A hunt for the truth of wolves — and a quest for the wolf inside us
One morning in Colorado, a wolf tried to put her tongue in my mouth. I’d been visiting a friend who worked at a wolf sanctuary there, and he’d told me this might happen. She’ll want to assess your value as a hunter, he’d said. She’ll be evaluating the last thing you ate. If you don’t let her lick your teeth, she’ll just lose interest.
I’m pretty brave and not so squeamish, so meeting a wolf appealed to me — or at least didn’t immediately horrify. I was prepared to sit, wait for a wolf and gape. But face to face with her, I clenched my jaw and balked. The wolf wandered off, back to a volunteer she knew. I yearned for a second shot, but I’d missed my chance. I should forgive myself now: We can’t always control our fear. But it wasn’t exactly fear that had made me recoil, at least not insofar as “fear” describes specific concerns about some specific phenomenon — the awareness that this toothy predator might bite off my human face, for example. The wolf ’s pursuit felt instead like ancient information, a message that overwhelmed my brain and inserted a terrified panic into my body.
Terror propels Erica Berry’s exhilarating book, “Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.” The book sets about on two simultaneous projects: understanding the wolf as a symbol in human stories and as a real animal that humans live alongside. This double pursuit can’t be split. It’s the thing and its shadow. “There is always the creature in front of you and the creature in your mind,”
Berry writes. “That wolf is a piece of cultural taxidermy, fabricated by humans with parts gathered across time and space.” In her pursuit of understanding, Berry treks through many nonfiction genres, from coming-of-age memoir to ecological history, from thriller-paced personal stories to feminist critique, poetic nature writing and sociological theory. But the intuitive, winding nature of Berry’s approach shouldn’t suggest that this work is unfocused. The wolf wanders a meandering and highly focused path to find food, a mate, a home. No matter where Berry weaves, she sniffs out fascinating insights. And she writes about it in clear, beautiful language.
One of the most propulsive themes in “Wolfish” concerns the practice of stalking another creature. Berry writes, “There was something about going to look for an animal, to focus on being smart enough to try and find it, that sharpened the experience of being in the woods, but also just being alive on earth.” Her hunt for the wolf heightens her ability to understand the world. She isn’t sentimental or romantic about wolves, but she is passionate. Her search sends her far and wide, but the book never suffers from lack of di- rection. The best reference point for “Wolfish” might be Helen Macdonald’s perfect “H Is for Hawk.” But where that book felt captivating (and concerned captivation), “Wolfish” reads expansively. And where Macdonald creates a character portrait of a rare and relatively unfamiliar creature (the goshawk), Berry has the difficult project of detangling myths about a rare creature we think we know.