Printed in the Summer 2020 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Firestone, Anne, "Things I Learned from Hanging Out with Wolves" Quest 108:3, pg 26-27
By Anne Firestone
I am falling down onto the ground. My arms are turning into front legs. I cry out, “I’m running with the wolves!” I turn completely into a wolf and run off to join my pack. I am filled with such wild exhilaration that I awake with a start and sit straight up in bed. I have no idea what the dream means, but I know that it is special.
That was forty years ago. I remembered the dream from time to time with a thrill of excitement, but gradually it faded into the background.
Fast forward sixteen years. The wife of a coworker gave me a book called Women Who Run with the Wolves as a Christmas present. The author, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, is a Jungian analyst, and the book contained fairy tales and stories which she interpreted from the perspective of the Wild Woman archetype. I loved the book, and remembered my dream.
I decided I wanted to see some real wolves. I’d volunteered for a few years at the Lincoln Park Zoo (LPZ) in Chicago, which had a pair of red wolves who were so shy that they came out only at night, when no one was there. However, I was familiar with the names of a couple of wolf preserves in the area, and I called the one in southern Wisconsin. Although the preserve was open to the public only on weekends, the owner was willing to let me visit with a couple of friends during the week because we had called ahead and also, I suspect, because I said I had volunteered for the LPZ.
When we got there, we split up. My friends headed for the pens on the left side of the preserve; I went down the right side. The wolves had been hand-raised, and the owner told us that if we stood next to the fences and were still, they might come over and let us pet them. I was kneeling in the March slush watching a beautiful wolf named Angelique pretend not to see me as she ambled closer, sniffing the ground as she came. Her fur was light gray overall, with brown and black and even hints of blond and maroon. Occasionally I would get a flash of her golden eyes as she glanced at me from underneath her lids, so I knew that she knew I was there. I must have had my face pressed against the chain-link fence, because when she got close to me, she gave me a big, sloppy kiss from my chin to my forehead, then sauntered away. I was ecstatic. Being kissed by a wolf—that was even better than being kissed by Prince Charming! And unlike him, the wolf was real.
I ran over to the owner and said, “Angelique kissed me. What does that mean?” He paused a moment, then replied, “She likes you.”
Well, duh. I had already figured that out and was looking for some deep insight into wolf behavior from the expert. I later learned that even wolves who have been hand-raised are very shy when introduced to new humans; they might come close and give a tentative sniff or two, but then they usually walk away. Angelique’s behavior was unusual.
In any case, I decided that I wanted to volunteer at the preserve. I started the following Saturday, and every Saturday and Sunday for the next few years I got up before 5 a.m. and drove from Chicago to just south of Milwaukee. When I look back on it now, I think being kissed by Angelique was an invitation. If she hadn’t kissed me, I would never have given up sleeping late on the weekends to drive 150 miles round trip each day just to volunteer at a wolf preserve. It would never even have occurred to me.
Gradually I got to know all the wolves. Some of them liked me more than others did, and I liked some of them more than I liked others. Some were very shy and never came close, and some became my special friends.
One Saturday I arrived late, after the preserve opened. We volunteers—there were three or four of us who were regulars—always arrived early so that we could spend some private time with the wolves and find out the latest news about them. I hated being late, so I hurried toward the senior volunteer to find out where I would be most useful. On my way over to her, I passed the enclosure where Angelique lived with her brothers, No Name, Nipper, and Shy Boy. No Name stood close to the fence watching me, smiling his toothy smile, yellow eyes gleaming, tail waving happily. A man who was standing in front of him looked at me in surprise, “He recognizes you!”
“Of course he does!” I wanted to say. “He really likes me and he wants to be scratched and petted.” Wolves, like domesticated dogs, smile and wag their tails when they see someone they like.
Then I thought of the first time I realized that even birds have preferences. I was walking my dogs in Lincoln Park along Lake Michigan, ready to go home, when they stopped to sniff something. While I waited for them, I heard some squawking up in the air. I looked up and saw a male robin pursuing a female near the crown of a nearby tree. She was protesting and finally flew down to the ground and perched on one of the tree’s roots. Looking up to find out what had happened to the male, I saw him being attacked by another male robin, who finally chased him away. After the first male had been driven off, the female, who had been watching this little drama, fluttered up to greet the second male, and I could practically see “My hero!” in a cartoon bubble over her head. They flew off together.
I don’t know what I had thought about mating habits in robins—probably that any male would do that during mating season—but it had never occurred to me that birds might have actual preferences in a mate. That was as much a revelation to me as No Name’s happy recognition of me was to the man standing in front of him.
I never worried that the wolves would bite me. Either they were too shy to approach people or they loved the attention and petting and scratching. Since the owner wouldn’t let us go in with the wolves, the other volunteers and I petted them through the chain-link fence. We all also cheated a bit and stuck our hands and arms through the right-angled gap where two sides of the fence met. That way we had more room to maneuver and to reach the wolves’ favorite spots.
