This compelling ‘young adult’ story begins with a realistic detailed account of the survival of a 13-year-old “Eskimo” girl Miyax lost, alone, and famished in far north tundra. With a wolfpack nearby, she draws insight from a tale her father told long ago of a despairing winter when he asked a wolf for help and was fed. Inspired and informed by it, she observes the wolves’ communication signals with each other, their social dynamics, and experiments with initiating contact to gain their trust and assistance. Step by step she deciphers and hones enough of their ways to secure acceptance by the pack. Once fed, Miyax continues tapping her intuitiveness and her nearly-lost ancestral wisdom to interpret the seasons, sky, land, plants and animals, in addition to sewing, foraging, cooking, navigating and sheltering to thrive in the harsh environment.

From there the story flashes back to her early childhood with her father in a seal camp, where hunters measured richness of spirit by intelligence, fearlessness and love compared to the way ‘gussaks’ measured richness with money and property. At age nine Miyax is sent away from the camp and her father to live with her aunt in an Arctic settlement. She learns English and math, writes with a pen pal in San Francisco, and takes another name for this more civilized way of life, Julie. At thirteen she decides to follow “Eskimo” tradition of arranged marriage with the teen son of her father’s close friend. When her new husband attacks and tries to rape her, she suddenly escapes, setting out to live with her pen pal in San Fransisco. It is as she sets out that she becomes lost in the tundra with the wolves and becomes Miyax again.

After acceptance by the pack, humans’ modern lifeway encroaches in the wilderness when a man shoots two wolves from an airplane, killing the pack leader Amaroq. “In that instant she saw great cities, bridges, radios, school books… long highways, TV sets, telephones, and electric lights. Black exhaust enveloped her, and civilization became this monster that snarled across the sky.” (p. 141) In the aftershock of the assault on the pack, she takes her turn to nourish and heal others, now using her indigenous human ways to assist them, as her loathing of civilization stews. Dropping her plans to journey to San Francisco, she sets out to find her father whose wisdom had kept her alive. Upon arrival, she is horrified to see how far he too has crossed into the trappings of civilization’s dominion, and worse still, that he is the one who evidently shot the wolf Amaroq from a plane to protect his musk-oxen herd. She instantly leaves him behind also, then pauses to reflect on her life choice as the story ends.

Most mistakenly interpret this story’s conflict as civilization vs indigenous cultures. But this story symbolizes nuanced conflict between not two, but three lifeways. While Miyax-Julie was somewhat content in the security of a home, strange ripples led both the civilized and indigenous cultures askew. When she first ran into the wilderness, confinements of customs old and new vanished. Wildness is the third choice, preferably with a band of humans. But could humans with wild callings such as Miyax hold on to a wilderness lifeway today as what remains of the wild warps and vanishes at the hands of our own kind? Sadly, that choice is not considered. The story’s ending is a contradiction of a too-common simplified choice, one that plays out shamefully in the sequel with a toxic blended culture against wild life, leading indigenous culture further and further away from primitive culture. {This statement may be deemed politically insensitive, but remaining stuck in a romanticized version of native peoples is not truthful.}

On a side note, in addition to authentic information on wolf pack behavior and communication, the naturalist author Jean Craighead George mentions some traditional tundra survival “Eskimo” skills. In a place so frozen that there are no trees, only moss, grass and a few flowers growing from the thin top soil layer, you can eat wild peas, crane fly larvae, owlet innards and caribou liver (Arctic candy), collect caribou chips (dried poop) for fire fuel, identify signs of arctic seasons and directions, build a compass and make a sled from nothing but ice and string. If you are famished yet fortunate enough to be accepted into a wolf pack, you can look forward to eating a wolf’s regurgitated stomach contents, and trying suckling from a teat. Otherwise look to the Arctic’s plants, mosses, lichens and animals, like lemmings, for feeding opportunities.

Like so much thinking today, in the end the author seems to have Miyax backing out of making the logical choice for which the story built the case, The logical conclusion to her life events is, Drawing on deep wisdoms and intuitions, humans’ truest belonging remains in the wildest home. Even if one’s decision is to remain in the trenches of civilization to fight it internally, civilization’s hangers-on choose to be blind to a rewilded human possibility. In these times, choosing a wild lifeway appears on the surface to be choosing the losing side in a predestined battle. But isn’t the clearest calling of all life to live your truth to the extent that you can, even if it’s bittersweet with little hope as the world around you is being killed? Rather that than join the killers in an anti-natural life? Isn’t that why the caged bird still sings, and the wounded wolf pack still howls?

Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. HarperCollins Publishers, 1972.