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| From
the January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Jean of the Wolves
She was an old hand at natural-history writing by then, with nine books to her name. But that was the rub. Most of those books, and the most prominent — animal biographies like Vulpes the Red Fox (1948) and Meph the Pet Skunk (1952) — were credited to John and Jean George. In her 1982 autobiography Journey Inward George challenges the billing: her zoologist husband supplied field notes, she says, but she did virtually all the writing. The Georges had divorced by then. My Side of the Mountain had appeared under the name Jean George. Thereafter she added her own illustrious family name and became, for all time, Jean Craighead George. The ardent naturalist is also a vigilant feminist. Both commitments were a legacy of her childhood. George grew up as the daughter of distinguished entomologist Frank Craighead and the kid sister of all-star twins Frank and John. The house was also home to a variety of wild animals — George’s first pet was a baby turkey vulture, which resembled a gargoyle — and Dad did not stop at collecting specimens. “He studied the whole forest or an entire ecosystem to find explanations for the behavior of a beetle or a wasp,” George writes in The Tarantula in My Purse, her collection of stories about wild family pets. Frank and John were A students; they were athletes and artists and outdoor adventurers. In high school they started the sport of falconry in the United States and wrote about it in national publications. Jean was one of their many admirers. For a determined, ambitious girl, the problem was how to keep up. She became a writer to survive, as she puts it — initially, a newspaper reporter. With marriage to a fellow animal-enthusiast, the birth of children, and the need to supplement a limited income, the rest of her career seems almost inevitable. But George’s longevity as a writer — for over sixty years and more than eighty books — has sources besides a fluency with words and a bedrock knowledge of the natural world. From the beginning, she’s had a feel for what makes a book intriguing to a child. Would it occur to you that a fox might enjoy the hunt, and even seek it out? That’s the startling premise of Vulpes the Red Fox, the first of the animal biographies — which is actually a parallel story of the fox and his pursuers, a veteran trapper and hunter, with equal respect for the skills of both sides. In George’s taut, level, thriller-like telling, the hunter has to win because he has the gun. By contrast, Dipper of Copper Creek (1956),
the last of the animal biographies, takes as its subject the obscure
water ouzel of the Rocky Mountains — a little gray bird that,
mysteriously to visiting teenager Doug, makes its home behind the
cascade of a waterfall. Leavening the lyrical, descriptive text
are the antics of Mister Whisky, a noisy, thieving Canada jay, the
counterpart of other animal characters to come. “It’s
hard to tell where they end and How animals and people are alike, and different, is one of the two salient themes of George’s fiction. The other, of course, is independence. Extreme independence. My Side of the Mountain is routinely classed as a survival story, a Robinsonnade. But Sam Gribley’s escape from the confines of a New York apartment to ancestral land in the Catskills is more in the tradition of Daniel Boone and Henry David Thoreau than of the castaway Crusoe. Sam comes to the woods equipped — with a few basic tools and a lot of heavy reading. He has a penknife and a ball of cord, he has read how to whittle a fishhook, and, crucially, he knows that one fish caught can lead to another. From the contents of its stomach, “You can find what the other fish are eating or you can use the internal organs as bait.” With pinpoint how-to knowledge, which he expands from experience, and two animal companions, the fledgling hawk Frightful and the fearless Baron Weasel, Sam not only survives in the woods but thrives. To read the menu of a meal he serves to a chance visitor — puffballs browned with garlic, smoked venison, roasted cattail tubers, fresh raspberries — is to think of Boone and Thoreau at the Cordon Bleu. Others are impressed. Sam’s achievement is publicized. His family turns up, in full force and ready to relocate, to prove to the world that Sam is not neglected. “And that ended it.” In 1959, when My Side of the Mountain was published, a young teenager couldn’t run away to the woods and stay there, unsupervised and unschooled, even with his parents’ blessing. By 1990, adjustments could be made. On the Far Side of the Mountain begins with the Gribley family recently gone, convinced that