One day I was petting Alpha through the gap in the fence. As the name suggests, he was the Big Brother of his little family. Contrary to what used to be believed about the concept of an alpha wolf, wolf biologists have recognized that a wolf pack is basically a family. The alpha males and females are usually the biological parents of the rest of the pack. It’s Mom, Dad, and the kids, not some kind of boss and his subordinates. As in human families, Mom is sometimes the overall top dog; sometimes Dad is. Depending on individual talent, one wolf (not necessarily Mom or Dad) might lead the hunt; another might break the trail in a heavy snow. In the wild, wolf biologists have observed members of the family pack providing food for a sick or injured wolf. Those of us who think of our dogs as members of the family are closer to the mark than a certain famous dog trainer who insists that a dog owner must be alpha. In fact, a dog owner must be a good parent.
Anyway, Alpha was acting in loco parentis to his brothers and sister because their parents were dead, and of all the members of the family, he was the one who was a natural leader. I was petting him through the gap when he decided he wanted the sleeve of my jacket. It was a hand-sewn wool jacket from Mexico, and I loved it, so I pulled my arm back, trying to get it back through the gap and save it, when I noticed that blood was trickling down my hand. Alpha’s canine—more than an inch long—had gone through my skin like a hot knife through butter. I hadn’t even felt it. It was clear that he was not trying to hurt me. He didn’t seem to realize that under the sleeve was a part of me. He just wanted the sleeve. I decided to let him have it. He ripped the sleeve off the jacket and trotted around the enclosure with the sleeve in his mouth, displaying it like a trophy. Bob (not his real name), the man who owned the preserve, told me that later that afternoon Alpha buried the sleeve. Like a treasure. And the next time I visited, he came over to me as I was kneeling in front of the pen and pushing my face into the chain link. He stuck as much as he could of his snout through the fence and, ever so gently, held my nose and let his teeth graze it in the affectionate way a dominant wolf acknowledges a family member.
The wound on my hand didn’t hurt badly, and I definitely did not want to go to an emergency room and tell them that a wolf had bitten me. This was just before Canadian wolves were released into Yellowstone. People’s attitudes toward wolves were beginning to change. Their role as the keystone predator, keeping the North American ecosystem in balance, was just beginning to be appreciated. I didn’t want to do anything that could halt that progress. Nor did I want to bring the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources down on Bob and get him and the wolves in trouble. I took care of the wound myself.
At that time I’d been a hospital social worker for almost twenty years, so I knew what to do. However, I made the mistake of telling the truth to a coworker who asked why my hand was bandaged. We were sitting at a table at the nurses’ station, charting, when a doctor who was an avid hunter came up, saw the bandage, and inquired about it. My coworker Kathy exclaimed, “She was bitten by a wolf!” He rolled his eyes, pulled his arm up into his lab coat, mimicking being one-handed, and announced, “She’d be walking around like this if she’d been bitten by a wolf.” Kathy started to protest, but I kicked her under the table and said to the doctor, “It wasn’t a wolf, just a dog who looked like a wolf.” Whew.
I’d learned the hard way that wolves do not seem to understand that what is under clothing is also us. Unfortunately, the lesson didn’t seem to take. When I was visiting the wolves a few months later on a day when it was eleven degrees below zero, I decided to keep my little mittens on while I gave Bravo, Alpha’s brother, a very sweet wolf, some treats. He took the treats but also, very gently, peeled the mitten off my hand, taking some of the skin over my knuckles with it.
This time I knew that my hand needed to be stitched. I found out where the closest emergency room was, and worried all the way there about what kind of plausible story I could tell them. I made up something about being lost on a country road and getting out of the car (I couldn’t think of a reason for doing that) and being suddenly bitten by a dog who came out of nowhere. No, I didn’t know where this happened and I was so surprised I couldn’t remember what kind of dog it was. The story was so lame that I couldn’t bring myself to even try to sell it. I was lying, the doctor knew I was lying, I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew. He stitched me up—a lovely job—and I went back home to Chicago.
Another thing I learned while volunteering with the wolves was not to have a mammogram when the backs of your hands are covered with bruises. Ever since I was little, I’ve bruised easily. And when I stuck my hand through the gap in the fence to pet the wolves, I would turn my hand so that the back of it was pressed against the fence. That way my fingers were free to reach down through their outer coats to their skin and find the good spots to scratch. The only drawback was that the backs of my hand got badly bruised from the pressure of the wolves’ bodies pushing my hands against the fence when I was scratching them. But I barely noticed it.
That’s why I was so surprised when, after trying to turn my breasts into pancakes with her awful machine—which hurt a lot more than the bruises on my hands—the mammogram lady got a sheet of paper from another room, presented it to me, and asked me to fill it out.
It was an abuse report. She thought I was the victim of physical abuse. I was so shocked that without thinking I blurted, “Oh, it’s just the wolves.”
She looked at me as if she were thinking “This poor woman is in deep denial,” and I suppose she was thinking something like that. It occurred to me later that the bruises on the backs of my hands might have looked to her like defensive bruises, received when I held my hands to my face trying to protect myself. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but I thanked her for her concern, grabbed my purse, and fled.
One day when I arrived early at the preserve, I noticed Akila lying on the ground breathing stertorously. I had always thought of him as the grandfather wolf because, even though he wasn’t related to the other ones, he was the oldest. Bob told us that the vet had been to see him, that nothing could be done, and that he was dying.
