There's no escaping the call of the wild

No matter how big a city we live in, we're followed, it seems, by a deep-seated nostalgia for the long-ago life of nomadic hunters, who made camp wherever the wind and wild herds took them.

This yearning sometimes comes howling to the surface, as it did for me recently while reading Wolf Totem. (A far cry better than the toothless, oversimplified movie.)

Eagerly lapping up this Chinese novel about survival on the grasslands of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, I was reminded of likewise riveting tales by US authors John Neihardt and Mari Sandoz.