55 pages • 1 hour read
Farley MowatNever Cry Wolf: The Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Self-Deprecation and Humor
Throughout the narrative, Farley continually uses self-deprecating humor as a motif, often making himself the butt of his humorous comments. For instance, in Chapter 1, he describes himself as a bored, curious youth who decides to put catfish in his grandmother’s toilet bowl to see how long he can keep them alive. When his grandmother discovers this in the middle of the night, it perpetually alters her nighttime restroom habits but also inspires him to learn all he can about the natural world since his uncle flushed his catfish. The book is rife with humorous stories, as when a family of Inuit charges after him with weapons; he assumes they want to kill him when, in fact, they fear he has decided to attack the wolf pack and want to save his life. Such humor transforms Farley into an accessible “Everyman” while belying the courage and bravery it took for him to live in the Barrens for 18 months.
Farley’s use of humor is not merely to keep readers laughing but to validate his insights and demonstrate the accuracy of his logical deductions. A key example of this occurs in Chapter 18, where Farley writes of a rabies epidemic that struck the Manitoba area around Churchill in 1946. In comical detail, he points out the overreactions of the civilian and military population as they mobilized to protect the community from an invasion of rabid wolves. In protecting themselves, area citizens shot 11 husky dogs, one US soldier, and one Chippawa man. Over the 20 years that followed, the story of the rabid wolf invasion expanded. In actuality, as the factual record shows, one rabid wolf wandered in and out of town and became the accidental victim of a truck driver. Thus, Farley uses humor to reveal the absurdity of typical human responses to natural occurrences they fear and misunderstand.
Incompetence Versus Competence
Farley establishes dual motifs of incompetence and competence to illustrate how he ultimately survives thanks to the assistance he receives from Inuit and helpful locals. He portrays himself at the beginning as a bumbler—naive, ignorant, and ill-prepared—and thus a poor choice to be the director and sole participant in The Lupine Project. In the face of his ignorance, however, Farley repeatedly stumbles into good fortune—the help freely given by Mike, Ootek, and others—allowing him to undertake the project successfully. Early on, he accidentally encounters a new brush pilot who flies him as far into the wilderness as his fuel supply allows, even though Farley’s hidden cases of beer dangerously weigh down the plane. When Farley finds himself exposed on a frozen lake the first night, an English-speaking trapper appears and rents him his nearby cabin for next to nothing. Needing to study the interaction between wolves and caribou but knowing very little about either, Farley meets a wolf-loving Inuit man who accompanies him on a pilgrimage to observe wolf packs hunting the deer. While these chance encounters are most certainly lucky, they also contrast Farley’s initial (and sometimes ongoing) incompetence with the intuitive and learned capabilities of those familiar with the Barren. Specifically, this contrast also highlights the theme of Indigenous Americans in the Arctic Ecosystem.
Just as Farley’s use of humor serves a literary purpose, his self-portrayal as a bumbler intends to create a sense of objectivity in the reader. Farley wants to convey that he did not go into the wilderness to disprove the belief that wolves slaughter caribous for sport. Rather, Farley wants readers to perceive that he stumbled onto the truth that the great decline in caribou numbers resulted from overhunting and trapping. In the early chapters, the author expresses great fear of the arctic wolf, a fear he shared with most white citizens of the Canadian north. Whether Farley began the project as innocently as he proclaims or actually knew from the beginning that wolves were the victims of bad information, the reality is that his observations bear out the truth: Wolves have much more to fear from humans than vice versa. As his incompetence shifts to competence as he learns from his mistakes and the expertise shared by others, his realizations convey The True Nature of Wolves to the reader.
Undermining Government Authority
Farley’s insights are often subtle and ironically expressed, especially concerning Governmental Inefficiency, another motif in the book. One example of this arises from his attempts to contact his supervisors in Ottawa over his shortwave radio to describe for them the multiple failures of their planning process. The radio, which has an expected range of 20 miles, with a battery that survives only six hours, experiences atmospheric skip in its signal, allowing Farley to have a brief conversation with a radio operator in Tierra del Fuego, about 13,000 miles from his location. When the Peruvian operator contacts the Canadians and they eventually figure out the message is from Farley, they argue about who gave him permission to go to South America. In this case, Farley didn’t actually undermine their authority—he is where he is supposed to be—but by including this detail in the book, he makes them look like petty bureaucrats, thus undermining their authority in the eyes of the reader.
Farley doesn’t mince words in his assessment of the Canadian government, particularly those who planned the project. His ironic observations, often written for humorous effect, have underlying implied criticism that, again, contradict the authority of the desk jockeys who presume to know more than the man in the field or, in this case, the tundra. Farley describes trying to contact his superiors from Churchill when he cannot fulfill his assignment: “Since I could not adhere strictly to my original orders, I did what I thought was the next best thing, and radioed Ottawa for new instructions. The reply came back promptly, six days later” (23). Farley quotes the entire message, which consists of browbeating the author and telling him he must pay for messages over 10 words in length out of his salary. Without having to verbalize his recognition of the incompetence of his superiors, Farley’s use of irony points out the folly and ineffectiveness he must face to complete his work.
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