![]() On his first assignment for the Canadian government in the late 1940s, he is given a lot of rules to follow, a ton of stuff, but no clear way to get where he is going. What a pleasure to become reacquainted with Farley Mowat’s adventures with the wolves in the subarctic regions of Canada. This 1963 book became a classic that shifted the public’s perception of wolves. He also creates a cast of wolf pack members and the shy Eskimos who become the conservationist’s close friends and teachers. His soft, youthful voice becomes plausible as the author’s he recounts the expedition as if from memory yet makes the scientific discoveries unfold with the drama of a novel. Narrator Adam Sims makes listeners feel welcome. Sentimentalists’ complaints to the government that “the wolves were killing all the deer” caused Canada to send Mowat to investigate the claim. Their indifference allowed him to observe every part of the predators’ lives: monogamous reproduction, a nuclear family, and a surprising diet. The Canadian wolves ignored Mowat when he first arrived in the Arctic to study them. Until they see Mowat, who had been skinny-dipping and hadn’t had time to get dressed. They pass within feet of cud-chewing bucks, who turn their heads but keep on munching. ![]() One day Mowat sees three wolves loping along the crest of a crag and follows them to grasslands full of grazing deer, through which they pad leisurely. Forget White Fang and shots of slavering packs creating carnage on fleeing caribou in David Attenborough documentaries. ![]() Never Cry Wolf, published in 1963, did much to change the popular perception of wolves as savage, gratuitous killers. How can they carry enough mice back to their dens to feed their cubs? They eat them and then regurgitate them, that’s how. After a year in the wilderness monitoring various wolf packs, Mowat reached the astonishing conclusion that the staple diet of wolves (in Manitoba in 1948, at any rate) was not deer, but mice. Mowat’s brief was to prove that wolves were to blame for their disappearance and not, as a previous researcher had suggested, the ever-increasing numbers of trophy-bagging deer hunters. In 1948 Mowat was commissioned by the Canadian Wildlife Service to investigate declining caribou numbers in the sub-Arctic wastes of northern Manitoba. Instead, he finds that they live as much on mice and fish as on deer, and normally attack only the weakest members of the herd in a good demonstration of natural selection. His mission is to prove that wolves are destroying indecent numbers of caribou. It is also an hilarious satire on state bureaucracy that finds Mowat dumped in the middle of a frozen lake with a mountain of supplies and an utterly useless canoe. Never Cry Wolf, a myth-breaking study of wolf-pack organisation, altered the general perception at the time of wolves as unmitigated evil. He is renowned for his books on the Inuit and the animals that they hunt. The Canadian naturalist Farley Mowat, now approaching 90, is too little-known in the UK: think of Gerard Durrell crossed with Garrison Keillor. Titles read by Adam Sims Titles read by Adam Sims The American (unabridged) The Aspern Papers (unabridged) The Book of Disquiet (unabridged) The Bostonians (unabridged) Ethan Frome (unabridged) The Europeans (unabridged) Famous Heroes of the American West (unabridged) Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (unabridged) The House of the Seven Gables (unabridged) Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (unabridged) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (unabridged) Never Cry Wolf (unabridged) Nightmare Alley (unabridged) Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & The Pride of the Village (unabridged) Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Pride of the Village & The Spectre Bridegroom (unabridged) Roderick Hudson (unabridged) The Scarlet Letter (unabridged) Ten Days that Shook the World (unabridged) Washington Square (unabridged) ![]() Film and theatre credits include: Band of Brothers (HBO), Lost in Space, The Madness of George III (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Alice in Wonderland (RSC), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Regent’s Park) and Snake in Fridge (Manchester Royal Exchange), for which he won the award for Best Actor at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards. ![]() His recent recordings for radio include Wenny Has Wings, The World According to Humphrey and The Salamander Letter, all for the BBC. ![]()
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