A deep dive into the history, mythology, biology, massacre and reintroduction of the wild wolf. Thought provoking an still highly relevant. Should be on every university zoology/biology major's mandatory reading list. Barry Lopez at his best. ( )

More scientific than I was expecting. ( )

A few random quotes:

"Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the wolf's pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among stones where a year before he had cached meat."

"The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not appear so effortless. The wolf's body, from neck to hips, appear to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows."

"The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His fur carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill then days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smart snowshow hare that eluded the wolf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening was home to porcupines last winter."

"I called this exchange in which the animals appear to lock eyes and make a decision the conversation of death. It is a ceremnonial exchange, the flesh of the hunted in exchange for respect for its spirit. In this way both animals, not the predator alone, choose for the encounter to end in death. There is, at least, a sacred order in this. There is nobility. And it is something that happens only between the wolf and his major prey species. It produces, for the wolf, sacred meat. Imagine a cow in the place of the moose or white-tailed deer. The conversation of death falters noticeably with domestic stock. They have had the conversation of death bred out of them; they do not know ho to encounter wolves. A horse, for example-- a large animal as capable as a moose of crackling a wolf's ribs or splitting its head open with a kick-- will usually panic and run. What happens whena wolf wanders into a flock of sheep and kills twenty or thirty of them in apparent compulsion is perhaps not so much slaughter as a failure on the part of the sheep to communicate anything at all-- resistance, mutual respect, appropriateness-- to the wolf. The wolf has initiated a sacred ritual and met with ignorance."

"We are dealing with a different kind of death from the one men know. When the wolf "asks" for the life of another animal he is responding to something in that animal that says, "My life is strong. It is worth asking for." A moose may be biologically constrained to die because he is old or injured, but the choice is there. The death is not tragic. It has dignity."

"Men in a speculative business like cattle ranching singled out one scapegoat for their financial losses. Hired hands were readily available and anxious to do the killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing wolves, things were bound to get better. And the wolf had few sympathizers. The history of economic expansion in the West was characterized by the change or destruction of much that lay in its way. Dead wolves were what Manifest Destiny cost."

"By and large, the kinds of men who did the killing in the 1880s and 1890s were drifters who gave strong lip service to Progress, the mandate to subdue the earth, and the ghoulish nature of the wolf. Ben Corbin, a frontier roustabout who at one point killed wolves for a living, left his wolf-hunting wisdom behind in the pages of a privately printed booklet called The Wolf Hunter's Guide (1901). It is typical of hundreds of other such memoirs in that it has very little to say aobut how to actually kill woves but a great deal to say about the Bible, free trade, the privilege of living in a democracy, and the foulness of the wolf's ways. It expresses the sentiments of the day and is full of bad biology and fantastic calculations."

( )

I first heard of Barry Lopez when someone I knew recommended that I read Arctic Dreams. That book will always remain one of my favorites. There are moments in there that transcend anything other "nature writers" offer. This is because Lopez is always trying to see the world through the eyes of the animals, or at least doing his best to not let his own cultural conditioning get in the way.

In Of Wolves and Men, Lopez explores the subject of wolves from many viewpoints. He looks at the wolf in the wild: how it operates, what it is really like, how some other human cultures have come to embrace it. He also looks at the sad history of man's war on wolves, a war not deserved by this incredible creature. It seems a little odd to me that we forget where dogs come from when we attack wolves, but of course the lore about wolves goes back to ancient times. Lopez explores the mythology and the history of writing about wolves, how they have been portrayed over the centuries. Finally, he hopes that we can finally allow the wolf to be.

There are many beautiful lines in here. I have added them as favorite quotations on Goodreads.com. So much about perception and reality. Lopez is not only a fine nature writer; he is a fine writer period. ( )

What a fantastic book.

I've long been in love with wolves, the idea of them and the truth behind them. [b:Of Wolves and Men|743936|Of Wolves and Men|Barry Lopez|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347919044s/743936.jpg|730087] by [a:Barry Lopez|10262|Barry Lopez|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1319321209p2/10262.jpg] examines both our conceptions of wolves and the truth of how little we know of the creature. Myths are examined, legislation, and ethology.

This book neatly encompasses the bulk of what we know about wolves, what we think we know about them, and perhaps why we want to know more. It's one of the best books on the topic I've ever come across. I truly treasure this book - it serves as a great reminder of both the good and the bad we're capable of as a species. ( )