CHILD OF THE WOLVES

A runaway husky pup, Granite, falls in with a wolf pack and struggles to win its acceptance in this Call of the Wild for a younger audience. Granite wouldn't have stood a chance, had not the alpha male's mate, Snowdrift, just lost her pups to human breeders. To ease her grief, Ebony lets the injured dog live, though it's a precarious existence; constantly harassed by the rest of the pack, unable to catch even field mice, Granite is completely dependent on Snowdrift's maternal instincts--at least, at first. Crediting the observations of researchers Adolph Murie and David Mech, as well as a film by Jim Brandenberg, Hall portrays her wolves (and dogs) as intelligent creatures with strong feelings, an expressive language, and a well-developed social structure. People get short shrift, appearing in only a few brief scenes and mostly to do harm; a hunter's bullet blinds Snowdrift, and it's saving her from running over a cliff that finally earns Granite the entire pack's approval. While naming them, even for the purpose of clarity, introduces a false note, the wolves are not unreasonably anthropomorphized; their behavior and ""feelings"" seem perfectly normal given the challenges of the Alaskan wild.