The Canadian naturalist Farley Mowat, now approaching 90, is too little-known in the UK: think of Gerard Durrell crossed with Garrison Keillor. He is renowned for his books on the Inuit and the animals that they hunt. Never Cry Wolf, a myth-breaking study of wolf-pack organisation, altered the general perception at the time of wolves as unmitigated evil. It is also an hilarious satire on state bureaucracy that finds Mowat dumped in the middle of a frozen lake with a mountain of supplies and an utterly useless canoe. His mission is to prove that wolves are destroying indecent numbers of caribou. Instead, he finds that they live as much on mice and fish as on deer, and normally attack only the weakest members of the herd in a good demonstration of natural selection.

In 1948 Mowat was commissioned by the Canadian Wildlife Service to investigate declining caribou numbers in the sub-Arctic wastes of northern Manitoba. Mowat’s brief was to prove that wolves were to blame for their disappearance and not, as a previous researcher had suggested, the ever-increasing numbers of trophy-bagging deer hunters. After a year in the wilderness monitoring various wolf packs, Mowat reached the astonishing conclusion that the staple diet of wolves (in Manitoba in 1948, at any rate) was not deer, but mice. But wolves eat 30lbs of red meat a day. How can they carry enough mice back to their dens to feed their cubs? They eat them and then regurgitate them, that’s how. Never Cry Wolf, published in 1963, did much to change the popular perception of wolves as savage, gratuitous killers. Forget White Fang and shots of slavering packs creating carnage on fleeing caribou in David Attenborough documentaries. One day Mowat sees three wolves loping along the crest of a crag and follows them to grasslands full of grazing deer, through which they pad leisurely. ‘The scene was all wrong,’ he writes. They pass within feet of cud-chewing bucks, who turn their heads but keep on munching. Until they see Mowat, who had been skinny-dipping and hadn’t had time to get dressed. Then the terrified herd stampeded.

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
The Canadian wolves ignored Mowat when he first arrived in the Arctic to study them. Their indifference allowed him to observe every part of the predators’ lives: monogamous reproduction, a nuclear family, and a surprising diet. Sentimentalists’ complaints to the government that “the wolves were killing all the deer” caused Canada to send Mowat to investigate the claim. Narrator Adam Sims makes listeners feel welcome. His soft, youthful voice becomes plausible as the author’s; he recounts the expedition as if from memory yet makes the scientific discoveries unfold with the drama of a novel. He also creates a cast of wolf pack members and the shy Eskimos who become the conservationist’s close friends and teachers. This 1963 book became a classic that shifted the public’s perception of wolves.

What a pleasure to become reacquainted with Farley Mowat’s adventures with the wolves in the subarctic regions of Canada. On his first assignment for the Canadian government in the late 1940s, he is given a lot of rules to follow, a ton of stuff, but no clear way to get where he is going. The first few chapters are funny and replete with how bureaucrats don’t seem to get it. Luckily when he finally arranges transportation (and hides his heavy supplies in the canoe on the underside of the plane overloading it) his radio expires because there is no way to run it after the batteries are used up. Having gone there to investigate the declining caribou population and with the officially preconceived notions that wolves are deadly predators needing to be exterminated, his intimate observations of the wolves endear them to him and to his listeners and prove not to be such deadly predators. Anyone who ever enjoyed Gerald Durrell’s Birds, Beasts and Relatives will enjoy Farley Mowat’s experiences with the wolves. There are many humorous incidents as Mowat seems to relish laughing at himself. British trained television and theater actor Adam Sims (Band of Brothers and the RSC’s Alice in Wonderland) has a young voice which he deepens for the Inuit who becomes Fowat’s friend, mentor and colleague. Sims appears to enjoy what he is reading and sharing it with all of us.