the mountainside is too rocky for farming — and not only is Sam staying behind but his younger sister Alice (“I love it here!”) is staying with him. She’ll be safe, and take correspondence courses. The advent of high-spirited, strong-minded, energetic Alice changes the tone of the ongoing story and gives it a new direction. Sam, content with things as they are, is not thrilled. The first thing Alice does is to whip out her Swiss Army knife (“with all the gadgets on it”) and clip her fingernails. The second is to announce she’s going to finish making her plumping mill — a mechanical device run by water power, she tells the dumbstruck Sam, that will vastly ease the work of pounding grains and nuts into flour. A balance is reached between them. When the plumping mill jams, Sam spots the problem and, buying into the labor-saving idea, decides to build a water mill to cut wood. And with those escalating projects the foragers and hunters of the frontier become pioneer settlers. Alice, in fact, insists on having a house, a tree house with windows, before she’ll work on the mill. As a feminist hero, she’s irrepressible — what George, thwarted in her own childhood yearning to take to the woods, would have liked to have been. The tie that binds the two books, however, and extends them into a brand, is the falcon Frightful and her symbiotic relationship with Sam. At the start of the second book, Frightful, whom Sam has raised and trained from infancy, who supplies him with food and gets love in return, has been confiscated by a supposed conservation officer. Peregrine falcons, inarguably, are an endangered species, and protection of wildlife is as definite an advance to George as equal rights for women. The windup — after some melodramatic hugger-muggery — has Frightful wheeling off, free of her hood and her tethers, and Sam prepared to move on without her. But can the bond be so easily broken? Can Frightful be the wild bird she’s never been? The third book, Frightful’s Mountain (1999), leads off with a testimonial by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the influence of My Side of the Mountain on his own career, and his falconer-friends’, as natural scientists and/or environmental advocates. The story this time is Frightful’s; now free, she’s as much the master of her fate as Sam is. Or as little: to live as a wild falcon, she has a lot to learn, just as he once did as a tenderfoot. The resolution of their relationship is ecologically imaginative, anyhow. With Alice’s urging, Sam will transform part of an old Catskills property into a wilderness farm where Frightful and her kind can find sustenance. On another part, Alice can raise her moneymaking pigs. And the farmhouse can be home to the citified rest of the family. Call it the social reintegration of runaway Sam, or the greatest good for the greatest number. In the long interval between the first two books about Sam and Frightful, George became the nation’s most prolific and versatile nature writer for children, responsive to changing publishers and changing times. With Elizabeth Riley at Crowell, she produced the Thirteen Moons series (1967–69), a handsome set of books that combined poetic, evocative texts and artistically distinctive illustration. The Moon of the Wild Pigs, for example, has crisp line drawings by desert-meister Peter Parnall. “In the blasting heat of the desert,” it begins, “a small wild piglet stood alone. He was crying. His whimpers did not carry far, for the desert is big and its heat seems to burn up even the loudest sounds.” What’s this all about? the reader might wonder. Why thirteen moons, why a wild pig? In the 1990s the series was republished (by HarperCollins) and not only redesigned and re-illustrated but extensively rewritten. For the poetic evocation of the late 1960s George substitutes careful, brass-tacks narration; each volume begins, moreover, with an explanation of the thirteen moons and the animals chosen to represent them. Out with atmospherics; in with facts, as the market decreed. The 1970s found George publishing major and minor works with a number of houses, including her original publisher, Dutton. There she did one of her all-time successes — as a story and a teaching tool — Who Really Killed Cock Robin? (1971). Elizabeth Riley had advised George to stick to nonfiction on the grounds that she couldn’t write dialogue; children liked a story, George replied, and Riley could teach her. Subtitled An Ecological (now Eco) Mystery, Cock Robin and its successors capitalize on two enthusiasms common to most kids — for sleuthing and for fighting pollution — that, in environmental science, go together naturally. George’s Saddleboro, an up-to-date Centerburg, has a sit-comic mayor