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list price: $28.00
edition:Hardcover
also available: eBook
category: Nature
published: Nov 2015
ISBN:9781771601276
publisher: Rocky Mountain Books

Wolf Spirit

A Story of Healing, Wolves and Wonder

by Gudrun Pflüger

tagged: wolves, women, personal memoirs
Description

“Gudrun was a world-class athlete who is fun and vivacious. She’s passionate about a species that’s been misrepresented. And you come away feeling inspired by her courage and bravery recovering from cancer.” —David Royle, executive vice-president for programming and production, Smithsonian Channel

 

“I really believe the encounter with the wolves in the wilderness was a powerful medication. They gave me strength.” —Gudrun Pflüger, in USA Today

 

 

 

In 2005, elite marathon mountain runner and cross-country skier Gudrun Pflüger spent five weeks tracking and studying elusive coastal wolves by foot, kayak and sailboat along the rugged Pacific Coast of western Canada. Her daring and adventurous work as a field biologist eventually formed the basis for the Smithsonian Channel documentary A Woman Among Wolves.

 

In the period between the completion of her research and the premier of this first documentary film, Pflüger was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer and told she had eighteen months to live. Eventually surgeons removed a tumour the size of a golf ball, and Pflüger underwent protracted chemotherapy and additional, non-conventional therapies in order to combat what some expected was an inevitable and all too common fate.

 

During her prolonged and arduous recovery, she took the wolf—a true “endurance athlete”—as a model and re-immersed herself in what she hoped would be the restorative mountain environments of the British Columbia and Alberta backcountry in order to focus her traumatized mind and body on a path toward self-healing. Her difficult and reflective return to studying wolves in Canada led to another Smithsonian Channel documentary, Running With Wolves. It also included an event that defied the odds and astounded her doctors: after gruelling rounds of cancer treatment Gudrun became a mother, giving birth to a son, Conrad, in 2009.

 

Through an intensely personal and emotional, yet rigorously scientific connection with the wolves she studies and the glorious landscape that surrounded her during this remarkable journey, Gudrun Pflüger tells an absorbing story of the transformative and healing power of nature, motherhood and one woman’s goal to save the wolves she admires and bring her own threatened body and mind back to health.

About the Author

Gudrun Pflüger is a former professional cross-country skier and mountain jogger who is also a certified biologist. After retiring from athletics, she relocated to Canada, where she became involved in the conservation of British Columbia’s coastal wolf population. Her research has been documented in the much lauded, award-winning film Searching for the Coast Wolves. She now lives near Salzburg, Austria, with her son Conrad, and advocates for the acceptance of wolves in her homeland.

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