The spirits of the animals are passing away.
Amaroq, Amaroq, you are my adopted father.
My feet dance because of you.
My eyes see because of you.
My mind thinks because of you. And it thinks, on this thundering night,
That the hour of the wolf and the Eskimo is over.
Julie pointed her boots toward Kapugen.
BONUS MATERIALS
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Jean Craighead George’s Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech with archival photos and selections from her field notebooks
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Julie of the Wolves Discussion Guide
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Suggested Reading List
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Excerpt from Miyax’s next adventure, Julie
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NEWBERY MEDAL ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
Jean Craighead George
1973
Last January the 30th my telephone rang about eight o’clock in the evening, and I picked it up in the kitchen. Luke, my sixteen-year-old son, and I had just learned that it is a felony to overdraw a bank account in the state of Utah, where his older brother Craig was a sophomore in college. We were wondering how Craig, who thinks about mountains and backpacks rather than budgets, would fare with his allowance in a Utah bank. This was in the front of my mind when I answered the ring.
“It’s long distance,” I called to Luke, who was leaning over his homework at the dining room table. “Oh, oh,” he said, as I braced myself for the sound of clanking chains. The telephone clicked, and in bright contrast to my dark fears, I heard Priscilla Moulton’s pleasant voice:
“The Children’s Services Division of the American Library Association,” she said, “has selected you to be the recipient of the 1973 John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American Literature for Children. The award proclaims your outstanding achievement in the creation of Julie of the Wolves.”
“Oh no,” I said, just like that, which apparently confirmed Luke’s worries. His eyes widened; his jaw dropped. As quickly as I could, I called to him: “I’ve won the Newbery Medal!” Luke grinned, blew a sigh of relief, and then gave me a twinkling smile; for he knew well what the Newbery Medal means. Not many years ago his sixth-grade teacher had said at the end of a long discouraging day: “Look, kids, if you’ll just read all the Newbery books, you’ll get a terrific education, and it’ll be a lot more pleasant for both of us.” Luke had taken her advice, and now he cheered me.
As for my own reaction, I was electrified and then unbelievably calm. I serenely opened a can of dog food and handed it to a guest who dropped in, put the book I had been reading in the refrigerator, and washed a batch of clean clothes.
As I boarded the plane for Washington, D.C., where the 1973 winners of the Newbery and Caldecott Awards were announced, a most beautiful feeling sparkled through me. It persists today; for there is no author of children’s books who does not work with greater inspiration and a more vivid direction because Frederic Melcher created the medal that recognizes a children’s book as art. To win that medal is wholly gratifying.
It was fitting that Luke was home the night Priscilla called, for it was he who stepped off the plane with me in July of 1970 and looked out upon the Arctic Ocean at Barrow, Alaska. The severity of the Arctic biome hushed our voices as we walked to the small wooden terminal that looked like a house trailer by a road. The sky vaulted above us, clouds of birds wheeled overhead, and not far away on the beach, we could see a wall of ice that stretched a thousand miles to the North Pole. As we waited for our luggage, Luke pointed to a small fur-clad child who was walking into the wilderness over which we had just flown.
“She’s awfully little to be going that way alone,” he said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and stepping closer to me. The little girl walked with determination, her straight back expressing confidence and inner strength. Months later, she, of course, was to become Julie.
At that moment, a children’s book was the farthest thing from my mind. Luke and I were in Alaska because of several scientific investigations. One was The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944) by Adolph Murie; another, “Social Relationships in a Group of Captive Wolves” (1967) by G. B. Rabb, J. H. Woolpy, and B. E. Ginsberg of Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Mr. Murie’s book is the ecological study that first pointed out that wolves have babysitters, rituals, and spring and summer dens. He also noted that the wolves keep the population of big-game animals in balance and that they harvest the sick and infirm. The Brookfield study, on the other hand, was a breakthrough in canine behavior. Facial expressions, movement, and positions of tails, ears, and heads were seen as “a language.” Not long after the publication of this work, scientists began to speak freely about “the language of animals”: the squirrel flashing his tail in a semaphore, the song-call of the humpback whale. Now it is known that when a wolf mouths another wolf on top of the muzzle, he is saying: “I am leader of the pack.” The wolf who rolls on his back and shows his light belly waves the “white flag of surrender,” and the aggressor ceases his attack. No blood is shed. After discussing this provocative material with the editors of the Reader’s Digest, I was dispatched straightaway to the Arctic Research Laboratory at Barrow, Alaska, where scientists were studying captive packs.
