Mike flees camp after the autopsy demonstration

Mike flees camp after the autopsy demonstration, a departure that turns an awkward misunderstanding into a practical and emotional rupture in Farley Mowat’s already uncertain attempt to study the wolves. The flight follows a sequence of increasingly unsettling demonstrations: equipment intended to explain field research instead gives Mike cause to retreat, first from particular objects and then from the cabin itself. His departure leaves Mowat alone in unfamiliar country, dependent on his own judgment to approach the wolves he has come to observe.

An uneasy arrangement

Mike had helped Mowat move supplies and equipment to his cabin with his dog team. Mowat later suspected that the bargain between them had been one-sided and that Mike had not fully understood what it would involve. Once the equipment was unpacked, the small cabin’s limited space was largely given over to Mowat’s field laboratory. He noticed that Mike seemed preoccupied, but, taking his taciturnity as natural and their acquaintance as too brief for personal questions, he did not ask what troubled him. Instead, he sometimes tried to interest Mike by demonstrating his scientific apparatus.

Those demonstrations did not relieve Mike’s distress. The first sharp change came after Mowat explained the wolf-poisoning devices: they killed instantly and were almost impossible to detect. Mike began carrying a long stick and using it to probe objects before touching them. He poked at his chair before sitting down, sometimes at his plate before eating, and at his boots and clothes before dressing. Mowat recognized the behavior as irrational, but its specific pattern made clear that the equipment demonstrations were not simply failing to entertain Mike; they were changing how he approached ordinary things around him.

From specimen traps to the dissection lesson

A further demonstration deepened the estrangement. Mowat showed Mike four gross of mousetraps, explaining that he planned to use them to collect small mammals and identify animal remains found in wolf stomachs. He also described boiling a mouse skeleton to prepare it as a museum specimen. Mike left the cabin without a word and thereafter refused to share meals with Mowat. The refusal gave their misunderstanding a daily consequence: the two men no longer even sat together to eat.

Mowat then tried a more personal approach, hoping to draw Mike out of his reserve by showing him the tools of his work. In the cabin laboratory, he displayed scalpels, bone shears, brain spoons, and other instruments intended for autopsies on wolves, caribou, and other animals. Because Mike had difficulty understanding what an autopsy meant, Mowat turned to a pathology textbook. Its two-page color diagram showed a human abdomen under dissection. Mowat was explaining the image when he realized that Mike was no longer following him.

Flight from the cabin

Mike backed slowly toward the door, keeping his eyes on Mowat with an expression of growing horror. Mowat understood that his explanation had been misconstrued and sprang up to reassure him. That movement intensified rather than eased the scene: Mike turned and ran through the door at full speed. The demonstration had been meant to make the work intelligible; instead, the tools and the human dissection diagram had made Mowat’s intentions seem alarming to his companion. The abruptness of the flight marks the point at which Mowat’s efforts to explain his research cease to be a bridge between them.

Mowat did not see Mike again until the following afternoon. After returning from setting a trapline for mice, he found Mike in the cabin packing as if for a long journey. Speaking in a voice so low and rapid that Mowat struggled to understand him, Mike said he had been urgently called away to visit his sick mother and would probably be gone for some time. He hurried to his already harnessed dog team and departed north at speed, without another word. The account gives no independent explanation for the call; Mowat specifically remained puzzled by how Mike knew his mother was ill.

Left alone with the wolves

Mike’s departure removed the help Mowat had hoped to have when making his first introductions to the wolves. Mowat was sorry to see him go: being alone with the local wolves satisfied the scientific purpose of his stay, yet sharpened the desolate, storm-swept country’s ominous atmosphere. He had not decided how best to approach the animals and would have welcomed Mike’s assistance. At the same time, he accepted that a sick mother took precedence over his research.

The immediate consequence was not a resolution of Mowat’s difficulty but a shift to solitary preparation. He began drawing up detailed study schedules, listing fifty-one subtopics under sexual behavior alone, until he was running short of paper. He then set out cautiously to learn the country, limiting his first expedition to a circular route about three hundred yards from the cabin. The episode therefore links a domestic misreading to the fieldwork that follows: Mike’s flight leaves Mowat without a guide, while the scientist’s plans and careful first steps become his means of facing the wolves on his own.