I went over to see his mate, Nantan, who was one of my favorite wolves. She was almost blind, but she must have liked my scent because she always came over to greet me and to get some petting. And sometimes a treat. She didn’t come up to all the volunteers, just a couple of us. I knew she liked me because once another perfectly nice volunteer came up while I was petting her and wanted to join in, and she snarled at him. She snarled until he left, and then turned back to me. Wolves, like people, have preferences.
Anyway, on that day while I was petting her, I heard Akila’s breath slow. It eventually stopped. I stood up and started to call over to Bob, “He’s gone,” but before I could get the words out, Nantan started to howl. Then all the wolves started to howl. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. They knew Akila was gone and were saying goodbye, sending him on his way, grieving his loss.
I know that I was not imagining this. A while later I read story about a man in Pennsylvania who kept wolves. He got sick, but fortunately had other people whom the wolves accepted and who could take over for him. One afternoon while the owner was in a hospital over fifteen miles away, the wolves started to howl. They howled for several minutes. Several hours later the caretakers received a call from the family of the wolves’ owner. He had died. The caretakers asked the time of his death, and the time they were told was the exact time the wolves had howled. The wolves knew.
How did they know? I have no idea.
Life is a mystery. In fact, the Lakota term Wakan Tanka, which is usually translated in movies as Great Spirit, actually means Great Mystery. Life is a great mystery, and the older I get, the truer this seems to me.
The experience that brought this home to me in the most vivid way occurred after I’d been volunteering at the wolf preserve for about six months. On that day when I arrived, something felt different. There was an air of excitement that I could feel but didn’t understand.
I started to make the round of the enclosures, and I saw that Peter, the brother of Alpha, Bravo, and Waterlou was visiting Bravo and Waterlou. That rarely happened, because Peter was the largest of the family and thought he ought to be in charge. He didn’t have the right stuff, though, and to keep him safe, Bob had to keep him separated from Alpha. But sometimes Peter would visit his brother and sister, and this was one of those times.
I knelt down in front of their enclosure and said, “Hey, you guys. You’re together today!”
I started to pet them, but I felt someone tap my shoulder and say my name. I turned to see who it was. There was no one there. But Nantan, in her far enclosure, had started to howl. Then all the wolves howled. And they were howling to me. I had heard the wolves howl many times before that day, and I heard them howl many times after that day, but on that day—never before and never afterward—they were howling to me.
I felt held in their howling as if it were an embrace, and I felt love all around me. I also felt shaky. I stood up and lurched over to where Angelique was standing and watching me. I knelt in front of her to pet her. Her eyes and nose were moist with excitement. As the other wolves howled, she raised her tail and misted me from her scent gland. “Oh my God, this is an initiation” were the words that went through my head.
I still don’t know exactly what I was being initiated into, but I do know that the experience was wondrous. At that time I had been meditating regularly for about fifteen years, and I had had a number of nonordinary experiences. But nothing like this.
After Angelique misted me, the howling died down. I felt changed in some way. But instead of honoring my own experience, sitting with it for a while, I went to ask an “authority figure” what the misting meant (as if anyone but me could be an authority on my experience). I asked Bob, who told me that he’d never been misted and didn’t know.
Not satisfied with that answer and still looking for an authority figure to tell me the meaning of what I had experienced, I decided I would call both Chicago zoos after I got home.
I had not told Bob about feeling surrounded by love—big love, divine love—and I had no intention of mentioning that to either of the women who cared for the wolves at the zoos.
I had never forgotten a cartoon I’d seen years before. A man in a straitjacket was sitting at the foot of a large tree. A yogi was sitting on a branch. The yogi was saying to the man, “The difference between you and me is that I know who to talk to about things, and you don’t.”
I wasn’t about to make that mistake.
When I talked to the wolves’ keeper at the first zoo and told her about the misting, she said, “It sounds like the wolves have accepted you in a very deep way.”
I thought so, too, but I still was not satisfied. When I called the second zoo, I found what I now believe I had been looking for.
I told the woman—it has always been interesting to me that the keepers of wolves at both zoos were women—about the misting. Her response was immediate and definite. “Well,” she huffed, “it must have been bowel gas!”
I was so surprised I almost burst out laughing.
There was no way it could have been bowel gas. Wolves’ scent glands are about two inches down from the base of their tails. When Angelique misted me, I was at her head. Her body was parallel to the fence, so her tail and rear were about three feet to my left. When she raised her tail, the mist came toward me, to the right; bowel gas would have gone to the left.
However, I am grateful to that woman because she taught me a valuable lesson.
Nonordinary things happen all the time to many people. They can happen in a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or they can happen while you’re walking in the woods. Or petting wolves.
Life is the Great Mystery. Anything is possible. Love is all around us. But only if we’re willing to honor our experience, be with it, let it teach us.
We can have baptism or we can have bowel gas: the choice is ours.
Anne Firestone has been a hospital social worker, adjunct professor of English, and yoga instructor. Now retired, she is writing the first volume of an Arthurian trilogy.