Most white wolves are found in the north, though Lewis and Clark and many mountain men, explorers, and immigrants reported large numbers of very light wolves on the Great Plains in the early 1800s. The small Asian, or Iranian, wolf, Canis lupus pallipes, for example, differs from most other wolves in that it is not known to howl and apparently travels alone, or in very small packs.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The form that the book takes, in and of itself, with the photographs and paintings, poetry and anecdotes, promotes simply in its form different ways of knowing this subject.

In the months to follow it will become so dense between his shoulders it will be almost impossible to work a finger down to his skin. As we begin to put vocalizations together with a more fluid and careful description of body and movement, we are bound to discover considerably more about the wolf and his language of gesture” (48). He was sent there by the Canadian government to prove or disprove that the wolves were eating the caribou.

He talks mainly of the Nunamiut people who live in the Alaskan interior and are a seminomadic hunting society. In the days to follow, they will meet another wolf from the pack, a second female, younger by a year, and the three of them will kill a caribou. On warm days wolves dissipate heat by panting, a weary-looking but efficient method of cooling by evaporation. Some of this is centered in my own perspective, with the wolf as charismatic mega-fauna, but cruelty is cruelty. The most luxuriant pelages show up among adults on the tundra, the difference between a tundra wolf pelt and a timber wolf pelt being so pronounced that the former often sells for twice as much.In the 1920s a Montana cattleman wrote that the wolves on his ranch "would lay up in the damp cool dirt among the reeds and cattails below some spring or in the cedar clumps and thickets on the north side of a high butte" on a hot day. Originally published in 1978, and now with a new afterword by the author, Of Wolves and Men is classic wildlife literature at its best. Of Wolves and Men offers an early indicator of how Lopez’s environmental sensibility functions as an elastic point of consciousness: it is both the space between humans and the world, and that which makes the two inseparable.

Barry Lopez’s work ranges across diverse subjects and fields of speculation, as one can tell from his more recent short story collections Field Notes and Light Action in the Caribbean. The movement that Lopez is making through this particular section is deft and subtle—and for the most part only available in hindsight. In my opinion, a well-written scene can be incredibly meaningful and thought-provoking with the help of imagery, sometimes even more so than a photograph. Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a wolf howls -- a long wail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, with several harmonics, long moments to a tremolo.The most gruesome were the “brave hunters” who would shoot machine guns from an airplane to kill hundreds of alaskan wolves per day. Of Wolves and Men is not just about wolves, but about how little is actually known about wolves—in other words, Lopez is interested in the mythologies that circulate around wolves. His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hunt crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by just over four wide. Another example of imagery within the book is the quote, “Predicting Divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition. Douglas Pimlott, a Canadian wildlife biologist, believes the "extinct" Newfoundland wolf, for example, simply vanished from that island as part of a natural process, that it was not hunted out.