Three Among the Wolves: A Couple and Their Dog Live a Year with Wolves in the Wild

In this breezy volume, Thayer, whose previous book chronicled her successful solo trek to the North Pole at age 50, recounts the year that she spent in the Yukon and Arctic wilderness following packs of wolves with her husband, Bill, and their part-wolf dog, Charlie. Like Farley Mowat and others before her, Thayer (Polar Dream) is motivated by a desire to study the behavior that wolves won't reveal when they're kept in captivity, particularly the""food-sharing habits they have with land-bound animals, such as grizzlies and ravens."" The wilderness project relies heavily on the talents of Charlie, who acts as a canine go-between that both guides and protects his owners as they cautiously make their way closer and closer to a wolf pack. Thayer and her husband copy Charlie's behavior to transform themselves from threatening humans to submissive, wolf-like strangers. They eat a vegetarian diet and try to minimize their presence as they follow the wolves on hunting expeditions in a cold, forbidding world. Suspenseful encounters with bitter storms and fearsome grizzlies are tempered by calmer moments with romping pups and breathtaking scenery. While the subject matter is not new, Thayer's smooth prose style moves the story along, and the inclusion of Charlie as a main focus adds a new twist to the first-person nature narrative.