Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  The other side of the coin is the wolf who is himself helped but then turns on his helper, as in the fable “The Wolf and the Crane.” In a Chinese story called “The Wolf of Chungshan Mountain,” a scholar meets a wolf being pursued by hunters. He kindly offers him a hiding place in his book-bag. When the hunters are gone, he lets the wolf out. The wolf promptly declares his intention to eat the man. The scholar objects and they agree to have the matter debated by the first stranger they meet. The first stranger manages to get the wolf to crawl back in the bookbag by insisting on a complete reenactment of the scene. The stranger then clubs the wolf to death, praises the scholar for his compassion, and remonstrates with him for his foolishness. In other versions the wolf and his benefactor meet three strangers, each of whom says, yes, it is true, favors are soon forgotten in this world—and the wolf eats his erstwhile friend.

  Wolf and dog stories form a genre all their own. Classic among them is the ancient Welsh tale of Gelert, a huge hound. Prince Llewelyn leaves Gelert to guard his infant son while he goes off hunting. A wolf creeps into the castle and a desperate struggle ensues, during which the infant’s cradle is overturned. Gelert finally kills the wolf and falls down exhausted. When Llewelyn returns and sees the upended crib and Gelert smeared with blood, he is gripped with rage and drives the dog through with his spear. Only when he turns the crib over does he find his son asleep and see the dead wolf.

  Observations on the hypocrisy of men and stories of wolves bent on realistic accommodation with man present us with a sympathetic character. In “The Old Wolf in Seven Fables,” an aging wolf visits the shepherds around him, knowing his days are numbered. He asks the first one for enough sheep to satisfy his hunger in exchange for not terrorizing the flocks and killing more than he needs. No, says the shepherd. He asks the second one for six sheep a year. No. He asks the next for one sheep a year, and is accused of plotting and sent off. To a fourth he offers to act as watchdog against other wolves, to a fifth he promises to eat only sheep that die of natural causes, and to a sixth that he will bequeath him his wolfskin. Finally, spurned by them all, he turns around and wreaks havoc on the flocks of every one.

  Many folktales stress the wolf’s gullibility. In “The Wolf’s Breakfast,” a wolf has a dream of a fantastic breakfast and awakens famished. Intent on making it come true, the hungry wolf faces goats, swine, a cock, a goose, a mare and her foal, and a ram. He demands with foolish straightforwardness the life of each in turn, and each engages him in some diverting task long enough to escape. Cursing his endless stupidity he cries aloud for someone to chop off his tail as punishment. A huntsman, conveniently near, obliges. Thus we are cautioned not to put too much faith in dreams.

  In a class almost by itself is Serge Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a symphonic fairy tale in which the young Peter and a small bird capture a wolf who has eaten their friend the duck. When hunters on the wolf’s trail arrive, Peter asks them to spare the wolf’s life and take him to a zoo.

  In an eerie, dreamlike native American story from the Pacific Northwest coast a boy named Sheem becomes a wolf. Abandoned by his brother and sister after the death of their parents, Sheem takes to following wolves in order to eat what they leave. The wolves feel kindly toward him and allow him to stay close. One afternoon his brother is fishing on a lake when he hears a child weeping. Paddling toward shore he recognizes Sheem, who now looks a little like the wolves. The young boy cries out to him, “My brother! My fate is near! My woes are ended! I shall be changed!” and so saying he becomes even more wolflike. The brother beaches the canoe and chases after Sheem, trying to gather him in his arms, crying in anguish: “Nee sheema! Nee sheema! My little brother! My little brother!” But the boy eludes his grasp, alternately howling and calling out the names of his brother and sister as he runs. Soon he is a wolf completely and he bounds away.

  Before a wolf was brought into their classroom, a group of grade-school children were asked to draw pictures of wolves. The wolves in the pictures all had enormous fangs. The wolf was brought in, and the person with him began speaking about wolves. The children were awed by the animal. When the wolf left, the teacher asked the children to do another drawing. The new drawings had no large fangs. They all had enormous feet.

