The Red Snow: A Story of the Alaskan Gray Wolf

by James M. Greiner

In The Red Snow, his second work, Greiner turns his keen eye to Alaska's vast wilderness and its most mysterious creature: the gray wolf. Basing his story on careful research and personal observation, Greiner recounts the lives of the Tanana River Valley wolf pack and the tough, lonely hunter, Jake, who inhabits their valley. In splendid detail, he describes the birth of pups, the victory of the hunt, and the habits of animals who share the wolves' valley. Yet in describing the beauty, he never forgets the harshness of the Arctic wilderness; Greiner makes the ugly realities of the fight for survival intensely clear.

Genres: Wolves, Natural History

241 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[WolfLover · Rating 1 out of 5]

This claims to be the tale of an Alaskan wolf pack, but there is very little in the way of plot. It is written in a dry, didactic tone, more along the lines of a lecture than a story. It just blandly states what the animals are doing or drones on for page after page about the landscape. The characters have absolutely no personality – animals are portrayed as mindless slaves to instinct, with no thoughts or feelings.

Though the author makes much of how “realistic” the story is in his introduction, there are some factual errors, such as the suggestion that incest is the norm in wolves (it’s actually rare), and some misinformation regarding their evolution. He also talks about how wolves are “thriving,” claiming that there are probably more of them than there were thousands of years ago, which is obviously untrue – wolves have been exterminated from much of their original range and classified as endangered in some areas. This is even more ridiculous when you consider the book was written in 1980, before reintroductions to places like Yellowstone – there were even fewer wolves then than there are now. There are a few mistakes regarding other species, too (for example, the author calls pikas rodents, when they are lagomorphs).

Don’t read this unless you want to read about boring animals that behave like automatons.

[Cienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book shows its age, but that doesn't mean it's bad. The book was written in the 1980's, but I assume it is set in an earlier time due to certain aspects of the story. The natural aspect of this is absolutely amazing. The entire book has no dialogue, and is simply a day by day descriptions of a wolf pack's life as well as the animals that interact with them. If you don't enjoy animal behavior or detailed descriptions of nature it probably isn't for you, as the prose can be lengthy and sometimes over detailed or boring. The only aspect I genuinely didn't like was the human interaction with the wolf. I think we're meant to care about Tatum, a trapper living in Alaskan wilderness and this is where the age of the book really shows. SPOILERS: The trapper seeks revenge against the wolf pack because he hates wolves, they chewed up his snowmobile seat and very late in the book one of the wolves kills his dog (something they would very rarely do in reality). So in retaliation he traps 3 of them in snares and foot traps, which is horrid and many other animals fall prey to this and later he decimates all but two of the wolves by airplane. Honestly this was so hard to read and I don't understand why a good book was ruined by this addition. My only complaint, but it makes me like the book a lot less.

[Argyl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm an avid reader of natural history in general, and books about particular animal species in particular, so I was quite eager to read The Red Snow, which follows the life of a pack of Arctic wolves for a year. Greiner is obviously knowledgeable about the subject and the book is full of interesting detail concerning the lives of wolves and other fauna and flora of the Arctic. Ostensibly, The Red Snow is fiction but the artifice of writing fiction is not much in evidence here, and the book wallows in page after page of description and explication. Greiner's writing style is repetitive, with little variation in sentence structure or length (most sentences are unnecessarily long). The only significant conflict in the book--that between the wolf pack and a crusty old trapper seeking revenge for the death of his dog and other crimes--is introduced too late in the book to be considered plot. There are many books about wolves that are fascinating and well-written. I would stick with those.

[Lone Wolf · Rating 1 out of 5]

‘The Red Snow’ is a very slow-moving account of a pack of wolves in Alaska. It’s fiction, but there is no real story, just impersonal descriptions of the animals going about their daily lives. It’s very baldly written, with no emotion whatsoever – the characters are never excited, afraid, curious or anything else. They just … do things. This makes for dull reading, and there are some factual errors. It is NOT the norm for siblings to mate!