When wolves howl us home
I venture out on a misty ridge hike with a friend.
I’ve been cooking on a vision of a through-trail across our island, so I’m keen to investigate the first hypothetical section, and bounce my fantastical route ideas off my more practical hiking companion. Plus, I’m too deep in the news of war and genocide and politics. It’s time to go feed my feet a meal of earth and give my lungs a drink of sky.
Jenny and I meet and park our pick-ups at the base of a logging road, and load up in the single cab of my ‘92 Toyota along with my sled dog Pilot, who settles his long legs on Jenny’s lap as we bounce up the mountain road. Minutes later we don rain gear over rain boots and set out up and off trail, following a path marked by tattered plastic blue diamonds on the gnarled trunks of spruce, cedar, and pine, our coffee-fueled chatter swallowed by rolling mists. We’re in a cloud. And happy to be here.
October in the Alaska rainforest is red-gold, not on the trees, which are mostly conifer, but in the muskeg, the deep and thick mossy wetlands peppered with shallow ponds and creeping with mosses, berries, and herbs. Low blueberry leaves edge crimson, sedges are sun gold and green tipped, and the leaves of herbaceous plants are curling shades of rust.
The yellow cedar and spruce forest slope is October slick with dead and decaying skunk cabbage leaves and flowing springs and rivulets. We use roots and rocks and downed trunks to find footings. I feel the summer’s hikes in my thighs and glutes which welcome and settle in to the climb. Our bodies measure the ridge in muscular bites of altitude.
Before long we approach the high muskeg and forest mix of the broadly ascending ridge. We skirt neon green scrub conifers, muskeg puddles, and rows of spiky trees that ebb in and out of mist as we pass. We’re absorbed with route finding via unmaintained blazes. Our eyes are peeled for fresh cranberries and mushrooms, though we’re only seeing summer’s leftover blueberries in the moss and scrub. We tsk tsk at a crushed red bull can tossed by a careless snowmobiler.
And it is amid this rhythm of stepping and looking and chatting that we run up against a sudden wail of luminous sound and we stop. We hear wolves. Many wolves.
I sense the sonic collage of their howls differently in my right and left ear, whether due to their locations or echoes I don’t know. I call Pilot back to us. Jenny and I express awe with widened eyes and whispered excitements.
We strain to geolocate the wolves but all we can reckon is that they’re unusually close. In low voices we confer, are they just over this little rise? Are they on the northwest flank of this upcoming ridge? Is one very close? Can they smell us? If we keep walking toward them, will they come after the dog? I know that a single wolf may play with a dog but Jenny reminds me that a whole pack may try to kill one. A more remote-living friend confirms this by text later, he knows because his neighbor has experienced both outcomes – sordid and silly – over the years with their dogs.
The howls keep up wrapping us in octave bending song that layers minor harmonies in resonant rounds that ebb and flow like the land we’re ascending and descending. The sound waves are large enough to hit my chest and throat, I absorb these wolves into my body. I don’t know enough about wolf howl to discern meaning, so I just experience them. It’s a reverie of wailing. Since we can’t see the wolves, it feels like the mist-shrouded land itself has taken up talking to us. Even as its happening I know I won’t forget it.
Eventually the howls slow and we decide to cautiously trek forward, reasoning that the pack is likely in a slightly different direction than our route. This is maybe willful delusion. There’s no way I’m not walking toward these wolves.
As we work over the muskegs toward the ridge’s wide bend to the west, alternately crossing scrubby hummocks, padding on deep moss, and slurping our boots in sucking mud, the howls disperse in time and space but the mist persists. The wolves exited stage right and returned to their usual place in my world: distant, occasional, abstract. But among the ridge’s moose prints and chunky bear scat we bend to poke at little piles of rain-sodden white-grey fur: the digested remains of wolf prey, their scat.
Before it’s time to turn back, we stand amid a few towering spruce and Jenny offers me and Pilot a thin slab of deer heart from a steel tin. I rustle out chunks of canned coho salmon and share my apple slices. The cloud never evaporated as we’d hoped, but the fog has been soft and welcome. We realize our hands have grown icy in the mist and agree that glove weather has finally arrived. I feel like I could keep walking on this ridge until nightfall, but Jenny was up at 4:45 am for an early shift at the cafe this morning and she’s ready to go home. As we retrace our steps we discuss coming back on the next good weather day and covering the whole ridge route back to town, maybe 12 miles? We’ll leave early and walk swiftly. We brainstorm other friends to invite. I lose my footing on slick moss and mud here and there, it’s always trickier to descend than ascend.
I hug Jenny back at the pick up trucks and we mention the wolves again before parting, eyes wide with gratitude.
Later, I have trouble sleeping because I’m still excited (and I’m an easy insomniac, it doesn’t take much). I toss and turn and think on why I was so overwhelmed by wolf howls. It occurs to me its because we heard emotion in their voices. And for mammals emotion is about connection. Jenny and I heard wolves singing about connections to one another, their relationships, their culture. A biologist friend once explained to me that wolves learn from their elders and pass on that learning to their babies. That the pack is the vessel for containing and continuing this culture across generations. We use the term “lone wolf” for human predators but wolves, in general, are community animals like us. They raise babies in big families, and they act fiercely to protect them. I’m overwhelmed, I know, because I could feel in my chest how their howls carry community, land, life, death, all of it.
With the howls of wolves, at first you think the thrill you feel is a rare contact with “the wild.” But what if what you hear with your heart is the affirmation that in wildness lies connection and community. What if what you hear is aunties and babies and mama affirming the same social bonds you also yearn for.
I decide that beneath the paved streets of capital, the homes tumbled by war, and the imposition of isolated individualism, lies the asynchronous sound of mammals wailing together. A haunting of voices beyond time. None of us are without violence, and that’s contained in our howls too. The earth is older than us, and the stars even older. But the layered songs that connect us as living beings on the planet are still ancient compared to the blink of our own lives. And it’s this howl that joins us across the ten thousand generations, it’s the howl that carries the stories that walk us home to ourselves.
AhhhhwowoooooooooooOOoooooooooooo! AwoooooooOOOOoooooooo!
P.S. Read more about wolf families, and how the whole idea of the “alpha male” is a myth!
