Rainy Day Reading

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I just finished reading an excellent natural history book and wanted to recommend it with a little review. The book is called The Last Wild Wolves, Ghosts of the Rain Forest, by Ian McAllister.

I've long been fascinated by the wildlands of the north -- the Yukon, the Tongass, the Great Bear Rainforest. I was doing some random internet-searching on these places recently when I ran across McAllister's book (published in 2007 by the University of California Press) and decided to order a copy.

I bought it because it's a photography book, so I wasn't surprised to see excellent photography. What surprised me was how engaging it was to actually read. As I turned the pages of story after story about these animals -- I'd never heard of coastal wolves before -- I felt like I was reading the best blog ever. McAllister gives us just the right combination of objective information and subjective experience, all beautifully presented.

To reach the wolves in their remote homes, McAllister travelled by boat:

In the lee of one of the islands, after twenty-odd hours of sailing, I dropped anchor in (twenty-five feet) of gin-clear water. Shining a spotlight below, I could see sand lances and bull kelp swirling about in the current. I made sure that the anchor was well set; this spot would be home for as long as the southeast storms held offshore. I could hear the Steller's sea lions just off my port side, and the ambient roar of the surf filled the wheelhouse. The sounds and smells were familiar. I immediately fell into a deep sleep, my clothes stiff from salt spray, tomorrow just hours away.

My eyes were still shut tight when the howls penetrated the boat. I had to think for a moment to remember where I was, but soon, above the sound of the surf, I could hear them. The wolves were still there.

In one of the first wolf encounters he writes about, you could be forgiven for wondering how he knew he could safely have such an encounter. It reminded me of getting close to a bobcat in an off-trail meadow and hearing distant hikers wondering if I was nuts. Many other things make McAllister feel like a kindred spirit, a photographer who's really interested in his subjects, such as when he writes, "I crouched to make a closer inspection of the scat." You can tell he's not just someone looking for "trophy" photos of wolves.

That sense of being with a kindred spirit kept me turning the pages for more stories of his encounters with the wolves:

One of the yearlings broke from his siblings and circled back, poking his nose through the dense salal bushes.... He tiptoed so close that I could see the insides of his moist nostrils as they opened and closed, smelling everything about me.

Or this:

I frequently have to remind myself not to treat photography as a "pursuit" of the wolves. What I feel while following them is too similar to what a hunter feels if I view it as a pursuit, and wolves easily sense this. They tend to appear only when I have convinced myself that it doesn't matter whether they show up that day or not.

He also observes bears, and occasionally bears and wolves: 

The wolves lined up at the fringe of the trees, the pups safely stashed in the security of the den hole. Maybe the bear did not want to turn his back on the wolves; maybe he did not think he would make it back into deep water. No longer stiff and cautious, he ran towards the wolves....

No spoiler alerts here. If you want to know what happened, you can read the book. McAllister is a founding director of the Raincoast Conservation Society. I hoped he actually did have a blog so I could read more, and I found something called the Great Bear Blog that includes some of his work. There's a DVD included with the book, but I'm saving that for the next rainy day....

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