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Wolf Tails
In 1995, naturalists, game biologists, and conservationists applauded efforts by the Northern Gray Wolf Recovery Plan to return wolves to their native habitat. As Alaska was the sole remaining state with a healthy wolf population, Alaskan wolves were reintroduced to lost wolf territories in the Yellowstone, Central Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Minnesota.
Exuberant optimism resulted in wolves accustomed to the arctic being transplanted as far south as Arizona. For all intents the Arizona portion of the project was pronounced a failure with all the displaced Alaskan wolves declared officially dead when their radio collars stopped working.
This novel supposes that six of those wolves, each taken from disparate packs, banded together against all odds, rejected this unfamiliar land, and began the impossible journey across the Western States and Canada back to their homes in the Tanana Valley of Alaska’s Interior.
Wolf Tails can best be described as a Watership Down for Wolves.
The tale follows the struggles of six wolves taken from separate packs in which none of them were alpha wolves with leadership ability. It follows their gradual evolution into a cohesive group necessary to survive in a land where everything around to them was unfamiliar. Each wolf’s unique personality unfolds with the story and their strange encounters with plants, creatures, and natural disasters totally alien to them.
Woven into this quest to return home is an entire culture of wolf mythology with its own legends, heroes, language and a strict code of conduct known to the wolves as the Lore. Part of the richness of the tale evolves from the assertion that as wolves crossed the Great Ice Bridge into Alaska about ten thousand years ago along with migrating humans the wolves shared a common bond with man, even parts of his language.
And unknown to man, certain wolves possess the ability to read human minds.
One of the wolves, a misfit among his own clan, discovers he has such rudimentary talent. Along with direct speech, the wolves retain a unique capacity to communicate their thoughts among themselves and display skills using their senses that the domesticated dog has lost.
All six of the wolves have distinct personalities with strengths and flaws, and often their struggles are among themselves as well as their surroundings. Their characters rise to the occasion at times and fail at others, but their persistence leads them through passages that would be epic even for humans.
The readers will soon find themselves rooting for the animals as they enlist the aid of a Spanish speaking coyote for his local knowledge, tangle with rattlesnakes, cholla cactus, and survive encounters with buffalo, a cougar, and even a flash flood.
During this time the wolves struggled to adapt their knowledge of the arctic to the desert and to bend their inflexible Lore to situations never meant to be covered by that code of conduct. In the end they grow in stature and produce something better.
Exuberant optimism resulted in wolves accustomed to the arctic being transplanted as far south as Arizona. For all intents the Arizona portion of the project was pronounced a failure with all the displaced Alaskan wolves declared officially dead when their radio collars stopped working.
This novel supposes that six of those wolves, each taken from disparate packs, banded together against all odds, rejected this unfamiliar land, and began the impossible journey across the Western States and Canada back to their homes in the Tanana Valley of Alaska’s Interior.
Wolf Tails can best be described as a Watership Down for Wolves.
The tale follows the struggles of six wolves taken from separate packs in which none of them were alpha wolves with leadership ability. It follows their gradual evolution into a cohesive group necessary to survive in a land where everything around to them was unfamiliar. Each wolf’s unique personality unfolds with the story and their strange encounters with plants, creatures, and natural disasters totally alien to them.
Woven into this quest to return home is an entire culture of wolf mythology with its own legends, heroes, language and a strict code of conduct known to the wolves as the Lore. Part of the richness of the tale evolves from the assertion that as wolves crossed the Great Ice Bridge into Alaska about ten thousand years ago along with migrating humans the wolves shared a common bond with man, even parts of his language.
And unknown to man, certain wolves possess the ability to read human minds.
One of the wolves, a misfit among his own clan, discovers he has such rudimentary talent. Along with direct speech, the wolves retain a unique capacity to communicate their thoughts among themselves and display skills using their senses that the domesticated dog has lost.
All six of the wolves have distinct personalities with strengths and flaws, and often their struggles are among themselves as well as their surroundings. Their characters rise to the occasion at times and fail at others, but their persistence leads them through passages that would be epic even for humans.
The readers will soon find themselves rooting for the animals as they enlist the aid of a Spanish speaking coyote for his local knowledge, tangle with rattlesnakes, cholla cactus, and survive encounters with buffalo, a cougar, and even a flash flood.
During this time the wolves struggled to adapt their knowledge of the arctic to the desert and to bend their inflexible Lore to situations never meant to be covered by that code of conduct. In the end they grow in stature and produce something better.
333 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 17, 2010
1 person want to read
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