As Luke and I deplaned, we sensed that the adventure was going to include more than wolves. The world in which we stood was as unique as a coral reef, a desert, or a tidal pool—the other so-called biomes. The first uniqueness we noted was the weather. The winter ski clothes we wore were inadequate. The temperature rarely reaches 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Barrow, and the wind brings the chill factor down to about zero. We shivered as we walked to the hotel along treeless streets where the cold crops the plant life down to low grasses and lichens. Front yards were strewn with oil cans, old cars, parts of boats, refrigerators, and airplanes—the midden of the U.S. Navy and Air Force. The strangeness absorbed us, and we walked in silence past one-room Eskimo homes, stores where manufactured goods were sold, past a restaurant and a large Quonset hut that was an Eskimo community house. Even as we walked, we felt the push and pull of two cultures—a feeling which became a reality when we saw our hotel. This wooden structure had the simplicity of Eskimo art and a name right out of a television commercial—Top of the World Hotel. Inside was a small sitting room lined with parkas, and a narrow corridor flanked by tiny rooms.
Almost immediately, Luke discovered that there was no running water in this hotel and that the ice in the drinker water cooler had been chipped off an iceberg. (The salt settles out of these oceanic glaciers and leaves them as fresh as a frozen spring.)
That night when we dined at an Eskimo restaurant, I ordered whale, and Luke ordered reindeer soup. Both were so rich and greasy that we could barely swallow them. Three days later, however, we were to discover that the body has its own intelligence. The cold had so changed our physiological needs that the whale, reindeer soup, even blubber, tasted like filet mignon. We were burning fats as I burn wood in my fireplace in winter—morning, noon, and night.
The element of the Arctic to which we never quite adjusted was the midnight sun. To Luke and me, the light seemed to say it was constantly four o’clock in the afternoon, no matter what the clocks said. After a few sleepless nights and after conquering the feeling that it was always time to quit work, we observed that the Eskimos and birds handled this situation by disappearing around noon and midnight for two sleeps instead of one. Unfortunately, we never got an opportunity to join the birds and Eskimos in their rhythmic naps during the endless day, for the gussaks had clocks and kept hours. Gussaks, by the way, is an Eskimo corruption of Cossacks, the first white men in Alaska. Eventually, we learned to solve our sleeping problem by pretending we were taking an afternoon nap. Exhaustion took care of the next eight hours.
Five miles down the gravel road from Barrow is the Arctic Research Laboratory. To this we bumped each day in the town taxi, a jeep, whose driver was skilled at
dodging snowmobiles. Eskimos so admire these mechanical dog teams that they run them over the gravelly land in summer. Unfortunately, snowmobiles cannot really replace the dog team, of which there were but two left in all of Barrow for the tourists to see; for when the snowmobiles break down far out on the tundra, they are not warm and life-sustaining. Human casualties are high.
The Arctic Research Laboratory is composed of Quonset homes for the staff, and a modern building of glass and pilings. The complex is maintained by the U.S. Navy and administered by the University of Alaska. About thirteen families live on the grounds the year round, keeping such fascinating pets as wolverines and seals. Gussak children are bused to the Eskimo school in Barrow. Off and on during the year, approximately 160 scientists from all over the world come to the lab to study the Eskimo, circadian rhythms, ice flow, the effects of oil spill on the tundra, wildlife, physics, oceanography, and weather. The library is a gold mine of information on the Arctic biome.
