But the reflection of a review quickly convinced me that five stars are justified it would be true to say that Barb and I both really liked it, but also true that the information Mowat imparts is at times genuinely amazing. It's one of many pre-Goodreads nonfiction books I haven't made time to review until now and in the meantime, like most of those, I'd slapped a three-star rating on it to indicate that I liked it. My wife and I read it together, and both found it not only fascinating but enormously educational. It's a fine good story, with a strong emotional plotline as the narrator gets ever more involved with the wolves, and a nice line in laconic Canadian humour, but I'll never be able to stomach it while it's marketed as "An Incredible True Story."Ī recent read of Chandler Brett's excellent novel A Sheltering Wilderness, the first volume of his projected Wolf Code trilogy, brought to mind this nonfiction book which I read decades ago, and which is a groundbreaking classic in the field study of wolves in the wild. As a wolf biologist said, despairing of educating the public, "We'll never get past Never Cry Wolf!" Unfortunately he forgot to mention that they're also damn' great bloodthirsty beasts with strong territorial and dominance drives, a propensity to roam long distances, and a large appetite for ungulate flesh. Mowat helped convince two generations that wolves are sweet-natured beasts with strong family values and a natural place in the ecosystem. A wolf-handler friend of mine puts it nicely: "wolves are the new dolphins" - all too often seen as the incarnation of Nature's goodness, wisdom and beauty.
Trouble is, now that big truth is largely accepted, we're still stuck with all the little lies. Its fundamental thesis was "wolves are okay," and that badly needed saying at the time. As such, it probably succeeded: it sank deep into the public consciousness of wolves, and surely helped the great turnaround of the wolf's image in the western world. If I remember correctly from reading a long-ago interview with him, Mowat fully intended his book to be pro-wolf propaganda. This was in the early 1960's, when a lot of people were bent on systematically eradicating the wolf as a species. Mowat knew a lot about life in the Arctic, but he didn't know much about wolves. And quite a lot of it is, at least in terms of factual accuracy, horseshit. Let's get one thing straight: Never Cry Wolf is fiction. I hate it's made up from start to finish, yet the tagline on the cover says, "The incredible true story of life among Arctic wolves." I love it because I love wolves and this is a well-written, entertaining story about wolves.
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