Ordinary Wolves: A Novel

by SethKantner (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $4.32

  In the tradition of Jack London, Seth Kantner presents an Alaska far removed from majestic cliches of exotic travelogues and picture postcards. Kantner s vivid and poetic prose lets readers experience Cutuk Hawcly s life on the Alaskan plains through the character s own words feeling the pliers pinch of cold and hunkering in an igloo in blinding blizzards. Always in Cutuk s mind are his father Ab; the legendary hunter Enuk Wolfglove, and the wolves all living out lives on the unforgiving tundra. Jeered and pummeled by native children because he is white, Cutuk becomes a marginal participant in village life, caught between cultures. After an accident for which he is responsible, he faces a decision that could radically change his life. Like his young hero, Seth Kantner grew up in a sod igloo in the Alaska, and his experiences of wearing mukluks before they were fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and communing with the native tribes add depth and power to this acclaimed narrative.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.35

  A stirring and vivid novel about a white boy raised among natives on the harsh Alaskan tundra, Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what most people have ever known. In its pages, Cutuk, a boy equally uncomfortable in the ways of whites and Inupiaq, tells of his youth and young adulthood: of his father, who brought his family to Alaska from Chicago before Cutuk's birth; of his adopted Inupiaq family; and of the vast Arctic expanse beneath the frozen sky. It is here that Cutuk grows up - hunting, fishing, and living off the land, far away from the grinding, yet beckoning, machine of consumer culture.Dispelling all mythical visions of Alaska, this evocative novel leads readers down its true trails, to feel the icy pinch of cold, to hunker as blizzards moan overhead. And in the twilit spaces from which animals appear are the wolves - and Cutuk's father - living their lives out on the tundra, unobtrusive, unapologetic, uninvolved in the world beyond.