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.
Key Figures
Farley Mowat
Farley, born in 1921, died a few days before his 93rd birthday in 2014. In this memoir, Never Cry Wolf, Farley reveals little about his earlier life that is not comically absurd. He completely omits that he had served on numerous battlefronts for the Canadian military during World War II. Rather, he presents himself as a naive schoolboy dropped into the wilderness to confirm the widely held suspicion that wolves are “murderous savages.” It is only in his preface that Farley gives the date for his excursion as the two years before 1948. If accurate, Farley was in his late twenties when he traveled to the northwest, and the events of the book took place around the winter of 1947-1948. He published this narrative description in 1963.
Farley remained an outspoken, catalyzing figure throughout his life. Some in the literary and scientific communities took great exception to his work, claiming his studies and observations—including the results of The Lupine Project, the basis for Never Cry Wolf—were falsified. Readers may note that Farley’s actions in the narrative often confound people and that he makes no apologies for it: He does not tell the bush pilot who flies him to the frozen tundra that he has loaded dozens of cases of beer into a canoe below the plane, making takeoff almost impossible; he maintains a standoffish relationship with Mike, even though he uses the trapper’s cabin as his headquarters for an entire year for $10 (Canadian); he manages to rile the entire population of the frontier town, Bouchet, by unapologetically telling them their understanding of wolves is entirely incorrect. This corresponds closely with Farley’s personal history in that several of his former colleagues struck agreements with Farley not to mention him in their writing if he agreed not to mention them. Farley was opinionated, controversial, and intractable.
While discounted by his critics, Farley undeniably made a huge impact on the environmental community. Regardless of its historical accuracy, Never Cry Wolf changed the average Canadian’s perception of wolves. As a conservationist and naturalist, Farley illuminated many issues and opened doors for the scientists and ecologists who came after him. Recognized by the academic community for his endeavors, Farley received nine honorary doctoral degrees. Some commentators have noted that the extreme opposition Farley faced because of his work resulted from the challenges it presented to vested interests who did not want to change their operating procedures or face the ecologically negative results of their actions.
Ootek
Ootek is a young Inuit man, Mike’s cousin, who travels to Mike’s cabin to meet Farley out of curiosity. Reserved at first, Ootek—who speaks no English—quickly begins to understand Farley’s deep interest in the lifecycle of wolves and their place in the ecosystem. Ootek warms to Farley quickly. In literary terms, a reader might say that Ootek and Farley become “new brothers.” They spend many days studying various aspects of Canis lupus behavior and travel hundreds of miles across the late summer tundra to observe the seasonal caribou hunt. Ootek introduces Farley to his friends and family members who occasionally travel through the area, though none become close to Farley. The author portrays the typical Inuit as having the mindset that, like most white men, Farley is absurd. Rather, Ootek believes the wolves inspire Farley.
Ootek’s fascination with wolves is quite personal. His personal spiritual totem is the wolf. At one point, he tells Farley, with Mike as his interpreter, that his father, a shaman, left him for a day in the den of adult wolves and cubs. Ootek possesses the ability to explain certain behaviors of the wolves to Farley. He hears the wolves’ howls and cries at great distances and interprets them for Farley so accurately that Farley realizes they virtually speak to one another.
If Farley portrays himself as a blunderer in the narrative, Ootek is his rescuer. Often, when some lupine behavior Farley observes does not make sense to him, Ootek explains it. When it comes to predicting wolf behavior, Ootek is unerringly correct. On one occasion, Mike is close to shooting the wolf called Uncle Albert when the wolf will not leave a female husky who is in heat. Ootek intervenes, explaining that the wolf and dog will remain together as long as she is in season, then each will return to its natural setting.
Mike
Mike, who is white and Inuit, is the first person Farley meets in the wilderness and, in a real sense, begins by being Farley’s savior. With his 14-dog sled team, Mike relocates all of Farley’s equipment from the ice of a frozen lake to his cabin. Mike agrees to allow Farley to use his cabin as the base for his years of conducting The Lupine Project. A trapper by trade, Mike leaves the cabin for weeks at a time to procure food for himself and his multiple dogs, who require the meat of two caribous a week. Farley initially assumes that wolves slaughtered the hundreds of caribou skeletons he sees around the cabin until Mike explains that he has killed them. He kills around 200 to 300 caribou a year.
Mike is quite reserved around Farley, and unlike Ootek, the two never become close, partly because Farley has many pieces of equipment that appear ominous and questionable to Mike. Farley’s experiments, such as dissecting wolf scat, also create distance between the two. Mike never quite trusts Farley and believes he may have a mental illness. Another issue for Mike is Farley’s growing adoration of the wolves, whom Mike sees as competitors for the caribou he must harvest.
George
George is the alpha wolf of the small pack that Farley spends most of his time observing. Farley inadvertently meets George when he climbs over a ridge and finds himself face-to-face with the full-grown, equally surprised arctic wolf. Over the next year, George becomes Farley’s key example of lupine behavior. What Farley learns directly contrasts most of the suppositions of Farley’s superiors and the assumptions of those area residents who boasted of having intimate knowledge of wolves. George’s howl is the last sound Farley describes as he prepares to leave the tundra for the very different kind of civilization human beings enjoy.
In a symbolic sense, George represents the truth of what Farley learned about arctic wolves. George is powerful, social, playful, observant, curious, and tolerant of his human observer. As Farley prepares to return to Ottawa to make his report, he regrets leaving the company of wolves, which to him means abandoning once again the symbiotic partnership that humans and wolves participated in for centuries.
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