Is it because wolves are one of the most widely distributed land mammals on earth – from tideline to tundra, desert to grassland – that they also roam so widely through our stories? Or is it because of what we share as apex predators, both of us known to wander away from our families when we are young, mate for life, raise young collaboratively and, as Plato pointed out, sometimes kill our own kind? To consider a wolf is to grapple with an animal that conjures both the familiar – our dogs; ourselves – and the foreign. The wolf will not be tamed, but neither is it likely to hunt us. The animal looms far larger in our psyches than we likely do in its. But what exactly is the animal we have created in our stories and our minds? “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. “That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”
From fable to fairytale to wilderness adventure novel, the wolf has very often been cast as antagonist; a spectre of danger and the unknown. The very mention of “howling in the distance” has, like the creaking door, become a sort of atmospheric shorthand for looming threat or eerie uncertainty. There is also, though, a well of wolf stories that nod to the trope of evil wolf before subverting it. Having written my first book, Wolfish, about the solo journey of one famous Oregon wolf alongside my own coming-of-age departure from home, I am fascinated by the biological reality of wolves, but also in dissecting what I have come to think of as the “cultural taxidermy” of our lupine symbols.
