never cry wolf

Farley Mowat began expressing an interest in living biology at age five when he first discovered two catfish in a stagnant pond near his grandmother's home in Ontario. This childhood event foreshadowed his future scientific endeavors as an adult..When he completed his schooling, he was engaged by the Department of Mines and Resources to investigate the problems of the decreasing deer population, presumed to have been the result of an out of control wolf population. No one had considered the fact that hunters outnumbered deer by five to one at the time.

Farley Mowat's investigation took him to Churchill and then beyond to the subarctic Barren Lands.

Farley and the gear the government decides he'll need are loaded onto an Air Force transport. The plane is a twin engine capable of carrying thirty. However, by the time his equipment is on board, there is barely room to take Farley, the pilot, and the crew. He is outfitted with one third of a collapsible canoe, armaments including tear gas grenades and potassium cyanide charges, grain alcohol for preservation of specimen stomachs, seven axes, skis, snowshoes, and more. Finally, there is barely room for Farley, the pilot, and co-pilot to wedge themselves in for the flight to Churchill.

Farley finally leaves Churchill during the last week in May in a plane operated by an ex-R.A.F. pilot from Yellowknife. Luckily, he is able to trade a gallon of alcohol for a seventeen foot canoe which they lash to the underneath of the plane, and in it he hides the Moose Brand that had been considered non-essential and set aside to assure that they would be able to take off. When the plane is unable to do so, the pilot leaves behind his 'reserve' drums of fuel and they are able to get airborne after a few mechanical and environmental stutters.

The pilot takes him about three hundred miles northwest of Churchill and leaves him on a frozen lake with all of his gear assuring him that he'll return in the fall sometime, although there are lots of Eskimo around who will return...

After the plane departs, Farley takes stock.

His gear is more than he can move off the frozen lake on his own. His instructions are to establish a permanent base and, by utilizing waterways, to make a survey of the area. This is impossible. So, he sets up the portable radio as per the enclosed instructions to seek consultation with Ottawa, but the only person he is able to contact is a radio operator in Peru who agrees to relay a message to Ottawa for him.

Farley keeps it to a ten word minimum as instructed, only months later learning of the crisis it caused. This is only partially because the message identifies him as Varley Monfat. It was a problem because it appeared to be in code. It is sent to External Affairs and then to the Ministry of Defense..

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The young man is a trapper named Mike, who is part Eskimo and part white. He is alone, other than his team of huskies and a small band of Eskimos (including his mother) who lives seventy miles north. Farley makes a deal to use his 'cabin' as a base, and Mike and his team of huskies help him to get his gear there. He maintains his distance, watching warily as Farley unpacks the various scientific tools supplied as his field laboratory. Farley shows him some of it, explaining how it works.

However, when he shows him his collection of autopsy tools and explains their purpose using photos from a book, Mike suddenly realizes his mother is ill and has to leave. Farley is too preoccupied to consider how Mike could have known his mother was ill. Instead, he concentrates on his surroundings.

He doesn't get much sleep, and by morning he has convinced himself that he has missed an opportunity.

He decides to return to the spot of his encounter. He is pleased, though unprepared, for the footprints he finds measuring six inches in diameter. They combine to make a forty inch stride. He returns to the cabin and rereads the information he has, confirming that some wolves weigh in at up to one hundred and seventy pounds and measure up to almost nine feet from nose tip to tail tip, standing as high as forty two inches at the shoulders. The next morning, Farley finds his compass and decides to again try to make contact.

He follows the wolf's tracks through a bog and loses the trail on the other side. He stops for lunch and scans the area with his binoculars seeing something move...

The next morning, Farley once again returns to the site of the den, but this time sees no sign of the wolves whatsoever. He watches the area through a telescope until two in the afternoon, and he is discouraged enough by then to give up his place of concealment to relieve himself. He is stunned to discover the pair of wolves sitting twenty yards directly behind him, relaxed and almost bored looking. Somewhat indignant, he shoos them away,. Startled, they trot off without looking back.

Thinking on the events later that evening, Farley is confused about just who is watching whom. The next day, he returns to the area he'd thought was their den by canoe and almost walks past it when a series of squeaks commands his attention. One pup catches Farley's scent and comes out to investigate

From that time forward, Farley's domain is never violated by the wolves, and he adapts himself to their schedules so that he doesn't miss anything vital in their day to day activities. At first, he finds it difficult to nap like a wolf, instead dropping off to sleep for hours at a time.

But, once he begins to imitate all of their mannerisms, including changing his body's position after each nap, it becomes easier and he is much more refreshed. Farley names the patriarch of the wolf family George and the matriarch, Angeline. In the early days, Farley often notices the presence of a third wolf, which confounds his observations of the monogamous relationship that George and Angeline obviously have, and he has difficulty understanding how this third wolf fits in

One thing that confounds Farley is how the wolves manage to maintain a food supply. With growing concern for their well-being, he even returns to the cabin and bakes five loaves of bread, leaving one beside the hunting path, but his gift is ignored. At about the same time, Farley begins to experience problems with a growing mouse population. They invade the cabin, and Farley`s supplies, even having their children in the pillow of his sleeping bag.

Finally, Farley makes the connection one day as he watches while Angeline leaves Uncle Albert to deal with the pups. She begins to perform a sort of ballet during which she catches and eats no fewer than twenty three mice. It becomes increasingly evident to Farley that mice are their main diet source. In an effort to better understand the relationship between mice and wolves

Governments, both provincial and federal, turn a blind eye to the senseless slaughter of wolves, regardless of the evidence put before them. Instead, they fueled the fire by offering a twenty dollar bounty on any wolf killed and many trappers find that they not only supplement their income, but use wolf kill as an income mainstay.

Unfortunately, overall opinion of wolves is so low that none of the governments involved care how the wolves are killed. Rather than simply catching wolves in traps or even shooting them, many trappers use strychnine liberally and kill everything in a given area. The result is the widespread killing of every fox, wolverine, and other flesh eater in a given region. One trapper boasted that he'd killed over a hundred of the wolves in a single season.

The killing didn't stop there.

Farley had long given up on the pilot who had dropped him at Wolf House Bay, and he is surprised when Ootek runs to tell him that a plane is circling to the west. He sets out quickly with smoke bombs, and the Norseman lands in the bay. The pilot informs him of all that has gone on in his absence from the Department's disturbed idea that he had absconded with their equipment to the fact that even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been asked to help find him. They, however, couldn't even find the pilot who had dropped him off. They heard a rumor that he was a Secret Service spy sent to report on the Russian bases at the pole and sent a scathing letter to the Department suggesting honesty might be in order next time.