Read Never Cry Wolf for Free Online Page A

dressed.
    On another occasion, when I showed him four gross of mousetraps with which I intended to collect small mammals to be used in determining the identification of animal remains found in wolf stomachs,and then explained the method of boiling a mouse skeleton in order to prepare it as a museum specimen, he departed the cabin without a word and refused to take his meals with me from that time forward.
    I was not unduly alarmed by his behavior, for I had some knowledge of psychology and I recognized the symptoms of an ingrown personality. Nevertheless I determined to try to draw Mike out of himself. One evening I inveigled him over to the corner where I had set up my portable laboratory and proudly showed him my collection of glittering scalpels, bone shears, brain spoons and other intricate instruments which I would use in conducting autopsies on wolves, caribou and other beasts. I experienced some difficulty in explaining to Mike what was meant by an autopsy, so I opened a pathology textbook at a two-page color diagram of a human abdomen under dissection, and with this visual aid was well into my explanation when I realized I had lost my audience. Mike was backing slowly toward the door, his black eyes fixed on me with an expression of growing horror, and I realized at once that he had misconstrued what I had been saying. I sprang up in an attempt to reassure him, but at my movement he turned and fled through the door at a dead run.
    I did not see him again until the following afternoon, when, returning from setting out a trapline for mice, I found him in the cabin packing his equipment as if for an extended journey. In a voice so low and rapid that I had difficulty understanding him, he explained that he had been urgently called away to visit his sick mother at the camp of the Eskimos, and would probably be gone for some time. With that he rushed out to where his team stood ready harnessed and, without another word, departed at a furious pace into the north.
    I was sorry to see him go, for the knowledge that I was now entirely alone with the local wolves, while satisfying from a scientific point of view, seemed to intensify the Hound of the Baskervilles atmosphere of the desolate and stormswept lands around me. Then too, I had not yet clearly decided upon the best method of approaching the wolves, and I would have been happy to have had Mike perform the initial introductions. However, a sick mother took precedence even over my scientific needs—though I am still at a loss to understand how Mike knew his mother was ill.
    The weighty problem of how best to make contact with the wolves hung fire while I began drawing up my study schedules. These were detailed in the extreme. Under “Sexual Behavior” alone I was able to list fifty-one subtopics, all requiring investigation. By the end of the week I was running short of paper. It was time to get out and about.
     
    As I was a newcomer to the Barrens, it behooved me to familiarize myself with the country in a cautious manner. Hence, on my first expedition afield I contented myself with making a circular tour on a radius of about three hundred yards from the cabin.
    This expedition revealed little except the presence of four or five hundred caribou skeletons; indeed, the entire area surrounding the cabin seemed to be carpeted in caribou bones. Since I knew from my researches in Churchill that trappers never shot caribou, I could only assume that these animals had been killed by wolves. This was a sobering conclusion. Assuming that the density of the caribou kill was uniform over the whole country, the sample I had seen indicated that wolves must kill, on the average, about twenty million caribou a year in Keewatin alone.
    After this dismaying tour of the boneyard it was three days before I found time for another trip afield. Carrying a rifle and wearing my revolver, I went a quarter-mile on this second expedition—but sawno wolves. However, to my surprise I observed that