Reviews 313 The same themes, augmented by a larger historical context, inform The Right Madness on Skye. While writing on the Isle of Skye, Hugo is conscious of the lasting monuments of historical fact in Scotland’s “sad long history” : Viking invasions, defeats by the English, the Stuart rebellion, the Highland clearances, the enduring poverty of crofters. These are facts — “the way it has to be” — standing like those neolithic brocs or strange Stonehenge-like monoliths. But this harsh realism mixes with romance — a blend of spirits Hugo has always preferred — and the songs echo in the Skye mists, “Pipe the dead Gaels back for one more dance,” and stories materialize which take monsters more serioasly than mere projections of human dysfunction which technology can solve. Hugo wants to make, and in this book mightily succeeds in making, a poetry that lasts, which has its roots in assonance and rhyme and dance and the essential emotions and connections and losses of our lives. In “Letter to Garber from Skye” he takes the Highland saying, “the fate of the Gael is to lose everything,” and shows us our loss at losing the Gael. On this frontier outpost of Europe, similar to his own Northwest frontier, Hugo knows with deep understanding that the endurance of song as poetry depends upon the continued presence of “the autonomous man” who knows his silence inside, who has tested his “capacity for hate” and has seen “how bad it can be.” And the continued presence of that man of under standing, Hugo’s poetry implies, depends on poetry enduring as song. And so there is a curious mix in these poems of the romantically lyrical and the hard fact, of Skye mist and Callanish stone. Hugo assumes he is part of the past, one of the stones, and in the title poem takes the stance that he is already dead, then turns his death march into a jig. Therein lies the “right madness” : knowing how to create feeling out of defeat, letting stones sing in wind, making the dispossession of history a source of strength. Hugo has raised poems durable in their song: the singer’s voice dissolves in wind but the words stand in the rain for years. MICHAEL ALLEN, Ball State University Secret Go the Wolves. By R. D. Lawrence. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. 277 pages, $10.95.) This book relates the author’s experiences with two wolf pups pulled from a bloody sack in the bottom of a Cree Indian’s canoe rescued from Ontario’s Mattawa River when its occupant — a little the worse for whiskey — had allowed himself and his canoe to get caught in the river’s rapids. They were wrapped in their mother’s gory hide where the Cree had placed them, soaked in water and blood, barely ten inches long, and quite blind. Naturalist Lawrence paid the Indian twenty-five dollars and a canoe paddle for the male and female pups, whom he dubbed “Matta” and “Wa” after the river from which they had been rescued. 314 Western American Literature Thus began an amazing adventure for Lawrence, his wife Joan, and their malamute dog Tundra, in raising and caring for two animals that Lawrence vowed would someday return to their wilderness habitat. Before the pups would give their farewell howl in the wilderness after eighteen months of civilization, there would follow the author’s sham regurgitation in simulation of their mother’s weaning process, their first frightening night in the woods, their first response howls, their encounters with other creatures of the wild, and their first deer kill. Lawrence describes in great detail his and his wife’s procedures in preparing the pups for the inevitable parting, and their necessary vigilance in keeping wolves and wolf-hating neighbors apart. Naturalist Lawrence has added much to wolflore, and along the way, provides the reader with many anecdotes of more than twenty years of north woods experience. Lawrence is a satisfying and very competent writer. He was born in Vigo, Spain, and was educated partly in that country and partly in England. Twenty-five years ago he moved to Canada, and now lives on 200 wilderness acres...