Wolf
Minnesota: Wolf..
June 7th 2012
It seems that I owe my niece Olivia an apology. Being the grand woman that she is, I am not expecting her to hold it against me for long.
The truth is that for the past eighteen years or so we have had an intermittent but ongoing conversation about wolves. A conversation which began with the wee lass perched on my lap, aged three, pensively watching the Disney version of ‘Peter and the Wolf’. I think it was during a particularly tense moment that she expressed her considered opinion about wolves. “I don’t like wolfs because they eat people”. My attempts at reassurance, the old time classic, ” If you saw a wolf in the street he would be much more scared of you then you are of him”, understandably fell on deaf ears. In fact, she turned around to face me, fixed me with a steely look and said firmly, “No, I don’t think he would”. It occurred to neither of us that wolves were not then and are not now, native to Lytham St Annes. She has remained implacable on the subject of wolves and has never conceded to my argument that they are much maligned creatures, although she no longer says “wolfs”. I however, knowing what I know now, might owe her a gin and tonic.
I haven’t actually seen a wolf and I haven’t heard one either, although we are about to embark on an overnight trip into the wilderness so it’s not over until the fat lady wakes up in the night with warm doggy breath on her neck. From now on, I can assure you, that I will be much more scared of him than he is of me. I may not have seen old Canis Lupus but I have heard plenty of stories about him which have not been reassuring. I had assumed, for example, that the highway at the bottom of the garden was the reason Mary Ellen and Suzanne are reluctant to let the cat and dogs out in the garden during the day. Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s not the road – it’s the wolves – who fairly regularly make off with domestic pets, and not just the little ones either. Last week Doug came out of his cabin to find Rosco who is an enormous German Shepherd Dog, being chased across the garden by a hairy slavering visitor. While I have been here the local paper has printed a story about a woman who was in her garden when she noticed a large wolf weaving about and snarling on her drive. When she turned to go back in the house there was another one behind her, also weaving, also snarling, and she realised that she was being rather ominously ’rounded up’. She managed to get into her car and sound the horn and eventually they ran away. A few winters ago, Mary Ellen happened to look out of the kitchen window just in time to see one polishing off a deer in her back garden. It has to be said of course that wolves do not generally attack people, but as their numbers increase, they can become ‘habituated’, that is, too used to living alongside humans. If this coincides with a loss of their usual food source, they begin to explore other options. In places where they are not endangered however, a managed wolf cull seems to drive them back into the woods and restore their fear of humans. Which is just as well.
For some reason, perhaps because of its famous blood curdling howl, the wolf has always been used in stories to speak to our deepest fears. The biblical wolf and the one in children’s fairy tales is a cunning predator who hides his true nature to avoid detection. He appears in our dreams as an uncontrolled predator. In all the places where our consciousness is suspended, in our sleep and in our stories, there is a wolf lurking somewhere. Only in one story that I can remember, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’, are the wolves portrayed as sensitive, cooperative and strong, raising the baby Mowgli as their own cub. I hadn’t realised how ingrained this fear was in me despite all my protestations, until faced with the prospect of meeting one coming up the drive. Since then I have had several dreams where they feature heavily and none of them have had a good outcome.
It goes without saying of course that the real wolves, not the ones in fairy tales chasing small girls, rank with some of the most extraordinary creatures on the planet. Living and cooperating together in family packs, their life is hierarchical, subtle and complex, each wolf understanding its place in the scheme of things. The alpha male and female mate for life, with members of the pack acting as babysitters for their cubs. According to studies in National Geographic they have adapted remarkably to a series of controversial reintroductions which have substantially improved the ecosystems in places like Yellowstone National Park by keeping down the Elk population and restoring balance to the environment . People now come from all over the world to watch Yellowstone’s famous ‘Druid pack’ roaming the park. Douglas Smith and Gary Ferguson who co-authored the book ‘ Decade of the Wolf’ about the reintroduction in Yellowstone, describe wolves as living “”epic lives, full of struggle and conquest.”
Because of their very position as an ‘apex predator’ and because fear of them is so ingrained in our collective subconscious the relationship between wolves and humans is always going to be a battle. For many people however the continued thriving of wolves in the wild is a strong indicator of whether we are doing enough to protect our natural environment. Despite my protestations I would still love to see one, or even hear them in the distance. To see real wolf and not the fairytale version. What a great reminder that there are things which we just don’t get to control..
“We have doomed the Wolf not for what it is, but for what we have deliberately and mistakenly perceived it to be..the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer..which is, in reality no more than a reflected images of ourself “-Farley Mowat.