  The people of Lithuania tell of a wolf who promised to give up killing animals and to lead a holy life. Things went well until one day the wolf was going down the road and a gander came flapping up to him. He wrung its neck. “Geese shouldn’t hiss at saints,” he said.

  The stories of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and “The Seven Little Goats” are perhaps the best-known fairy tales in which the wolf plays the role of an ogre. Of these the reader probably only needs to be reminded of the plot for the third: a wolf, uttering secret words he has accidentally overheard and imitating the voice of a mother goat, tries to get into a locked house where there are seven goats. They doubt whether it is their mother and ask the wolf to prove it by showing his white hooves in the window. The wolf raises his flour-dusted paws, the goats are convinced, and they let him in. He eats them all, save the smallest who hides in the grandfather clock. When the mother returns, the little goat tells her what has happened and with the help of a huntsman they track the wolf down. They find him asleep by a stream. The huntsman cuts him open, removes the young goats, stuffs the wolf with rocks, and sews him up. Awakened, the startled wolf jumps in the stream and drowns.

  The sexual undercurrent in “Little Red Riding Hood” has been a topic of frequent allusion among psychologists for years, though Charles Perrault’s original version presents an unresolved problem and is more a cautionary tale with a moral than a fairy tale. In Perrault’s version the wolf eats Red Riding Hood and that’s that. In later versions Red Riding Hood is rescued in various ways. According to a short history of the story written by Iona and Peter Opie, in Madame de Chatelain’s Merry Tales for Little Folk (1868) a wasp stings the wolf, whose bark alerts a tomtit, who warns a huntsman, who shoots an arrow that kills the wolf. In an 1840s version, Red Riding Hood screams and her father rushes in to save her. In a nineteenth-century version popular in Brittany the wolf puts grandmother’s blood in a bottle, which he gives to Red Riding Hood to drink before killing her. In the Brothers Grimm the wolf eats Red Riding Hood and falls asleep. His snores bring huntsmen, who open his belly to get Red Riding Hood and her grandmother out and then fill it with rocks, recalling again the wolf’s antipathy for stones. This is the version, I believe, that appears in a book with a delightful title, published in 1760 in England: The Top Book of All, For Little Misters and Misses.

  James Thurber, in a 1930s version, has Red Riding Hood shooting the wolf with a pistol she had hidden in her basket. Writes Thurber, “Moral: It’s not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.”

  Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, analyzes “Red Riding Hood” or, as the story is known in Grimm, “Little Red Cap,” in sexual terms. A prepubescent girl announcing her sexual availability with her red cap is approached by a seducer, who entices her to forsake what Bettelheim calls the reality principle (staying on the path to grandmother’s) for the pleasure principle (going off to pick flowers). Red Cap picks flowers until she can’t hold any more and then suddenly remembers her errand. Thus we see her ambivalence about whether to live by the reality principle or the pleasure principle. A similar scene occurs at grandmother’s when she gets undressed and gets into bed with the wolf. She doesn’t know whether to stay and resolve the oedipal conflict or bolt from the bed. The male nature, writes Bettelheim, is what Red Riding Hood is trying to cope with, and for her it is split into two opposite forms: the dangerous seducer and the rescuing father figure.

  Red Riding Hood.

  “It is as if Little Red Cap is trying to understand the contradictory nature of the male by experiencing all aspects of his personality: the selfish, asocial, violent, potentially destructive tendencies of the id (the wolf); and the unselfish, social, thoughtful and p
rotective propensities of the ego (the hunter).

  “Little Red Cap is universally loved because although she is virtuous, she is tempted; and because her fate tells us that trusting everybody’s good intentions which seems so nice, is really leaving oneself open to pitfalls. If there were not something in us that likes the big bad wolf, he would have no power over us. Therefore, it is important to understand his nature, but even more important to learn what makes him attractive to us. Appealing as naïveté is, it is dangerous to remain naïve all one’s life.”

  Bettelheim goes on to say that what appeals in the wolf is his capacity to provide simultaneously tremendous excitement and great anxiety, the essence of the sexual act in the mind of a child for Bettelheim.

  Erich Fromm has suggested that the wolf’s eating Red Riding Hood represents both a hostile feminine view of the destructive nature of the sexual act, and a male desire to usurp the female role by having living beings inside it.

