WOLVES HAVE COME A long way since the days of Little Red Riding Hood, when children were terrified by tales about creatures who bit the hands that read them. Ever since Kipling made them Mowgli's foster family, wolves have been seen as all that is best and noblest in the animal world. Their loyalty, discipline and purity of heart have triumphed over the kind Jack London knew and described in White Fang; paradoxically, as increasing numbers of children are terrified of dogs, what many now yearn for is a wolf.

The first of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, Wolf Brother, tapped deep into this lupine longing, as well as producing the best children’s novel to be published in 2004. Spirit Walker is the second instalment, and just as before the story grips you like a wolf’s jaws and won’t let go. Torak sees a hunter get between a female aurochs (a primitive ox) and her calf. Moments after he saves the stranger from the charge of the aurochs, he recoils, for the man is mad, and hideously diseased. A sickness is felling the clans, and when a Raven member dies, Torak leaves his adopted clan and the girl Renn, who befriended him when he destroyed the demon bear that killed his father. Now something equally nasty is hunting Torak in the shape of “tokoroth”, children kidnapped and tormented until a demon enters them to do the bidding of an evil mage, or Soul Eater. Torak sets off in a quest to find a cure before all the Raven clan are killed. The Raven leader warns him it could be a trap to lure him into the clutches of the Soul Eaters — but there is no choice if the Forest clans are to survive.

This could all sink into cliché but for the extraordinary feeling Paver has for the way in which early peoples must have felt and thought. Her account of their spiritual beliefs suggests deep anthropological research but feels new-minted when described in her taut, elegant prose. Children, who are often very close to these animist beliefs, will find this imagined world as thrilling as Tolkien’s or Pullman’s.

If it wouldn’t ruin the pleasure of reading them, they are exactly the kind of book that ought to be read in primary schools because they raise so many interesting questions of the kind that over-7s adore. For instance, the rules by which Torak and the clans live, which prohibit killing an animal unless you can eat or use every part of it, are both moral and slightly absurd when Torak is forced to kill a maddened boar and has to stop his quest to strip its carcass — a job that will take days, as he must even turn its bones into fish-hooks.

What he really needs is Wolf, the cub he befriended and can talk to. All Paver’s characters are drawn with precision, but the affectionate puzzlement Wolf feels at the way Torak or “Tall Tailless” behaves is close to what we suspect goes on inside our own dog’s mind. Paver has studied real wolves and it shows:

“His whiskers were so keen that they could pick up the rippling tracks of the smallest fish as it darted through the water. The Sea was webbed and criss-crossed with thousands of invisible fish trails. And he felt, too, the strong, slow tremors which the kelp sent back through the water, and the great blunt waves echoing off the rocks.”

The living Forest described in tingling detail in Wolf Brother is here replaced by the Sea, alive with a furious Hunter. Condemned to die in punishment for polluting the one with the other, Torak has to make good his claim of kinship with the Seal clan in order to keep his life and obtain the Seal mage’s rumoured cure for the mystery sickness. Of course, it isn’t long before Wolf has overcome his own fear of water to join Renn, but before the friends can be reunited there is a cliff-face of treachery, lies and murder to scale, plus the odd eagle and killer whale to avoid. The climax is superb. With Wolf fighting demons by Torak’s side for another four books, wolves have never looked more like a boy’s best friend.

www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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