Be Wolf: A True Account of the Survival of Reinhold Kaletsch

by Wayne Tefs

Novelist and editor Wayne Tefs delivers a thrilling novel based on a real-life experience in Be Wolf: A True Account of the Survival of Reinhold Kaletsch. Reinhold Kaletsch was a German doctor and inventor with a passion for the Canadian Shield. Whenever possible, he escaped to his farm in northern Manitoba, relishing its severe beauty. Kaletsch had a taste for adventure, fulfilling his creed: a life without risks is one not worth living.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0888013213
• ISBN13: 9780888013217
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Turnstone Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Getting Through

Be Wolf by Wayne Tefs Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-88801-321-7, 438 pp., $22.95 paper. Away from the things people enjoy, the stuff they think makes them safe--electricity, TV, and the trappings of modern technology--there is a force surrounding civilization known as nature. This physical phenomenon includes the wilderness and it can be a daunting place to visit, let alone be lost in. Wayne Tefs's novel, Be Wolf, written in non-fiction form, is an absorbing account of Reinhold Kaletsch's harrowing struggle for survival in the Manitoban wilderness. Tefs, the winner of the Margaret Laurence Award for his work Moon Lake and author of eight previous novels, makes his home in Winnipeg. Kaletsch, a German doctor and inventor, is also a loner. Drawn to the Canadian Shield and its stark beauty, he makes frequent travels to the Swan River district of Manitoba where he keeps a farm. One day in the early spring of 1979, with his beloved dogs Simba and Blondie, he decides on a month-long camping trip into the hinterland of Manitoba. The natives have cautioned him the ice is ready to break but he goes despite their warning. An accident occurs and Kaletsch falls and breaks his back in two places. Lying at the foot of an ice mound he realizes except for the dogs no one knows where he is. Reason has always been part of Reinhold's life. When he was a boy, his father drilled the message, "Be the wolf," into him, and it is this tenet that Reinhold uses to begin his plans for survival (57) Parallel to the main story is the one involving fifteen-year-old Reinhold, a draftee into the German army near the end of a dying Third Reich. He nearly doesn't survive the war. Now that he is in the wilderness, alone and injured, Reinhold devotes much of his time to staying alive, using his medical skills and his ingenuity as an inventor. Tefs writes of this ordeal with meticulous detail. Reinhold's senses awaken and he sees, hears, and feels things as if it is his last day on earth, as if he is experiencing sights and sounds for the first time. As days slip into weeks, the doctor discovers that the wilderness is full of wonder and that sometimes there need not be an explanation to everything. Once Kaletsch hears a crow and thinks: "For the first time during this unlikely ordeal it occurs to him that he's lonesome, and that the loneliness that's suddenly overcome him is not unique to his falling off the ice mound and being stranded in the woods, but the condition of being human. Yes, alone everyone of us, deeply alone. We are born alone and we die alone . . ." (237). He realizes he misses the company of his family and friends, that he has neglected the friendship that draws human together. Several times Reinhold comes to see that man is but "a grain of sand" in the universe. "The great human experiment as nothing in the immensity of the moon, the stars, the one mid-size planet rocketing through the universe" (295). Often impatient with the way people thou