American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee Book - Review - Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee

This is truly an interesting book about American wolves with many noteworthy points to ponder.

It has been said that the Americans can be sold anything...even a war.

Politicians with enormous checkbooks filled with other peoples money just couldn’t resist bankrolling the project of reintroducing wolves in parts of America where they had disappeared. Politicians are notorious for screwing up an ambush as is revealed in American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee.

Read it and pass your own judgment.

The wolf domesticated became the pet dog, man’s best friend and the worst enemy of a bicycler.

EXCERPTS:

Yellowstone’s wolves multiplied just as fast as Smith and his team had hoped they would. By the winter of 2003, the 15 wolves released in 1995, along with an additional 17 introduced a year later, had become a population of 174, divided into fourteen packs spread throughout the park

Now, just fourteen years after the first pens were opened in the Lamar Valley, the wolf population in the Northern Rockies had grown to over seventeen hundred animals.

They’d found a video of wolves demolishing a dairy cow and sent it to a couple of dozen members of Congress. He wondered how many of them had had the stomach to watch the whole thing. Louie had never lost an animal to a wolf, but he’d seen the aftermath on other people’s ranches: calves so thoroughly shredded that they looked like they’d swallowed dynamite, the snow covered in blood. Wolves and sheep were a particularly disastrous combination; stripped of their natural defenses against predators after centuries of domestication, sheep were known for making no attempt to escape when wolves came calling, and the result could be widespread carnage.

In the last count taken before wolves were reintroduced in 1995, over nineteen thousand elk were roaming Yellowstone’s Northern Range. By 2010, that number had plummeted to six thousand, roughly what it had been back in the 1960s, before rangers stopped culling the park’s herds.

Everywhere human civilization flourished, wolves were routed, until Homo sapiens, not Canis lupus, became the most widely spread species. Ironically, the dog—a domesticated wolf—became the first line of defense against depredating wolves, which grew more common as wild prey populations declined under pressure from human hunting and loss of habitat. Romans sometimes referred to dawn as inter lupum et canum: “between the wolf and the dog.” Dogs ruled the day, and wolves owned the night. Humanity’s most beloved animal and its most despised were essentially the same creature, but the wolf’s threat to the shepherd’s livelihood poisoned relations between men and wolves, and the wolf’s reputation never recovered. In Western culture, the wolf became an embodiment of wickedness, from the Middle Ages, when the werewolf myth first appeared, to Grimm’s fairy tales in the early nineteenth century. Early Christians—“the flock,” as believers were called—saw themselves represented in the sheep; their shepherd was God. The wolf that preyed

upon the flock was the devil himself. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had brought the devil back to the Northern Rockies.

They didn’t relish learning how to deal with a predator their own ancestors had so decisively defeated long ago.

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Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson - BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson

This philosophical masterpiece and compendium of insightful reflections is worthy of reading at a pace that gives the reader the time to absorb messages hidden within.

Sigurd Olson conveys his ponderous thoughtful persuasive messages in a joyful easy flowing style. I loved it.

EXCEPTS:

That became our theme song all the way. No matter what the adventure, and there were many, one of us would say, “I’ve been happier, but I can’t remember where.”

I have come to feel laughter and fun on the trails may be the secret of the joy of travel, as when one of my companions, Blaire Fraser, bellowed into an Arctic wind north of Great Slave a seaman’s ditty he loved: “Once I had a Spanish gal, and boy she was a dandy,” that song somehow took the bite out of the wind.

Intuition is different from instinct, the latter being a response to physical and physiological stimuli. When one is confronted with sudden danger, Adrenalin pours into the body in preparation for battle, flight, evasive action. When the hair rises on one’s neck and one is conscious of being followed or facing the unknown, reactions to such fears are instinctive.

Aces are born, not made. “We can train fine fliers,” he said, “but when the crunch comes, only those who act automatically survive to become aces.

I have seen horses hesitate before crossing a bridge they considered unsafe, have watched Indians skirt ice that looked perfectly solid to anyone else and have been with them when they sensed the coming of wind or storm, or an aura of impending doom.

Indians, woodsmen, farmers, and all those who spend their lives out-of-doors can smell the weather. This sense is not prompted by arthritic twinges or meteorological knowledge, but a certain something way down deep.

An old prospector friend of mine, Harry Moody, wrote me just before he died near Flin Flon, Manitoba, that we could sit across a fire from each other and carry on a conversation without saying a word. “I know what you think,” he said, “and you know what I think. It is enough just to be together sitting around a fire. We do not have to tell each other our thoughts or what we might be going to do.”

Wisdom is the key to a fuller life. If a richer one for me is enjoying my environment to the fullest, then it is up to me to cultivate my awareness of all I see.

Strangely enough there was a certain emptiness within me, and it was a long time before its full significance dawned. In a sense I matured during that moment of realization. Now I was an old-timer and could say “I’ve been to the Bay.” Someone said, “Do not take from any man his dream”; when a dream is gone, hope is gone, and life can become drab and without purpose. As long as a dream is ahead, there is always something to look forward to. No doubt that was the reason for the letdown when we came to the sea, but it was not long before I knew it was only the beginning of another dream: to see the Far North rivers of the Canadian shield. Eventually I did this, and found each realization was but an open door to another adventure. I remember so well the first time I saw the famed Athabasca after coming down the Fond du lac from Reindeer and Wollaston, the Athabasca I had read about in the journals of the fur trade, a three-hundred-mile sweep to Fort Chipewyan at its far western end, the place from which the Athabasca brigades came when heading for the Churchill and Grand Portage Post. Nor will I forget my first sight of the enormous reaches of Great Slave Lake with its countless islands, the gateway to the Coppermine River, the Thelon, and Great Bear Lake farther north; of the Great Bear River with its ninety-mile plunge to join the Mackenzie, the enormous waterway to the Arctic Sea, which the explorer Sir Alexander Mackenzie had thought was the way to the Northwest Passage and the Orient.

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