These days, I’m hooked on ABC’s Once Upon a Time, which has made me think of Red Riding Hood and the wolf in a different way. They were found in Afghanistan and northern India, throughout Russia north into Siberia, south again as far as China, and east into the islands of Japan. Wolves, twenty or thirty subspecies of them, are Holarctic -- that is, they once roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere above thirty degrees north latitude. But then, feeling the fingernails of their wives, also starring, digging into their arms, their foreheads wrinkle.

The book is also about how humans visualize wolves: Lopez’s writing is woven around visual culture, from historical photographs, to an Eskimo print of wolves eating a caribou (84), to illustrations of the wolf and the crane attached to the eponymous Aesopian fable (260). Mr Lopez brings in observations made by Eskimos who live in the Arctic among wolves, and by Native Americans who lived alongside wolves.In some instances the audience can acquire a sense, based on the description whether the characters are self absorbed, considerate, or overly concerned about their appearance. In human terms, some are more aggressive or shyer or moodier, and pack society allows these individual temperaments to mature. One observer followed two wolves who broke trail through five feet of snow for 22 miles in British Columbia. Lopez’s classic, careful study has won praise from a wide range of reviewers and improved the way books on wild animals are written. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained… They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

The wolf's body, from neck to hips, appears to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows. When it was weighed and found to be sixty-seven pounds, he became slightly indignant with the creature and said, "He's got the frame to carry ninety pounds.Barry Lopez's books include Light Action in the Caribbean (stories), About This Life (essays and memoir), the novella-length fable Crow and Weasel, and Arctic Dreams (nonfiction), for which he received the National Book Award. The tone here is slightly chiding, not too much, but enough to make the reader aware that he or she may have been slipping back into preconceived notions about wolves. The most gruesome were the “brave hunters” who would shoot machine guns from an airplane to kill hundreds of alaskan wolves per day.