Wherever wolves have lived, stories have been told about them. In Roman mythology, the twins, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf as infants, one of a handful of tales where the wolf wasn’t portrayed as the dreadful villain. Even in the Bible, Old Testament and New, wolves were reviled. Mathew, more so than Mark, Luke or John, had a special antipathy for the creatures.

Certainly, a pack of wolves roaming the countryside, preying on livestock and hunting other game so efficiently would fuel the anger of the people they competed with for survival.

But, in the case of wolves, righteous anger came to be replaced with hatred, and hatred spurned an unparalleled slaughter of the species using some of the most horrific methods only mankind could invent.

Some early Native Americans living in the wilderness of the New World are said to have admired the hunting strategies of wolves and learned from them – to work together as one constellation focused on a single goal – to outmaneuver the prey, even when they, the hunters, were vastly outnumbered.  They also seemed to understand the similarities in their tribe to the wolf’s pack, the social structure of its members, from lowest to highest, with each member serving the greatest purpose – survival of the group.

Dead Zone, Caja del Rio

The pendulum of public empathy has swung recently in favor of the species as it approached extinction in the United States.  Protections were put in place and wolves were reintroduced to some areas where they once thrived. But still, there are arguments about the wolf’s right to exist and the pendulum continues to swing.  Only human beings, the most apex of all predators, with all their faults and all their virtues will make the decisions about the survival of wolves.

Glyph Shadow Dog, Caja del Rio

Owl Canyon, Caja del Rio

The stories I’ve written involve human beings and a single wolf in an area called the Caja del Rio, just west of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was comfortable with inventing people and the situations they found themselves in this varied terrain, but not so much with a lone wolf roaming the same territory.

This is an enlargement of the artwork I did for the chapter headings in book. 

I wanted to show the lone wolf’s antipathy for humans, both innate and learned, and the disregard some of the humans showed for her right to freedom, and even to existence. 

The squiggly lines below her body represent her travels back and forth through the Caja del Rio, from where her lonely life began to where it ended.

Image copyrighted 2023

Wilderness No Trick of Light

As much as I researched wolves, I fear I may have made mistakes along the way about their behaviors.  Any such errors are entirely my own.  I encourage readers interested in wolves to read some of the expert and excellent writers who’ve studied them:  Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez; American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee; and any of Rick McIntyre’s books about the wolves of Yellowstone.