rattled by the death of a robin whose well-being he had touted as proof of the town’s clean environment; a pushy girl, daughter of the richest man in town, who’s afraid her father’s factory will be accused of dumping chemicals that killed the robin; and an eighth-grade sleuth, Tony, who’s been keeping tabs on the town’s robins and steps to the fore, buttressed by specialists, in the postmortems. A simple story, a properly complex conclusion: the suspects DDT, PCBs, mercurial compounds, and 2,4,5-T — and those who un-knowingly or carelessly used them — are all found guilty. In the 1980s George was settled in at Harper and steadily writing fiction — chiefly multicultural fiction, in the spirit of that time. The Arctic had become her second home; but native peoples elsewhere, she knew, also had close material and spiritual ties to their environment. That was her meat. In The Talking Earth (1983), modern-day Seminole Billie Wind ventures into the Everglades — almost as strange to Billie as the Catskills were to Sam — in a sort of vision quest; by learning how to survive, with the help of native tradition, she’ll learn what should be preserved. Billie Wind in her way is another Julie Edwards Miyax Kapugen — albeit less fierce, less conflicted. IN HER FIRST, exploratory conversation with Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom, George said that she wanted to write a book about a girl who talked with wolves. Will it be accurate?, Nordstrom asked; and that was all. Julie of the Wolves (1972) and its sequels share with native Alaskan art a combination of simplicity of outline and reserves of feeling. The plot folderol — flight from an arranged marriage, etc. — is forgettable. To survive on the tundra, Julie/Miyax must induce the wolves to accept her as one of their own. She must act like a wolf, talk like a wolf, and be treated like a wolf — even fed like a wolf by persuading one of them to regurgitate well-chewed food, a feat beyond everyday imagining. Nourished, Julie will live; be joking-serious partners with young Kapu; and, along with her packmates, defer to the great Amaroq. But the underlying conflict between white-American life and Eskimo life extends to the wolves. (George uses the term Eskimo as the native Alaskans’ preference.) Sports hunters in a small plane shoot down Amaroq, then don’t even pick up his body. As every reader of Julie of the Wolves knows, the plane was piloted by Julie’s father Kapugen, long revered as an Eskimo hunter, who has married a white woman and adapted to the encroaching culture. Can Julie ever forgive him for Amaroq’s wanton killing? Can she protect her wolf pack from destruction for acting like wolves? And, starkly presented, how can honored tradition and practical necessity be reconciled? These questions, as well as George’s strength in writing about the Alaskan wilderness, not only sustain the two sequels, Julie (1994) and Julie’s Wolf Pack (1997), they support elaborations. Even more than Sam and Frightful on their mountain, Julie and her wolves are in a fight for survival, to which there can be no simple, fictional resolution. With the ascendance of nonfiction picture books in the 1990s, George wrote some that were directly or indirectly related to the Julie books, and some on other natural history topics. This was a new genre for her — her fifth or sixth or seventh — and nowhere does she master it more fully than in last year’s The Wolves Are Back. George has always represented anti-Bambi realism. The book begins with a wolf-kill — a felled elk eaten by a wolf pup, doing as his father does, and by a golden eagle, a grizzly bear who has waited her turn, three hasty magpies, and two mice that chew on the antlers, while “two sexton beetles [bury] a piece of meat to eat later.” The coda: “The valley was sharing food again. The wolves were back.” Short sentences. Precise, vivid description. Clear, succinct information about how the wolves were eliminated and how they were brought back. An ongoing narrative detailing the difference their return makes, as experienced by the growing wolf pup. In the standard thirty-two pages, then, a distillation of vast knowledge and a spare, rich, engrossing text. What a way to enter your tenth decade!
From the January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
t
just so happens that wolves are back in Yellowstone National Park
in time for Jean Craighead George’s ninetieth birthday this
coming July — and for the publication of her picture book,
The Wolves Are Back, celebrating their return. The year
2009 also happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of the work that
made George famous, My Side of the Mountain.
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