
By Farley Mowat
