It is barely light and a wolf is trotting. That is the book. Janni Howker takes one female wolf out ahead of her pack, through a night of travel and a hunt, and back to her mate and her cubs, and Sarah Fox-Davies paints it in watercolor. Present tense, no plot, no names. Our store bands it K to 3, and it reads younger than that aloud.
The science it actually teaches
Start with the honest part, because it decides whether you should buy this book. The factual line here is thin. Books on our Stealth Science shelf that carry a real fact on every spread do more teaching per dollar than this one does, and what your child comes away with is a picture of a wolf's day rather than a set of facts she can repeat. If you want the facts organized, this is not the book.
What the picture gets right is the part almost every other wolf book gets wrong.
A wolf's life is mostly walking. Not chasing. Walking, at a steady trot, hour after hour, and covering ground that would take you a long day on foot. That is the true center of the animal, and the posters and the nature clips never show it, because footage of an animal trotting is boring and a kill is not. Howker built a whole book on the boring part, which is why the title is not a metaphor.
Travel is organized. In deep snow a pack goes single file and each animal steps where the one in front stepped, which is why a line of wolves can leave a trail that looks like it was made by one big animal. That is not tidiness. It is arithmetic. Breaking snow costs energy and only the front wolf pays it.
The hunt starts as a smell. The pack works a scent carried on moving air long before there is anything to see, which means the animal is hunting with its nose while its eyes are doing almost nothing. A child who understands that stops picturing a chase and starts picturing a search.
Then the part that matters most, and it is the reason this book is worth the money even with a thin factual line. The hunt is a test, and the wolves usually lose it. A grown moose is enormous, it is armed at both ends, and it can simply decline to run. Wolves are injured and killed by the animals they hunt. Most attempts come to nothing, and the pack goes back to walking. That is the real arithmetic of being a predator, and if your child takes only one thing off this shelf, that is a good one to take.
Howling belongs to travel too. It is long distance address, not mood. It carries for miles, it keeps one pack clear of another pack's ground, and it pulls a scattered family back together across country too big to search. The moon has nothing to do with it.
And underneath all of it, the pack is a family. A breeding pair and their young from more than one year, hunting together because they are related, not because they fought their way into a gang. The book gives you the mate and the cubs and lets that do the work.
This note deliberately leaves the signalling alone. How rank gets displayed, what a tail is saying, what a muzzle lick triggers: that is covered in depth in our note on Julie of the Wolves, and this picture book is not where a child will learn it.
The child it lands with
Three and four year olds sit still for this one. That is unusual for a nonfiction picture book and it is mostly the rhythm of the sentences, which are built to be read aloud slowly at the end of a day.
Then the child who has to be lured into nonfiction with pictures. Fox-Davies is doing half the teaching here, and a child who will not sit through a page of type will sit through a painting of an animal in snow.
Be warned about the other kind. The seven year old who wants facts, who reads the back of cereal boxes and asks how much a wolf weighs, will finish this in four minutes and look at you. Have the next book ready.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the moose and ask the question straight out. Why do the wolves not just take it?
Then let your child work on it, because the answer is in the picture. The moose is bigger than all of them. It has hooves and it is willing to stand still and use them. A wolf that gets hurt out here does not go to a doctor, and a limping wolf cannot travel, and an animal that cannot travel is finished. So the pack tests, and mostly the test comes back no, and they leave.
That is a durable idea and it goes well beyond wolves. A predator is not a certainty. It is a gambler with a poor record who has to keep playing, and that losing record is the whole reason there are still moose.
What to know going in
The hunt is on the page. A pack crouches, charges and closes on a moose, and however gently a watercolor handles it, a small child understands what is happening. It is a hunt drawn honestly rather than a hunt drawn gruesomely, but if your four year old is troubled by animals hurting animals, know it is coming.
The other weight is human. The book does not hide that wolves have been killed by people almost to the point of vanishing, and that sentence lands hard on a five year old who has spent the whole book walking beside one. There is no resolution offered.
The last thing is a buying caution rather than a content one, repeating what the science section already said. The facts are sparse. Nobody is misleading you, the book is doing exactly what it set out to do, but a parent expecting a small wolf reference will be disappointed and should know that before the money moves.
Where to get it
Buy it for the paintings and the voice. It is $8.99, the paintings survive that price better than they have any right to, and it is the kind of book that gets read forty times and then gets asked for again. Walk with a Wolf is the one to hand a four year old at the end of a day, and it is not the one to hand a fact hungry eight year old on a Monday morning. Buy it to make a small child want wolves, then let the Stealth Science shelf answer the questions it starts.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Chameleons Are Cool: The Camouflage Myth, Corrected
Chameleons Are Cool: Read and Wonder by Martin Jenkins
Grade K to 3
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Animal Teeth: Which What If You Had Book to Buy First
What If You Had Animal Teeth? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
