THIS WOLF WAS DIFFERENT

Dogs and people got together many thousands of years ago; here is one such imagined early encounter.

Salyer’s softly textured charcoal and colored pencil illustrations add a lyrical quality to this prehistoric meeting, which is related from the point of view of a wolf cub. More interested in watching snails crawl than joining the general tussle and in lingering near the den than chasing voles, the cub feels somehow less “wolfish” than her littermates. She yearns to be more like a real wolf. One day she becomes separated from her pack and, after a lonely interval, meets “a new kind of creature,” who approaches cautiously on two legs, drops a snail from her “paw”—and joins in watching that snail’s progress. A pat on the head seals a permanent companionship and a feeling of gratitude for finding a place at last: “How lucky I am to not be like a real wolf. How lucky I am to be something new.” In her afterword, Slivensky tallies fossilized evidence of a relationship that may go back as far as 40,000 years and suggests some possible reasons why early humans and a certain extinct type of wolf became natural partners. The dog’s human friend is brown-skinned.

Speculative, but sweet and not implausible.