"Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak in which - the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket - Little Red Riding Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded." ~ Charles Dickens A Christmas Tree
Over the course of this summer, late at night past midnight or in the early hours of three am, the crickets chirr to a halt and the night chorus of the coy-wolves begins. It starts with murmurs and ascends into hysterical yips and yaps, and finally rounds into full-throated howls that make your heart thud. There is nothing like laying in bed under civilized bamboo sheets and feel the responsive tingle that begins in your toes and exits through the top of your head - your body and mind on a high tension wire plucked by the wild sounds. Nocturnal laments. Lunar lullabies.
When first we heard them we thought - coyotes. But the sound was not solitary nor soprano like that of the prairie coyote of our experience. As the sound became that of multiple beings and the tone deepened to mournful long howls we thought - wolves. Then neighbouring farmers told us of the coy-wolf - a large hybrid coyote/wolf sometime mixed with dog, that has become common to the area around Fat Hummingbird Farm.
They come down from the mountain behind us and up from the valley to run the moon paths across the fields or along the trails where the railway tracks have been pulled up. The sound of them echoes off the basalt walls of the slope; we sometimes find scat in the yard close to the house; and on our walks after a rainy night we find their enormous paw prints in the disused road.
When they sing their night-time canticles, the local dogs whine and call out over the wind themselves. They sense the wild. It calls to them and, if they are chained, they pull at their tethers, feeling that same wire that I feel, vibrating in their bones and blood. Dogs can be full of heartache and poetry too and dream of running with a throng.
I know, in my human scientific mind, that coyotes and wolves and our resident coy-wolves do not actually howl at the moon. They will ululate and keen whether there is a moon out or not. But I know of a wolf that missed the moon. He lived his entire life in a zoo. His enclosure was concrete, the bars were heavy and rusted, and at night he was shut away in a roofed ghetto where not a single glint of starlight fell through the cement ceiling, let alone moonbeams. Every weekend of my childhood living in that city I went to the zoo and sat by the wolf's cage. He was already very old. The keeper loved to tell all who would listen about the oddity of this wolf - he never howled. Not ever.
That wolf lived to be 27 years old. Never howled. Never followed nor sang along a lane of light. The keeper boasted of how it was the fact that the wolf was captive that he lived so long. That if he had been left wild he would have died after a short life. I think, maybe, lives of misery and restlessness seem to be long lives. Lives of bliss are short.
"There are nights when wolves are silent and only the moon howls." ~ George Carlin
I remember another experience of wolves. We were camping, waiting for a meteor shower; so we were up very late, high in the mountains, with only the night sky for illumination. Around our camp the darkness was deep, and beside our camp the river ran heavy and turbulent; our ears so acclimated to the sound of it running to the ocean that it was mere ambience.
Laying on our backs, we waited for the meteor shower. We guessed at what were planets, what were stars, what were satellites spinning endlessly until they died. Sputnik. Asteroid. Moon. The meteorites began streaking across the night-fallen sky. One, then two, then twenty. Then, un-countable. They spoke. The fizzle of a flame. The swish of ladies' skirts. The sibilance of snakes. The whisper of vast rocks dying in the sky.
And out of the woods came the shadows of wolves. The pant-gutter sound of pursuit. The innuendo of foot-falls. The murmuring secret of them. They stood, just for a moment, and looked our way. The gold-flecked feral yellow of wolves' eyes in the moon-soaked night. And, just for a moment - with tumbling river, and sizzling skies, and silent taciturn forest about us . . . . we were wild.
I think of that sometime when I lay in bed at night, listening, and I think of that moon-starved wolf too. It doesn't matter if they are coyotes, or wolves, or coy-wolves. What matters is that they know how to find the wakes left by moonlight . . . and how to sing the untamed notes of the truly wild.
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