  I think “Little Red Riding Hood” might be examined as an extended metaphor on another level. Like “The Three Little Pigs” and “The Seven Little Goats,” this is a violent story. And the violence done to the wolf is socially acceptable. If one imagined cattlemen and woolgrowers as Red Riding Hood’s avenging father, it would be easy to see sheep and cows as their little girls and the wolf as the lurking rapist. What makes this suggestion less than facetious is that the sort of outrage and the promise of violence stockmen manifested when they found a wolf-killed sheep is uncommonly like that manifested by men on hearing that a neighbor’s child has been raped by an itinerant laborer.

  Making Freudian connections between sex and violence in wolf terms can quickly land one in an analytical morass. The wolf is called female destructive and male destructive. He is called a threat to the male ego as well as a projection of the male ego. He is suavely seductive; he is brutally violent. The reader can do as well as I here. Our historically ambivalent vision of the wolf is, again, very evident. An odd thought that remains with all these stories is that as adults it is often only these violent tales of hedonistic, ravenous wolves that we most easily recall. Why that should be I do not know. Perhaps these were the stories our parents and teachers emphasized. In any case it seems disconcertingly clear that this is the wolf we are preoccupied with.

  In an essay entitled “The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales,” Sigmund Freud recounts the childhood dream of a patient he calls the Wolf-man. The child was born, curiously, on Christmas Eve, 1886, in western Russia to an upper-middle-class family. He grew up maladjusted, and in psychoanalysis Freud traced his infantile neurosis through a boyhood dream that, Freud felt, derived in part from the child’s having been frightened by the wolves in Red Riding Hood and other children’s stories.

  In the dream the boy is lying in bed at night. He is looking out over the foot of his bed through casement windows at a row of walnut trees. It is winter and the old trees are without leaves, stark against the snow. Suddenly the windows fly open and there sitting in a tree are six or seven wolves. They are white, with bushy tails, their ears cocked forward as though they were listening for something.

  The boy awakes screaming.

  Freud’s analysis has not much to do with wolves, but the boy’s dream is surely as eerie, as surreal, a vision of wolves as exists in any fairy tale.

  The place of wolves in literature would not be complete without at least an allusion to the body of fiction that bears on wolfish themes, though the basis for much of it will by now be clear. There are the Jungle Stories of Rudyard Kipling, perhaps best known, featuring Mowgli, the boy adopted by wolves. Frank Norris, a turn-of-the-century exponent of naturalism, developed “lycanthropy mathesis” as a state of moral degeneration and severe depression in Vandover and the Brute. Werewolfry was a minor but staple theme of popular literature in America until the thirties, and I have already mentioned Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris. G. W. M. Reynolds wrote a Victorian thriller called Wagner the Wehrwolf that was wildly popular in magazine installments in 1846/47. Guy de Maupassant in a strange and crude short story called “The Wolf” features two pathologically insane brothers in hot pursuit of a wolf. One brother has been struck by a limb during the chase and his head crushed. His dead body is strapped crosswise in his own saddle. When the wolf finally turns to fight, the live brother props the dead one up in some rocks to watch. Then, hysterical with power, he throws away his weapon and strangles the wolf. H. H. Munro (Saki) wrote a werewolf story of charm and humor in “Gabriel-Ernest,” featuring a sixteen-year-old nature boy; and his “The She-Wolf” is an amusing drawing-room farce in which a stuffy matron is apparently changed into a wolf. There is a maniac in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi who believes himself a mad wolf and a lycanthropic character of Gothic horror appears in Charles Robert Maturin’s The Albigenses. The English novelist Algernon Blackwood wrote a number of bloody werewolf stories.

  Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Willa Cather’s My Antonia contain archetypal wolf scenes: in the former it is a fantastic battle in the Pyrenees, in the latter a reminiscence about a bride and groom thrown to the wolves one wintry night by the driver of a pursued sleigh. This is the most oft-repeated wolf scene in literature, its apotheosis being the scene in Robert Browning’s “Ivan Ivanovitch” in Dramatic Idylls, where the mother throws her children to the wolves.

