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. The Chukchi Eskimo of northeastern Siberia routinely told any wolf they killed that they were Russians, not Eskimos. 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.

Such a move from scientific documentation to fanciful speculation is a signature feature of Lopez’s writing. The idle word of a neighbor, the gibberish of a village idiot, a shaving cut that showed up the morning after someone claimed to have driven off a wolf with a sharp stick—for these reasons and less thousands died at the stake. Wolf-lovers want to say no healthy wolf ever killed anyone in North America, which isn’t true either… In the past twenty years biologists have given us a new wolf, one separated from folklore.

The wolf stood two inches taller, was three inches longer in the leg, and eight inches longer in the body. Before Mowat went on his journey he would have planned what equipment he needed to bring, how to prove or dis-prove to the Canadian government that the wolves are eating the caribou, and how Mowat would have prevented the wolves from attacking him. The wolf's ability to regulate its body temperature no doubt helped it survive in a wide variety of climates, each with a wide range of temperature. A few minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost forty miles per hour, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone.

Barry Lopez’s work ranges across diverse subjects and fields of speculation, as one can tell from his more recent short story collections Field Notes and Light Action in the Caribbean. A good author paints you a picture so you can imagine the places, colors, expressions, textures, with all the fine details.At the end of that section, I wasn’t any closer to understanding why they killed wolves the way they did and in such huge numbers.

In North America some generalizations can be made about the pattern -- about where dispersing wolves will likely show up. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions, allowing us to further understand how this incredible animal has come to live so strongly in the human heart.The Cascade wolf had to contend with deep snows, the British Columbia wolf with forty to fifty inches of rain in the winter. Mr Lopez brings in observations made by Eskimos who live in the Arctic among wolves, and by Native Americans who lived alongside wolves.

He is light gray; that is, there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine than there are black and brown. From the descriptions of the “conversation of death,” as Lopez describes several encounters between wolves and prey that do not fit expected patterns—and how domestic prey animals like sheep and cattle have had this conversation bred out of them—I begin to understand more of this relationship. He senses through his pads with each step the dryness of the moss beneath his feet, and the ridges of old tracks, some his own. 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. There is much more that is extremely complex here than I can understand—which is entirely Lopez’s point.If someone says big males always lead the pack and do the killing, the Eskimo shrug and say, “Maybe. The literary scholar Susan Kollin has shown how “…Lopez dismantles notions of Alaska as a pastoral or wilderness retreat, a place somehow cut off from the rest of the United States or the world” (46). Lopez cautions his readers to avoid thinking of wolves in human terms—and as he concludes Chapter 3, he also cautions his readers to avoid thinking of wolves in terms of domestic dogs. People have always killed predators but ‘ the history of killing wolves shows far less restraint and far more perversity. Social structure in a wolf pack has been observed in greatest detail among captive wolves, which makes extrapolating to wild wolves risky.