Mexico still has a small population of wolves, and large populations -- perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand -- remain in Alaska and Canada. What I have to say on the literature section could fill its own section, but it does underscore Lopez’s overall premise to explore all ways of knowing—and all the ways we will fail knowing—the wolf.

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.And we like to think that we are doing our part by finding new readers for previously loved and cared for books. I understand the need to hunt, to keep the balance of the ecosystem, to hunt the food that will feed us through the winter.

In the book All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque uses literary devices such as metaphors, similes, and imagery to help the reader have a better understanding of what he went through in the war.This is a good example of the marvelous but nevertheless commonplace efficiency of design found in all wild creatures. They were found throughout Europe, from the Zezere River Valley of Portugal north to Finland and south to the Mediterranean. The first line of the first chapter is also imperative, and perhaps the most telling moment of the entire book: “Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods” (9).

Originally published in 1978, this special twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the National Book Award finalist includes an entirely new afterword in which the author considers the current state of knowledge about wolves and recent efforts to reintroduce wolves to their former habitats in American wilderness areas. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winder darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. I had seen ice on the little horsepond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green” (Cather 29). Some of this is centered in my own perspective, with the wolf as charismatic mega-fauna, but cruelty is cruelty.The Cascade wolf had to contend with deep snows, the British Columbia wolf with forty to fifty inches of rain in the winter. Wolves, twenty or thirty subspecies of them, are Holarctic -- that is, they once roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere above thirty degrees north latitude. No matter how they scrubbed their hands, the residue of Red Hot Mama had a way of sticking round, as pesty and persistent as a chaperone at a high school dance.

Its title, Hammer of Witches, derives from a title sometimes bestowed on Inquisitors, Hammer of Heretics. Part of the tragedy—and it was a tragedy—was that wolves who bothered no cattle were hunted down by men who largely wanted to prove to other men that they were no fools.

The first part of the book, ‘Canis Lupus Linnaeus’, deals with the wolf’s origin and description, its social structure and communication, and its hunting and territory. He is of the subspecies occidentalis, and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada (10). With respect to females, who have largely a subordinate standing in Western human societies, the analogy, I think, is poor.