  The American poet Hamlin Garland captured some of the bitterness of life in the Upper Midwest in the nineteenth century and some of the hatred directed at wolves by those people when he wrote:

  His eyes are eager, his teeth are keen

  As he slips at night through the brush like a snake

  Crouching and cringing, straight into the wind

  To leap with a grin on the fawn in the break.

  And in a poem called “The Wolves,” another American poet, Galway Kinnell, speaks of buffalo hunters and wolves in such a way as to leave the hunters saddled with the bestial imagery usually put to the wolf. D. H. Lawrence was very much taken with the animal life of the American Southwest. In “Autumn at Taos” he compares the ash gray sage of the desert mesas to a wolf’s back, describing it as a kind of land fur. In “The Red Wolf,” a pueblo seer calls Lawrence a thin red wolf of a paleface, recalling Northern Plains Indian allusions to the East, the direction from which Lawrence has come, as the place of the wolf and the color red. Robinson Jeffers penned my favorite two lines about the wolf:

  What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine

  The fleet limbs of the antelope.

  I have indicated already that the oral literature of native Americans was rich with wolf stories. The Indian wolf, of course, was not the European wolf, though the familiar theme of shapeshifting—which nineteenth-century Europeans frequently took for werewolfry when they heard these Indian stories—is common. George Bird Grinnell recorded many wolf stories among the Blackfeet, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. One of the most haunting is “Black Wolf and His Fathers,” in his By Cheyenne Campfires. A man left to die in a pit is rescued by two wolves—one white, one rabid. During a long journey to the Place of the Wolves, the white wolf must keep constant guard so that the rabid wolf won’t attack the man. With the white wolf’s help, the man is later adopted by the wolves. When he returns to his tribe, he kills the two women who left him to die in the pit and offers their bodies to the wolves. Grinnell also has a similar story in Blackfoot Lodge Tales entitled “The Wolf-man.”

  But if there is one writer whose name must be linked with the wolf it is of course Jack London. He was obsessed by them. Call of the Wild and White Fang are widely known. In the former a dog regains its “wolfish heritage” in Alaska, and in the latter a wolf is tamed. The character of Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf is probably a projection of London’s own personality. His first story collection was entitled The Son of the Wolf.

  London named his dream house, never completed, Wolf House, and delighted in being called Wolf, the name his perhaps homosexual friend George Sterling gave him. (Literary al
lusions to homosexual lovers as “wolves after lambs” are not rare. Plato, in Phaedrus, writes, “The eager lover aspires to the boy just as the wolf desires the tender lamb.”) London was accused of being homosexual because of his aggressive displays of drinking and forcing himself on women, behavior that he thought proved his masculinity. In a poignant scene a month before he died, London asked his wife to have a watch he had given her inscribed “Mate from Wolf,” and lamented that she did not call him more often by that name.

  London’s novels show a preoccupation with “the brute nature” in man, which he symbolized in the wolf. In The Sea-Wolf Larsen’s internal war is between his brutish and civilized natures, though the idea of the brute as London presents it is admirable. But it is, ultimately, a neurotic fixation with machismo that has as little to do with wolves as the drinking, whoring, and fighting side of man’s brute nature. London, one of the most frustrated and perhaps tragic figures in American literature, nevertheless struck responsive chords with his themes. Few twentieth-century American authors have been as widely translated and appreciated outside America.

  Even so swift and cursory a glance at wolves in literature as this reveals that—except for a few stories here and there where a writer wasn’t bound by the conventions of fable or the happy endings of fairy tales—the role of the wolf is fairly predictable. London’s wolves and wolfish men seem more serious-minded and are more engaging because he was writing about a facet of human nature—the bestial side, the wolf side of man—and was not content to let the wolf stand simply as a stock symbol.

  The possibility has yet to be realized of a synthesis between the benevolent wolf of many native American stories and the malcontented wolf of most European fairy tales. At present we seem incapable of such a creation, unable to write about a whole wolf because, for most of us, animals are still either two-dimensional symbols or simply inconsequential, suitable only for children’s stories where good and evil are clearly separated.