(++++) A SWEET START

Full Moon Pups. By Liz Garton Scanlon. Illustrated by Chuck Groenink. Putnam. $18.99.

     Most people are not used to thinking of wolves as cuddly, but these close relatives of dogs certainly seem that way when they are newborn and just starting to explore their world. Chuck Groenink’s illustrations in Full Moon Pups give a litter of five wolf cubs near-human expressions and a sense of play that makes them instantly endearing – yet as Liz Garton Scanlon’s writing shows, this portrayal is not all that far from reality.

     The idea of Full Moon Pups is that the litter is born at one full moon and develops until the next – a lunar cycle of growth and progress even though, as Scanlon says at the end, “it will be many moons still/ till these pups are fully grown.” A great deal has already happened to the five wolf babies, though: born blind, deaf and floppy-eared, they nurse and sleep and wriggle until their eyes eventually open, their ears stand up, and they find their voices and join in the howls of the wolf pack that watches over them and helps as needed. Groenink makes the baby wolves adorable, but not unrealistically so, while Scanlon uses rhymes nicely as she traces the cubs’ first developmental milestones: “The pups grow ever bolder./ They start to reach and range./ What is that? And who is this?/ The whole wide world is strange!”

     One of the neat things about Full Moon Pups is that it almost seems like a cute little piece of fiction about cute little animals, but in fact is not fictional at all. Scanlon accurately explains the cubs’ early growth, and also does a good job showing how the young wolves are integrated into the pack and assisted as necessary not only by their mother but also by other pack members.

     The book does a good job of giving young readers a sense of where and how wolves live. Scanlon explains in a note at the back of the book that these are wolves living in or near Yellowstone National Park, and Groenink shows park vistas that support the concept. Scanlon also gives some useful background on the everyday life of wolves: how long a wolf pregnancy lasts, how the wolf mother prepares to give birth, and what happens afterwards. She also explains the reasons for the near-extinction of U.S. wolves in the 20^th century and the reasons for and method of their recent recovery. Her idea of tracking the babies’ first month by attaching it to the lunar cycle is a good one, and the back-of-book information includes an explanation of moon phases to go with the discussion of wolf life.

     It is unlikely that most readers of Full Moon Pups will directly encounter wolves, except perhaps from a distance, and certainly any human-wolf relationship is a great deal more complex and much less adorable than anything shown in this book. The point Scanlon and Groenink are making, though, is not that wolves – even wolf cubs – exist for humans to frolic with, but that the babies and their parents are part of a larger ecosystem that has its own rhyme and reason, very different from the rhyme scheme and illustrations of this book. The idea is that by understanding a little bit about wolves’ birth and first few weeks of life, and then perhaps learning more through the sources mentioned at this book’s end – Scanlon includes both books and Internet sites – young readers can come to understand how wolf packs fit into the overall life of Yellowstone National Park and, by extension, the web of life wherever they live and roam. The book is a simple and gentle introduction to a complex topic, and is one that young readers – and even pre-readers – will enjoy for its easy style, pleasant pictures, and sense of the ways in which the wolf cubs’ youthful play sets the stage for their further development as many more lunar cycles come and go.