We're All Prospectors

I recently read Farley Mowat's memoir Never Cry Wolf after watching the movie in one of my classes. The book recounts his year spent in the Canadian wilderness observing wolves. As a government scientist, he had been sent into the arctic wilds to prove the widely held assumption: the blood thirsty wolves, who often kill simply for the joy of the hunt, were exterminating the caribou population. They assumed his report would confirm the common wisdom and provide warrant for the extermination of wolves in the area. His first-hand research, however, led him to quite different conclusions.

The book is delightful, and I highly recommend it. Mowat's dry wit pervades the book, regularly leading to bursts of audible laughter for the present reader. His paradigm-shifting observations about the lives of wolves still fascinate several decades after his research.

Come to find out, the book is standard reading in California public schools, which explains my wife's otherwise inexplicable distaste for the movie. The film captured my imagination as a young boy. Images of a man eating mice and running naked with the caribou leave an indelible mark on a preteen. The movie faithfully adapts the book, though it addresses questions that Mowat does not raise in the book. I hesitate to say that the movie is better than the book, but its more complicated portrayal of the protagonist makes for rich analysis. I'll note two important questions/themes in this post.

First, the movie grapples with the paradox of human interaction with wilderness. Simply stated: humans long for and need wild places, but their very presence threatens to destroy the wildness they seek. Near the end of Never Cry Wolf, Tyler (for some reason the film-makers balked at naming their protagonist Farley) takes indirect responsibility for the killing of two wolves. Hunters killed them for their furs, but Tyler realizes that by establishing his observation camp near the wolf den, he pointed the hunters to their prey. Simply by seeing the wolves, he threatened them. When other wolves arrive to adopt the orphaned pups, Tyler turns his back and refuses to watch them leave. He doesn't want to see where they are going. If they are to remain wild, as they should, he cannot even look at them.

Second, the movie explores Tyler's ambiguous motives for going into the wild. We might be tempted to romanticize Tyler as a purist who loves the wild country and its inhabitants for their own sake. He is the virtuous, selfless foil for the selfish, greedy hunters, we might think. He cares about the wolves; they care only about money. An encounter at the beginning of the movie complicates such assumptions.

During his hair-raising flight into the Canadian wilderness, Tyler converses with the pilot, Rosie. Tyler has been reticent to talk about why he is traveling into the back country, and Rosie assumes he is hiding his plans to mine a valuable ore. Not a bad policy, Rosie notes; it's best to keep your plans close to the vest. Tyler assures him that he has no plans to mine, and Rosie responds, "We're all of us prospectors up here, Tyler."

In other words, Rosie affirms that people might find the wilderness valuable for different reasons, but they all exploit that value for selfish aims. For his part, Rosie sees unconventional value in the wild country. The real gold isn't in the ground, he tells Tyler. It's in the south, sitting on couches in living rooms, bored to death and needing adventure. The wilderness provides limitless resources of adventure, and when we encounter Rosie later in the movie, he is bringing rich adventure-seekers into the arctic to hunt wild game.

The movie does not explicitly reveal the nature of Tyler's prospecting, but I think Rosie's comment calls the viewer to explore that question. Is Tyler any less exploitative than Rosie? Or are they simply seeking different selfish ends? If Tyler isn't seeking money in the wilderness, what is he seeking? Is it simply the well-being of the wolves, or are there less pure, more selfish motives at play?

I plan to post more on this second question later, using insights from the writings of Aldo Leopold. In the meantime, what do you think?