Walking with Wolf            

From the lush, windy cloud forest of Monteverde in Central America comes the story of pioneering conservationist Wolf Guindon. Jailed in the United States in 1949 as a conscientious objector, Wolf and his bride Lucky were among a small group of Quakers who left Alabama a year later in search of a new life and found it on a wet, green mountaintop in Costa Rica. For the next twenty years, Wolf labored clearing land, establishing a dairy farm with which he could support his eight children, even as he was falling in love with the flourishing jungle around him. In 1972, he found a new purpose when he helped establish the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. Since then he has worked relentlessly to secure the protection of the surrounding wilderness so that the flora and fauna of this vast, incredibly beautiful and biologically diverse region will be intact for generations to come.

 

In 1990, following her first experience of walking with Wolf for several days through the rainforest, Canadian social activist Kay Chornook gave Wolf a tape recorder. She encouraged him to record his many remarkable tales of cutting trails through the dense vegetation, coming face-to-face with wild cats in the darkness, following tapir tracks across the ridges, discovering the magic and mysteries of the wild abundance of the area, and sharing innumerable cups of coffee with homesteaders, biologists and fellow adventurers. Walking with Wolf is a personal memoir, but it is also the history of a place and a movement as well as a celebration of lives lived amongst the trees of both Canada and Costa Rica.

 

The foreword is by Adrian Forsyth, internationally renowned conservationist and author of Tropical Nature (1987), Portraits of the Rainforest (1995) and How Monkeys Make Chocolate (2006).

 

Colored photographs, original artwork, maps, glossary, bibliography, and index, along with a lifetime of observations presented against a backdrop of tropical biodiversity, make Walking with Wolf a valuable reference book.