One of the first scientists that Luke and I looked up was an old acquaintance, Dr. Edgar Folk, Jr., who was studying the effects of leadership on the heart rate of the alpha male wolf, the leader of the pack. When we came upon Dr. Folk, he was watching an alpha through a closed-circuit TV. A small radio was attached to the wolf, and it beeped to a cardiograph in the lab the rate of the animal’s heart as he trotted around an enclosure with the omega wolf, the low wolf on the totem pole of wolf status. The alpha’s heart rate was low and steady; the omega’s was rapid and frantic. Dr. Folk then returned the alpha to his pack. His heartbeat instantly went up and stayed there.
When I heard this, my image of a wolf began to change. Here was an animal who assumed responsibility with such conscious effort and concern that it affected his heart rate. This, I said to myself, is a trait heretofore attributed only to man.
Working with Dr. Folk was Dr. Michael Fox, author of the Behaviour of Wolves, Dogs, and Related Canids, as well as of two children’s books. A professor at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Fox was running experiments on litters of pups to determine the characteristics of the alpha. He concluded that a wolf leader is fearless, initiates activities, and sticks to jobs longer than other wolves. He makes all the decisions for the pack and communicates with them by voice, gesture, and pose.
Luke and I began to study this language so we could “talk” to the wolves. In time we became rather good at the submissive grin and could recognize the signal of appeasement—ears drawn back, mouth slightly open. We could grunt-whine to solicit attention in a friendly manner and would greet the wolves with their own posture for “hello”—an open-mouthed smile. The most significant man-wolf talk, however, was between Dr. Fox and a wild alpha male wolf. One morning the scientist opened the door of this wolf’s pen and stepped inside. Gently Dr. Fox bit him on the top of his nose. The alpha sat down before his “leader,” and the two conversed in soft whimpers.
That was the genesis of Julie for me. For Luke it was a different challenge. He wanted the wolves to talk back to him, too. One day he walked up to a litter of prancing pups, opened his arms, and picked one up. The puppy kissed him with a lick and tucked his head submissively under Luke’s chin. Luke kissed his nose, and the game manager smiled. “Take him home,” he said. “You are his alpha now.” I was sorely tempted until I recalled the problems that a friend had had with his pet wolf in Arizona. The wolf would trot off in the late afternoon and bring home groceries that had been delivered to neighbors’ back porches. He also gathered up boots, chair cushions, garden equipment, and all manner of presents. Eventually, my friend had to pen the wolf to inhibit his need to provide for the pack.
After supper in the sunny night, Luke and I would walk out on the tundra to try to understand this unique biome with its permanent frozen ground called permafrost, its tough, durable plants and clouds of birds. In time, we came to a deeper understanding of the complex tundra and the relationship between the owl, weasel, lemming, grass, caribou, bear, bird, fox, and Eskimo. The ecology of the Arctic is like a Chinese wooden puzzle; each piece locks into the others, and if one is not right, the whole thing falls apart.
Of this complex ecology, Charles Edwardson, Jr., an Eskimo leader of the Arctic Slope Natives Association, said to me: “To survive in the Arctic you have to be innocent and respect nature. The white man rushes the North and hence destroys it.” He pointed to the beach in front of the Arctic Research Lab. A truck was dumping black stone upon it. “The gussaks are putting back the beach,” he said. “They used it for fill; the oceans adjusted and began to snatch the whole shore. It threatened to demolish the laboratory.” The gussaks were paying for their lack of respect for nature.
Toward the end of our stay in Barrow, Luke and I met Julia Sevegan, an Eskimo mother of three sons, an employee of the hospital, and wife of a hunter. Julia and her family gave Luke and me insight into the Eskimo in Barrow, Alaska, in the year 1970. Despite sewing machines and radios, gas stoves and electricity, Julia was part of the past. She had seen a ten-legged bear, a sighting that made her a shaman, or a woman of great importance. Because Julia’s husband had heard that I bore good credentials from the lower forty-eight states, he invited me to his home to meet Julia.
