Lone Wolf - Feb 10 2021

 

Lone Wolf

Feb 10 2021

There is a lone wolf

lurking in the dead of night.

We glimpse him, furtively scurrying

tail down and head tucked

just beyond the circle of light

that marks our territory.

On our daily walks

we often come upon his scat,

littered with fur

and fragments of bone

and sometimes black with blood.

There are tracks in the snow,

solitary

and too big for dogs

and too long and magnificent a stride.

What could have driven him

so far from his kind,

a pack animal

like our faithful dogs,

a social creature

just as we humans are?

How does he survive,

hunting alone

and curling up to sleep in the snow

without another's warmth?

We hear his plaintive calls

haunting the night.

They resonate

on the cold still air,

then trail-off

like a plea left unresolved.

So he patiently waits

for the promised mate

that by nature is his birthright.

We admire his tenacity,

surviving

and even thriving

day after day.

We are thrilled by his wildness,

reminding us

of nature's beauty and strength,

of our comforting conceit

we are exempt from her reckoning.

And fear him, as well.

The atavistic fear

of man for wolf.

Our uneasiness in the dark.

And our concern for our dogs,

whom we have made in our image

to be civilized and soft

and easy prey.

But have not presumed

to give him a name,

respecting his wildness

deferring to his solitude.

We leave the lights on at night.

Which are strong enough

to illuminate the clearing around the house

but too weak

to penetrate the trees.

Mostly black spruce, standing shoulder to shoulder,

tall and spindly

and thinly needled

and disconcertingly gaunt,

menacing

in their sparse witchy look.

Encrusted

with brittle lichen

a cadaverous colour of grey.

Their dark looming presence

encircling us

in our small patch of light.

There has been talk of cougars in our area, far to the east of their usual territory. These are solitary cats, ambush hunters. But we have always had wolves, and although not yet too close to my house, some acquaintances have described the lurking presence of wolves, and in particular of one lone wolf who reappears. I also recently saw a CBC Nature of Things documentary on a lone wolf – Takaya (which is the word for “wolf” in the language of the Coast Salish First Nation) – who established a home on an island very close to the city of Victoria. (https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/takaya-lone-wolf)

Since I tend toward lonerdom myself, I identify with these solitary animals, who seem to defy their natural sociability. There is also this push/pull of attraction and repulsion in our relationship with wolves: their powerful appeal – perhaps more romanticized than real, but also very understandable in that they remind us so much of our beloved dogs – and our concomitant fear, which I feel when I let my dogs out at night, or hear stories of wolves who are becoming increasingly familiar with and less leery of people.

This is the alchemy of poetry: how currents of thought, often subconscious, bubble to the surface and interact. I had no idea what I wanted to say when I sat down at the laptop: I was just in the mood to write! Somehow the first line appeared, and after that the poem quickly wrote itself.