The wolf in its own clothing

In her new book, Oregon writer Erica Berry considers the wolf, shedding light on a creature that has haunted the imaginations of forest dwellers and urbanites alike for millennia.

Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell about Fear recounts Berry’s investigation of her own and others’ fear of wolves, which she undertakes while attempting to conquer her anxieties about random violence and global heating. Her travels take her to Montana, England and Sicily, to the woods and to city streets. Along the way, she explores who is predator and who is prey, what should be feared and what can, perhaps, be welcomed.

Part memoir, part journalistic inquiry, part literary criticism, Wolfish seeks to understand how wolves came to symbolize a wide variety of threats, ranging from serial killers to climate change.

Berry has had firsthand experience with wolves on her grandfather’s Oregon farm, where she witnessed damage done to livestock by predators. She began researching the repopulation of wolves in the West for her undergraduate thesis, continuing that work in graduate school.

…who is predator and who is prey, what should be feared and what can, perhaps, be welcomed.

Each of the seven chapters focuses on a particular aspect of wolfhood, from the animal’s supposed unreliability and its vulnerability to mass killings to the origins of werewolf folklore and more. Altogether, the volume presents a kaleidoscopic view of a rich subject.

Wolfish, as Berry writes, “circles the wolf as I ‘jump’ between lenses of history, ecology, biology, anthropology, fairy tales, myth and journalism, motored by the conviction that the associative leaps of the brain — between self and other, past and present, symbolic and real wolf — are not a distraction from understanding the Canis lupus, but the tunnel we must go through.”

Red Riding Hood meets old father wolf from an edition of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales illustrated by Gustave Dore, originally published in 1862. Credit: Gustave Dore

Wolfish begins with a disturbing account of Berry’s train trip to a writing retreat. As a young woman traveling on her own, Berry knows what it’s like to be wary of too-friendly fellow travelers. Thinking of predator/prey situations, she wonders whether she is overreacting to an uncomfortable encounter, and feels guilty about changing her seat and alerting the train’s attendants — though, as it turns out, her concerns might have been warranted given the way the stranger was escorted from the train after the authorities read references to Berry in his notebook. In this first chapter, she weaves that story around the tale of B-45, the first known gray wolf to wander into Oregon from Idaho after the species had been extirpated by hunters in the ’40s.

For some Oregonians, B-45’s crossing was a cause for celebration, confirmation that a species might be brought back into its natural habitat. Others wanted B-45 shot on sight. Still others, like Berry, see connections between the attempted extermination of wolves in North America and the genocide perpetuated by white settlers against Indigenous people.

Berry eventually focuses on OR-7, one of the West’s most famous wolves, a source of both fascination and fear. OR-7 was fitted with a tracking collar, allowing scientists and journalists to follow him as he wandered from state to state seeking food and a mate, avoiding hunters and their traps and poison for more than a decade. Berry intersperses her account of OR-7’s early travels with her own personal and family history in the Northwest, along with the history of wolf extermination as a consequence of American settlement.

Unsurprisingly, Little Red Riding Hood figures prominently in Berry’s narrative. The folktale has its roots in the Middle Ages, and the first printed version, by Charles Perrault, appeared in 1697. She reminds readers that, in Perrault’s version, Red does not make a clean getaway — that the Wolf “fell upon” Red, her punishment for having wandered from the path.

What she hates most about the story, Berry writes, is that there is no question of coexistence, no restorative justice, “just two creatures in moral opposition. Only one ever makes it out alive.” She notes that popular versions of Little Red “seemed like origin stories for a dominant narrative about predator and prey” that not only vilify wolves unfairly but also reinforce the “male Western imagination of female victim.”

Red Riding Hood in bed with the wolf. Credit: Gustave Dore

Berry supplies a hefty set of footnotes, perfect for retracing the path of her hard-won knowledge, though the book could have benefited from an index, for readers who don’t want to hunt for names and locations.

One concept to which Berry circles back multiple times is entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf. The expression typically refers to the dusky part of the day when the lighting or the curve of the road makes it difficult to distinguish between a dog or a wolf. For Berry, the phrase suggests the ability to distinguish real danger from false fear, “that hazy hour where we not only evaluate our fear, but learn to question it, deny it, walk beside it.”

“More people are killed each year by cows, by toddlers who pick up guns, falling vending machines, lawnmowers and lightning and ladders, autoerotic asphyxiations.”

Berry emphasizes that wolves rarely threaten human lives: “More people are killed each year by cows, by toddlers who pick up guns, falling vending machines, lawnmowers and lightning and ladders, autoerotic asphyxiations.” Again and again, Berry examines how the wolf has nonetheless become a surrogate for humans’ greatest fears.

Berry writes with a strong sense of assurance, suspense and wit, balancing her personal experiences, the peregrinations of OR-7 and the history of humankind’s fraught relationships with wolves.

Ultimately, Berry suggests that humans should look beyond the hair-raising stories and simply pay attention to how wolves are part of a balanced ecosystem. By the end of Wolfish, she is able to sleep alone in an Oregon campsite without worrying about wolves, in sheep’s clothing or not. She is able “to lie beside the things I could not control” and surrender to the time entre chien et loup.

Freelance writer Michael Berry has written about books and authors for various local and national publications, including the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sierra Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Chronicle. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.