While we sat on the floor sewing warm mittens, I learned of bears and moons and family love. Snowmobiles screamed by the doors; jets roared overhead. In the kitchen Julia’s sons chatted, and occasionally hard English gave way to the beautiful bell-like language of the Eskimo. As I sat among plastics and machines, I lamented the passing of the Eskimo culture that had sustained these remarkable people under the most adverse conditions in the world. Yet, Julia was more comfortable because of her warm gas stove and her radio that filled the room with music. She could not, nor would anyone want her to, go back to severity. But something beautiful has been lost.
As I left Julia’s house, I realized we have given the Eskimo everything but meaningful values; because of this, some are violent, some are drunk—they are deprived. Many others, however, like Julia and Charlie Edwardson, are finding a new direction in ten-legged bears and in respect for nature.
Just before we departed from Barrow, word came via the scientific grapevine that Gordon C. Haber, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of British Columbia, was observing a pack of wild wolves in McKinley National Park. We hopped aboard a bush plane, swept out over the vast North Slope, then winged down the Anaktuvuk Pass, through which the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is plotted. I thought of Charlie Edwardson as I looked down on the Hickel Highway, a road that is supposed to parallel the pipeline. Three huge road graders had scraped back the grasses and mosses from the tundra and let the sunlight strike the ice crystals. The ice crystals had melted zipper-fashion—one after the next—and turned the soil to a mush that avalanched the huge machines down the mountainside into the river. I could hear Charlie’s firm voice: “You can’t rush the North.”
In Mount McKinley National Park we found Gordon Haber cutting wood beside his cabin at Sanctuary River. Jays sang around him, and ground squirrels watched him, for Gordon was part of the ecology. He had spent three summers with the wolves and was preparing for his second winter. When I explained that I was in Alaska to write about wolves, he took Luke and me to watch a pack at their summer den.
For ten days we lay on our bellies, peering through a spotting scope and binoculars at these remarkable beasts. We saw the black alpha awaken, saw his pack nuzzle him under the chin ceremoniously, heard him open the hunt song with a solo. When all were alert, he would swing through the willows, his huntsmen at his heels, to test their crop of moose and caribou for harvesting. We never witnessed a kill, but we saw the ravens hover over kills and the hunters return home as fat as barrels to regurgitate food for their pups. We watched the puppies play bone ball, tug o’war, “jump on the babysitter”; and we became wholly involved in wolves. Luke, who had come to Alaska to fish, never strung up his rod again.
One dawn we joined Haber on a trip to the deserted nursery den of his pack. We hike
d through bog, sphagnum moss, and over the tundra to a remote valley. Pushing our way through tangled willows, we climbed to a bluff high above the river. There in a layer of white sand was the birthing den, a generous tunnel dug into the earth. It was topped with flowers and set beneath a small garden of twisted spruce. The entire home expressed family love. A play yard was worn in front of the den. Around it were the large saucer-like beds of adults. I could envision them watching the tumbling pups, grins on their faces.
Most heartwarming, however, was a shaft that led straight down to the nursery chamber. It was a sort of telephone. During the first few weeks after birthing when the female remains in the den with the pups, the other adults stand over this hole and listen to the sounds from the den below: whimpers, sucking sounds, the contented grunts of happy puppies. When an adult wags his tail, he says, “all is well”; and the other wolves wag their tails, too.
Just before leaving the den site, I sat down beside the entrance and scanned the wide valley. I wanted to see the rocks and mountains as the wolf sees them. I looked down, and my blood turned to ice. There below was an enormous grizzly, head down, fur swinging as he came down our trail. Instinct warned me to stand still, but reason told Gordon to act. He wanted us ahead of the bear so that we would not meet him face to face when he turned around to go home. “Run!” Haber said. Luke shot off like a prong-horn antelope; Gordon like a deer. I ran as if I were weighted down with lead, but I must have been zooming. As I leaped down a frost heave, I passed a jay in flight.
When we were safely ahead of the bear, we heard a wild sound as if an orchestra were tuning up. I looked back. On the top of the hill stood the female wolf and her nine fat puppies, who bounded forward to greet us. One yip from their mother, and all the pups vanished. If there was any doubt in my mind that wolves speak to each other, it was banished in that moment.
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