Jean Craighead George gives children a gripping, wintry book to read on short nights in front of warm fires. "I know kids love conflict and they love adventure," George says, "Where else are both more vividly compelling than in the Arctic. There's something about the Arctic that pulls heart strings in a way I've never quite understood. It's the survival and the gorgeous bleakness of its challenge that's so beautiful."

Twenty years ago, George won a Newbery award for Julie of the Wolves (HarperCollins, $15.00; $3.95; ages 11 and up), the story of a young Eskimo who runs away from an arranged marriage and survives on the tundra with the nuturance of a wolf-pack for many months. The book ends with Julie's return to her father and home. In George's newest book, Julie (HarperCollins, ages 11 and up), her heroine must face the conflicts not only of nature, but clashes between man and wolves, white culture and Eskimo, as well as her own struggles of young womanhood.  There's a conflict a minute, whether Julie is facing elements, understanding the relationship between cultures, or learning to know herself.

"I'm a bit of a dramatist," George says, "and I know that kids love books that solve problems.  I wanted to keep the story moving, but I also want to put in as much information as I could and these stories kept coming up. Conflict upon conflict is the rule of the Arctic. It's a constant force in a region where chances of mortality are high, if anyone makes a false move."

Julie's saga began over two decades ago when George, then a nature writer for Reader's Digest, went to Alaska to do a story on the wolves, then a burgeoning new field of study. "I was fascinated and even communicated with one of the reluctant female wolves.  I kept trying to get her to whimper to me, which means 'I'm your friend', to get her to give me a wolf smile and to finally look me in the eye,which means 'I accept you, you're a part of the family.'"

She took her son, Luke, then ten or eleven, and let him go in and hold her wolf puppies. "They played king of the hill and tug of war and a type of football, where they grabbed a bone and jumped on the carrier.  By the time we were to leave, the wolf mother was very aware of me and my son. She stopped and looked up and smiled, wagged her tail, whimpered and looked me in the eye. What an experience!"

It was also on that trip that George met the woman whom she novelized into Julie. "A woman named Julia Sebevan took me in and told me about the old ways of the Eskimos."  George treasures a beautiful parka Sebevan made for her, baleen given to her by Sebevan's son, and most of all their relationship.

It was George's first-hand experiences with the wolves and her understanding of the elder society that became the foundation for Julie of the Wolves. Without both of these, Julie could not have survived. "Eskimos turn to their elders for leadership and wisdom and they respect the animals and know that they couldn't live without them." Julie of the Wolves went without sequel, despite pleas from hundreds of children, "because I really felt I had solved the problem.   I thought I got her home and that's it." But now George wonders now if she didn't subconsciously begin writing the sequel twenty years ago because when publishers asked her to write one, she said yes immediately, "as if I'd been thinking about it for a long time and I'd better get down to it."

On rereading, George "couldn't believe what a wonderful situation I'd left for myself as a writer."  At the very end of Julie of the Wolves, Julie returns to find her father has built a successful village business by raising musk ox. There began her initial conflict for musk oxen are wolves' favorite food and the wolves that nurtured Julie were still on the home range. "And I thought it's all there, we just have to resolve it."  Julie also learns that her father has married a white woman. "I thought about her stepmother for a long time. When I told my daughter I was going to write a sequel, she said, 'Well for heaven's sake, don't make the stepmother an ogre.'"

When George finished Julie of the Wolves, she felt sure the marriage wasn't going to work, "but twenty years of experience and added knowledge challenged that thought.  In our changing culture things work in a way we would never expect.   The human being is so infinitely creative that you think you have everything all set up and then it all comes out entirely differently. Thank heavens!"

Returning to the subject after twenty years was a real measure of cultural growth. "I go to Barrow frequently and watch them struggling very intelligently with the Western influences and feel great admiration for what they're doing. As they adapt, they are using education as a tool, while insisting that they speak their own language and hold onto their own values. My grandson is starting kindergarten and he cannot speak English while he's in school. I don't know of another culture that's been that adamant, they usually give up, but the Eskimos are very strong people. When you experience the outdoors at 45-50 below zero, you realize these people must have a great intelligence to survive."

Twenty years has also seen a leap in knowledge. Two decades ago, wolf research was just beginning and George worried that reviewers would thinking she was making up stories about wolf-human communication. "Julie wrote easily because I had so much more knowledge about the animals.  I went out on the Tundra with scientists who were experts in owls, lemmings, in the cycle of grasses and everything else you can imagine.   They were very generous with me because they want to communicate, particularly with children, but can't write popular stuff so they invited me to come along.  I love to go out in the field and so there I was tagging after them and learning all I could."

George was parented by two entomologists, grew up in a family of naturalists, and has raised four children who work with the natural world. "No one was more surprise then me when I got to college and found out that not everybody wrote and kept turkey vultures and owls in their backyard.  I thought everyone lived with a closeness to nature.   I wrote about it because I knew it and loved it."

When the 70s arrived, it was as if George turned around to see a parade of appreciators behind her. "Children have always understood animals. When you give a child a rabbit to hold, or a grasshopper to look at, they begin asking questions and going deeper.   It takes a really intense teacher to knock it out of them.  I can't tell you how many young people have come up to me and told me that my books have changed their lives and that is so rewarding.  It never struck me as anything I ever did to change lives, I'm not a preacher, I just told what I loved.  I really believe in stories to bring children into knowledge, you can hang so much information on a good story, and they aren't even aware they're getting it, but pretty soon they know the whole ecology of the tundra and the life history of the wolf and they want more and they go to other books."

George will continue to connect children with nature. She'll publish two new books this spring, Everglades, illustrated by Wendell Minor and published by HarperCollins, and To Climb a Waterfall with Thomas Locker published by Philomel. She's also going to be traveling again to Alaska and thinking about Julie, and she promises we won't have to wait twenty years for a sequel.

©Susie Wilde 1998