What do you think?
Lessons from the Wolverine
In this story of a spiritual adventure from the author and illustrator of Crow and Weasel , a young man journeys through the arctic wilderness to find a family of wolverine and learn more about their mysterious power. At the time the story opens the narrator is working as an airplane mechanic in northeast Alaska. Long sensitive to wild animals, he feels drawn to wolverines through his dreams. One day his work takes him to the riverside village of Eedaqna, where he meets an older man who is impressed by his integrity and his desire to make a connection with wolverines. The villager guides him into the Ruby Mountains to Caribou Caught by the Head Creek, a place where wolverines have a spiritual stronghold. Here the young man enters the dream landscape of two wolverine, and receives from them the first lessons he will use to shape his adult life. Barry Lopez's story, infused with gentle magic, shows how one man comes to experience the wondrous power of animals and to understand his place in the natural world in a new way. Tom Pohrt's watercolor illustrations add vivid dimension to the story, bringing to life the land, people, and animals the young man encounters on his journey. Lessons from the Wolverine depicts with stunning detail the texture and nuance of discovery and suggests the importance of a wisdom other than our own.
32 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1997
About the author
Barry Lopez
105 books953 followersBarry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 7, 2016
Beautiful pictures. Good message about hunting sustainably, and also that wolverines are supremely awesome.
May 31, 2017
Sweet little read. Gorgeous illustrations by Tom Pohrt.
September 15, 2026
I picked up this book today because of an insatiable hunger. I was hungry for unknown shelves.
I've long been a member who weekly visits the public library, as part of my habitual practices. But quietly, in my soul, I know it is attached to something else - I am searching for more. In one of the staff meetings that opened the school year, one of the faculty members introduced himself by saying, "I'm always looking or searching, I don't know what I'm looking for or why - it's just who I am." I know that feeling. I'm always searching too, and sometimes the search takes the distinct form of wanting more stacks, more variety, more obscure titles waiting in rows of institutional quietude.
As I began looking through the Toronto Public library catalogue for other Barry Lopez books, I came up dry, and so whimsically decided to try my old library haunting: U of T's Robarts, that pure fort of a library. There they were: 7 Lopez books just waiting on the shelves.
It was too much too resist.
So, two weeks ago, I bought the reader's pass to the University library, and Lessons from the Wolverine - an illustrated version of a single story from Field Notes- came to me through that hunger: one more book found because I wanted a wider field to wander.
When I opened it, I realized I had almost missed this story.
The day I first tried to read "Lessons from the Wolverine," I was reading aloud somewhere in the countryside, while my reading companion was being relentlessly bitten by ants. So I put the book down and somehow never picked up that particular story again. That feels appropriate now: one small. interruption from the more-than-human world kept me from finishing a story about learning to pay attention to the more-than-human-world. This lesson from wolverines had its own timeline for me and it didn't include reading it with the 11 other stories in the book. It wanted to be set apart as a single and particular story.
Well, I'm glad it found another way to me.
In the story a young man, drawn by dreams and a long sensitivity to animals, travels into the arctic wilderness to find wolverines and learn from their mysterious power. At first, he imagines something more straightforward: perhaps he will track them, and trap in their area, and so know them through pursuit. But he is guided to another experience altogether.
One of the first real lessons he receives are that wolverines are not "all the same." Wolverine families have distinct cultures. You cannot understand "the wolverine" in general; you have to learn these wolverines, in this place, with these habits, this creek, this history, and this particular way of seeing and moving through the world. Mystery begins not in absraction, but in particularity.
Earlier, while wading in the water and looking at stones in the creek, the young man learns that the wolverines in this region also wade in shallow water like that. The boy with him notices the likeness. The man is looking down through moving water at stones; the wolverines do this too. Their bodies also wade in the shallows. They also attend to the river at that level. His body and their bodies know something similar about this place.
I know this as a Lopez "moment." One I've come to search for through his writing. The door into spiritual knowledge is never marked as a door. It is not announced. It begins with a bodily particular: feet in shallow water, stones beneath the surface, a local kid noticeing resemblance. Before vision, before dream, before the Milky way can become a river, there is a very simple recognition: the wolverines see particularities.
Later, the young man is sitting, waiting by a creek for the encounter that becomes lying down near the wolverines by the creek and entering their dream landscape. The river becomes the pattern through which memory, animal life, and perception move. The Milky way and its stars become like water runnning over shallows. The narrator becomes bird-like, looking down over the tundra river. In the current (is it the current of the Milky way or the current of the creek?) he sees fish, shells, sand, leaves, his father's face, a wild dog, animals he thought he'd forgotten. The wolverines tell him to continue "to pay attention."
That disorienting moment where he is seeing the shallows in the Milky way and life in the water reminded me immediately of Thoreau's "Ponds" chapter in Walden, when he fishing at midnight, felt suspended between water below and sky above, "I have returned to the woods...spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me, - anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, and now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity...It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when you thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook."
I've always loved that image of fishing. Another kind of searching: the line cast downward into the pond, and imaginatively, upward into the air; the physical and spiritual, the mental and imaginative worlds briefly caught on the same hook. In Thoreau, water and sky mirrored one another. Depth below and vastness above are part of the same inquiry. I know that feeling.
Something like that happens in Lopez too, but he makes the experience less serene or self-possessed. In Thoreau, the midnight pond draws the contemplative self back into relation with Nature. In Lopez, the river and sky open a field of relation that exceed the self and feels sublime and fearful. The narrator doesn't simply find himself reflected in the water; he is pulled into the flow of memory, animal presence, fear, place, and forms of life beyond his control, and the wolverines are not there to hold his hand through it all. They simply tell him to continue to pay attention.
There's nothing sentimental here. It is not a peaceful observation from a safe distance. It is frightening. The narrator tries to pull his eyes away and cannot. He is lifted out of ordinary percetion and then returned to his body with heart wildly beating, back against warm rocks, and looking through river willows. The wolverines are gone.
And yet that was also what was given. It is understood that this is what the wolverines here "do" and "offer." They cannot be domesticated into moral clarity, human lessons, or symbols. Their power is strange, dreamlike, demanding, and frightening. They teach by altering the narrator's way of seeing, not by explaining anything.
There are other powers out here. Other teachers. Other forms of memory moving beneath the surface, and they arrive as particular beings, in particular places: these wolverine, this creek, these stones, this shallow water, this way of looking.
A quiet, beatuiful, spiritually efficient story - I'm glad the ants (and a mega library collection) eventually allowed me to finish it.
I've long been a member who weekly visits the public library, as part of my habitual practices. But quietly, in my soul, I know it is attached to something else - I am searching for more. In one of the staff meetings that opened the school year, one of the faculty members introduced himself by saying, "I'm always looking or searching, I don't know what I'm looking for or why - it's just who I am." I know that feeling. I'm always searching too, and sometimes the search takes the distinct form of wanting more stacks, more variety, more obscure titles waiting in rows of institutional quietude.
As I began looking through the Toronto Public library catalogue for other Barry Lopez books, I came up dry, and so whimsically decided to try my old library haunting: U of T's Robarts, that pure fort of a library. There they were: 7 Lopez books just waiting on the shelves.
It was too much too resist.
So, two weeks ago, I bought the reader's pass to the University library, and Lessons from the Wolverine - an illustrated version of a single story from Field Notes- came to me through that hunger: one more book found because I wanted a wider field to wander.
When I opened it, I realized I had almost missed this story.
The day I first tried to read "Lessons from the Wolverine," I was reading aloud somewhere in the countryside, while my reading companion was being relentlessly bitten by ants. So I put the book down and somehow never picked up that particular story again. That feels appropriate now: one small. interruption from the more-than-human world kept me from finishing a story about learning to pay attention to the more-than-human-world. This lesson from wolverines had its own timeline for me and it didn't include reading it with the 11 other stories in the book. It wanted to be set apart as a single and particular story.
Well, I'm glad it found another way to me.
In the story a young man, drawn by dreams and a long sensitivity to animals, travels into the arctic wilderness to find wolverines and learn from their mysterious power. At first, he imagines something more straightforward: perhaps he will track them, and trap in their area, and so know them through pursuit. But he is guided to another experience altogether.
One of the first real lessons he receives are that wolverines are not "all the same." Wolverine families have distinct cultures. You cannot understand "the wolverine" in general; you have to learn these wolverines, in this place, with these habits, this creek, this history, and this particular way of seeing and moving through the world. Mystery begins not in absraction, but in particularity.
Earlier, while wading in the water and looking at stones in the creek, the young man learns that the wolverines in this region also wade in shallow water like that. The boy with him notices the likeness. The man is looking down through moving water at stones; the wolverines do this too. Their bodies also wade in the shallows. They also attend to the river at that level. His body and their bodies know something similar about this place.
I know this as a Lopez "moment." One I've come to search for through his writing. The door into spiritual knowledge is never marked as a door. It is not announced. It begins with a bodily particular: feet in shallow water, stones beneath the surface, a local kid noticeing resemblance. Before vision, before dream, before the Milky way can become a river, there is a very simple recognition: the wolverines see particularities.
Later, the young man is sitting, waiting by a creek for the encounter that becomes lying down near the wolverines by the creek and entering their dream landscape. The river becomes the pattern through which memory, animal life, and perception move. The Milky way and its stars become like water runnning over shallows. The narrator becomes bird-like, looking down over the tundra river. In the current (is it the current of the Milky way or the current of the creek?) he sees fish, shells, sand, leaves, his father's face, a wild dog, animals he thought he'd forgotten. The wolverines tell him to continue "to pay attention."
That disorienting moment where he is seeing the shallows in the Milky way and life in the water reminded me immediately of Thoreau's "Ponds" chapter in Walden, when he fishing at midnight, felt suspended between water below and sky above, "I have returned to the woods...spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me, - anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, and now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity...It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when you thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook."
I've always loved that image of fishing. Another kind of searching: the line cast downward into the pond, and imaginatively, upward into the air; the physical and spiritual, the mental and imaginative worlds briefly caught on the same hook. In Thoreau, water and sky mirrored one another. Depth below and vastness above are part of the same inquiry. I know that feeling.
Something like that happens in Lopez too, but he makes the experience less serene or self-possessed. In Thoreau, the midnight pond draws the contemplative self back into relation with Nature. In Lopez, the river and sky open a field of relation that exceed the self and feels sublime and fearful. The narrator doesn't simply find himself reflected in the water; he is pulled into the flow of memory, animal presence, fear, place, and forms of life beyond his control, and the wolverines are not there to hold his hand through it all. They simply tell him to continue to pay attention.
There's nothing sentimental here. It is not a peaceful observation from a safe distance. It is frightening. The narrator tries to pull his eyes away and cannot. He is lifted out of ordinary percetion and then returned to his body with heart wildly beating, back against warm rocks, and looking through river willows. The wolverines are gone.
And yet that was also what was given. It is understood that this is what the wolverines here "do" and "offer." They cannot be domesticated into moral clarity, human lessons, or symbols. Their power is strange, dreamlike, demanding, and frightening. They teach by altering the narrator's way of seeing, not by explaining anything.
There are other powers out here. Other teachers. Other forms of memory moving beneath the surface, and they arrive as particular beings, in particular places: these wolverine, this creek, these stones, this shallow water, this way of looking.
A quiet, beatuiful, spiritually efficient story - I'm glad the ants (and a mega library collection) eventually allowed me to finish it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 3, 2015
Barry Lopez is one of our great observers of the natural world and in this illustrated book he adds the magical realism of animal mythology to tell his tale.
In this beautifully illustrated short book, Lopez re-teams with artist Tom Pohrt (Crow and Weasel).
The book's narrator, a young man alone in the arctic wilderness, encounters two wolverines who teach him lessons that shape the course of his life.
In this beautifully illustrated short book, Lopez re-teams with artist Tom Pohrt (Crow and Weasel).
The book's narrator, a young man alone in the arctic wilderness, encounters two wolverines who teach him lessons that shape the course of his life.
July 7, 2023
Like many folk stories that stand alone, vs being a part of a larger collection, this book is short. But it is well done. It is a story that is hard to put into a box of a particular genre (I did my best on that account). Is it a lesson on conservation, spiritualism, or something else? I suspect it would depend on the reader and where they are at in their own life. Much like poetry, you will get out of it what you are meant to. Or not, if you are closed off from such things. But it was intriguing, and I enjoyed it. The illustrations by Tom Pohrt are lovely as well.
May 30, 2024
“I haven’t started a family yet, which is all right with me, but my friends in the coastal villages and up in the Brooks Range don’t like it. They don’t talk to me quite as much because I don’t have a family. No children. They believe it’s strange. But they have strangeness in their own lives.”
A gentle little story of honoring nature by way of myth and how deep curiosity into myth only leads one back to their life.
Whenever I read Barry Lopez, he expands my heart and fills my soul. And I’m gently working my way through everything he has ever written.
A gentle little story of honoring nature by way of myth and how deep curiosity into myth only leads one back to their life.
Whenever I read Barry Lopez, he expands my heart and fills my soul. And I’m gently working my way through everything he has ever written.
January 4, 2024
This paragraph appeared in my Substack article https://rayzimmerman.substack.com/p/i...
Lessons from the Wolverine by Barry Lopez, with illustrations from Tom Pohrt, is an exploration of Indigenous knowledge systems. Though classified as a work of fiction, it meets his definition of an authentic story. I have read nearly all of his works and reviewed his book Vintage Lopez here on Substack, but only recently acquired a copy of Lessons from the Wolverine.
Lessons from the Wolverine by Barry Lopez, with illustrations from Tom Pohrt, is an exploration of Indigenous knowledge systems. Though classified as a work of fiction, it meets his definition of an authentic story. I have read nearly all of his works and reviewed his book Vintage Lopez here on Substack, but only recently acquired a copy of Lessons from the Wolverine.
June 4, 2019
Dreamy and surreal recounting of animal dreaming experience with wolverines. As is often the case with myths, the ending felt abrupt and unfinished. I was left with more questions than answers but maybe that is the point.
June 12, 2019
This book was interesting, and I think it would belong in a lesson about different cultures and how they view the afterlife. I wasn't a super big fan it was quite odd. I don't think I will be adding this book to my library.
August 25, 2021
I am not certain how to rate this story as the way this story is told is far removed from the western European traditions of storytelling which I am most use to. I think that exposure is a positive even if it felt, different, to read.
June 1, 2022
I'll assume that the point of this short and pretty book went over my head. Though I'll say that this most definitely seems to be a piece written more so for it's creators and a small target audience. Very short read though. Definitely worth your time in that sense.
August 28, 2010
the title story in this collection still haunts me...compels me to read it again and again. along with enders game, by orson scott card, and an instant in the wind, by andre brink, this is the book i give most often, both literally and figuratively.
August 28, 2014
Pretentious and formless. Writers who purposely do not use correct punctuation in an effort to create a mood or rhythm distract me.
The illustrations, on the other hand, are quite good.
One wonders why a university press would publish such a book.
The illustrations, on the other hand, are quite good.
One wonders why a university press would publish such a book.
June 27, 2009
This book is really cool! It teaches a good lesson too, although it is kindof short.
June 3, 2012
A brief, moving short story. Barry Lopez' fiction is always surprising, and this is a perfect, eloquent example
December 19, 2013
more like a little story than something that deserved packaging as a book; so short I stood and read it in the bookstore; didn't get anything out of it
March 27, 2014
The illustrations make this little book especially attractive
July 20, 2015
People seem to scoff at this book because of its brevity and simplicity. Those characteristics help make this story a deep tale about the relationship of wolverine, men, and the wild.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews