I really don’t have much of an introduction here right now.
I simply felt like reading another sled-dog/wolfdog story similar to White Fang
or Kazan, and ended up getting The North Runner by R.D. Lawrence, as this book
has been in my to-read list for quite a while. Let’s see how it holds up, shall
we?
This story follows the narrator as he adopts an initially
feral wolf-Malamute mix named Yukon. He quickly bonds with the animal, though,
and they go on all kinds of adventures in the cold north of North America,
hunting, camping and the like.
The story was… pretty much that. I was expecting a whole lot
more to it, but it really is just the life of the narrator and his pet wolfdog
as he traverses Canada. I expected there to be a whole lot more to the deep
bond between pet and master, but Yukon accepted the narrator as owner really
quickly and their relationship stayed pretty much the same after that. I didn’t
get this feeling of a huge deep bond between the two of them, more just a
mutual understanding of respect. I’m not sure if this is a letdown or not, but
it definitely wasn’t what I expected.
I also didn’t know while reading the book if this story was
based on truth or not. The narrator might very well have been Lawrence as he
told of his experiences with this wolfdog, but it also could’ve been a
fictionalized account based on the author’s life in the north. After doing some
research, I finally came to realize that it was indeed based on truth, at least
partially.
Something I wasn’t really sure if I liked or not was that
the author would sometimes bring the story to a halt to just narrate about
flora or fauna he’d come across on the journey, images included. I thought it
was initially very distracting and brought me out of the story, but at the same
time it also made me learn some things about animals in Canada.
While I don’t think The North Runner is a great story by any
means, I do like it in the end. If you go looking for something along the lines
of The Call of the Wild, this probably isn’t for you, but it does have similar
themes to it.
Rating: 3/5
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