A team of biologists in Barrow, Alaska, found that the temperature of the wolf's footpads was maintained at just above the tissue-freezing point where the pads came in contact with ice and snow. The tone here is slightly chiding, not too much, but enough to make the reader aware that he or she may have been slipping back into preconceived notions about wolves. Thanks to the book I understood a little more about my own dog, but the author warns against extrapolating wolf behaviour onto their domesticated brethren. Malamute and wolf were about the same in the neck, twenty inches around, but the malamute was bigger in the chest by a few inches.

The dead wolf was taken inside a hut, where he was propped up in a sitting position and a banquet meal was set before him by a shaman.

And it makes me wonder if we, the civilians, better understand wolves in fiction, rather than real life.

The coat is thick across the shoulders, where guard hairs may be four or five inches long, and thins out on the muzzle and legs. The possibility has yet to be realized of a synthesis between the benevolent wolf of many native American stories and the malcontented wolf of most European fairy tales. However, as Lopez ends Chapter 7, a theme that continues through the statistics and descriptions of poisoning and destruction, he is sympathetic with those he has interviewed for this book, those who have no apologies for trapping and destroying the wolves. Even people who have considerable experience with the animal seem to want it to be, somehow, bigger than it is. He trots away with it, his head erect, tail erect, his hips slightly to one side and out of line with his shoulders, as though hindquarters were impatient with forequarters, the cone inert in his mouth.

Just when the detail nearly becomes too much to digest, Lopez steps back and puts the detail in context. Their eyes hint remorse, as marriages are scorned (she never lets me do anything fun), youth is remembered (why didn’t I go to California that summer? The hunter knew the spur ended at an abrupt vertical drop of about three hundred feet and he followed, curious to see what the wolf would do. The level of detail here never rises to the level of oppressive, yet even as Lopez moves through the detail, the information, never does he stray far from his authorial purpose, which is to make the reader understand the wolves. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike.

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. This excerpt describes Raven Bear (a member of the Crow Nation) and his grandson's visit to the wolf park on the Olympic peninsula, where the remnants of the Great Plains wolf "Canis lupus nubilus" were said to be kept. Being a concrete representation of an object or sensory experience (myLearning), imagery permits the reader to visualize what the narrator is experiencing.Human beings, particularly in recent years, have grown accustomed to speaking of “dominance hierarchies” in business corporations and elsewhere, and the tendency has been to want wolf packs (or troops of chimpanzees) to conform to similar molds. They wanted the attention and respect they used to get in a township, young boys tagging after them, men their own age cheering their shenanigans with the game wardens.

Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men was a National Book Award finalist when it was first published in 1978, and this book has come to exemplify the author’s truly interdisciplinary style: his works deftly fuse literary acumen with ecological awareness and ethnography. 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. The transformation of wilderness into civilization was the reward for his sacrifices, the definition of his achievement and the source of his pride.

When it was weighed and found to be sixty-seven pounds, he became slightly indignant with the creature and said, "He's got the frame to carry ninety pounds. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates careful scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions, allowing us to understand how this remarkable animal has become so prominent for so long in the human heart. There is something deep-seated in men that makes them want to “take on” the outdoors, as though it were something to be whipped, and to kill wolves because killing a wolf stands for real triumph.