Runt by Marion Dane Bauer Page B

creatures around them, baby-sitting, interacting with ravens, nurturing and disciplining and teaching their young, caring for the elderly and the ill, marking their territory, jockeying for power, and bobtailing cows.
    And they do, occasionally, slay animals such as cows that humans prefer to reserve for their own killing. In northern Minnesota, where wolves have made enough of a comeback for their status to be reduced from endangered to threatened, it is understandable that some farmers object strenuously to their presence. Occasionally, someone
attempts to eradicate the animal by illegally poisoning the carcasses of wolf-killed cattle. One of the ironic results of this poisoning has been to teach those packs inclined to do their hunting from human-owned herds to make new kills each time. However, biologists who have studied the situation say that in Minnesota only one wolf in ninety ever actually chooses domestic livestock for its prey.
    There is much we still don't understand about wolves, and what we do understand changes each year. But we know that a pack is usually made up of a single breeding pair and their offspring, especially the young ones who are still dependent and the yearlings not yet ready to go off on their own. We know that other adults can be adopted into a pack, that bider wolves exist, constantly challenging the lead, or alpha, male or female for power. We know that no wolf is exactly the same as any other wolf, that they are as different from one another as you and I.
    While wolves don't use words to think and speak, they communicate, in ways that are probably far more complex than we yet understand, using body posture, facial expressions, and vocalization. One biologist even maintains that wolves will not step on flowers and that, prior to their making a kill, an understanding passes between them and their wild prey, a kind of death contract. In any case, these animals are fascinating and intelligent, and if we allow them to continue to live among us, we will be learning from and about them for many years to come.
    Wolves are exclusive creatures. I have never seen one in the wild. Few people have. But I have heard them howl, I have seen their droppings and the remains of their kills, and I have felt the thrill of knowing that, however tenuously, they still inhabit this world I live in. If this story increases the reader's empathy for the wolf, I will be glad. If it helps bolster our willingness to protect the wilderness wolves must have to survive, it will have served its subject well.

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Bibliography
    Written for, or of special interest to, young readers
    F ICTION
    George, Jean Craighead.
Julie.
Illustrated by Wendell Minor. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
    â€”——. Julie of the Wolves.
Illustrated by John Schoenherr. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
    â€”——. Julie's Wolf Pack.
Illustrated by Wendell Minor. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
    â€”——. Look to the North: A Wolf Pup Diary.
Illustrated by Lucia Washburn. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
    â€”——. The Moon of the Grey Wolves.
Illustrated by Sal Catalano. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
    Murphy, Jim.
Call of the Wolves.
Illustrated by Mark Alan Weatherby. New York: Scholastic, 1989.
    N ONFICTION
    Johnson, Sylvia A., and Alic Aamodt.
Wolf Pack: Tracking Wolves in the Wild.
Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1985.
    The Language and Music of the Wolves, including "The Wolf You Never Knew," narrated by Robert Redford, an audio tape.
    Swinburne, Stephen R.
Once a Wolf: How Biologists Fought to Bring Back the Grey Wolf.
Photographs by Jim Brandenburg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
    Written for adults
    Bomford, Liz.
The Complete Wolf.
New York: St. Martin's, 1993.
    Busch, Robert H.
The Wolf Almanac.
New York: Lyons, 1995.
    Caras, Roger.
The Custer Wolf: Biography of an American Renegade.
Illustrated by Charles Frace. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.
    Grooms, Steve.
The Return of the Wolf.
Minocqua, Wis.: