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. (Fiction. 10-12)