Brothers To Man.

Brothers to Man.

It’s been so long since they’ve walked among us, seventy years and they have returned to grace their fellows of the grasslands, forests, deserts and tundras. For millions of years they were ever present. In truth we’ve never known a world without them, nor should we contemplate one. During a time we still fled up into the trees in fear of predators they watched. When echoed our phobic cries of the night and rages against the rains they heard. As with humanity they were once fruitful and multiplied. As small bands of humanity tread their way across five continents we always saw the elders’ guiding paw prints in advance of our own. Inheriting their ways we too became hunters of the plains. Soon to follow was our mastery of extremes, from swamps to deserts; tropics to the arctic; out in the savannas; back into the woods and many places between. All in following their lead. Never to attain their keen senses we harnessed some among them.

A dire age befell the wolf as we lost our way and the bond between us faded. A hunter’s strategy was misinterpreted as cruelty; the chase seen to be taunting of hapless victims; a way of life tailored for bare survival turned into savage infamy. First, humans took wolves to be slayers in dark, while the wolf knew our hearts better than our own dogs. Already having learned enough to distance themselves from the self proclaimed lords of the Earth people saw their healthy fear of the fires we brandished as evil receding under the light of God. Yet well enough couldn’t be left alone. Throughout much of the Old World most especially Europe wolves, labeled agents of Lucifer and Hounds of Hell, stood convicted for crimes invented in the minds of men. The judgment of humans claiming sovereignty of a deity and the mandate of heaven. Under this they hanged, disemboweled, burned or beheaded our spiritual siblings. The sentences passed were meant as a marriage of terror and torture. Accused of a shadowy nature the European Wolf now is less than a shadow, no longer to inhabit thick forests and open fields. All but mere footnotes brought to ‘civilized’ heel.

For a time things in the New World were different. Humankind spoke openly with great affection of their kinship to the wolf. Each gave the other due space to live in harmonious understanding of their niche never to take more than could be given back. However, over seven centuries’ time, other faces of the Sacred Hoop of the Human Nation set sights for western horizons. Takers and treaty breakers, came a tide of real-estate appraisers baring childish wants guided by maps more coloring books than atlases, slicing the continent into another birthday cake with flags posted in places of candles. During the genocide of humans by other humans through the Indian Removal Act, a villainously political correction of ecological and biological warfare, the wolf shared the fate of its neighbors. While handing out to members of our very own species blankets weaponized with smallpox we took on a duel front holocaust by massacring the buffalo herds. The wolf was accused of targeting the strongest of livestock. They in fact dared little to tempt the wrath of a mother elk or caribou who were still exhausted from calving. Arraign, deported or otherwise felled to an industrial scale capital punishment for being excessive in population we now outnumber them ten thousand to one. Framed for the environmental destruction of national parklands they starved in lands once capable of supporting a great masses of herbivores, yet now can’t sustain a tenth as many domestic cattle that graze to dust the grasslands’ renewable ability of old. Those who hunted for nothing more than a good time projected injustice into the wolves for eating their kills. Deer, elk, caribou and bison herds made genetically healthy by the cull and kept strong through the chase knew little of starvation under the stewardship of lupine shepherds. Now these diminished herds scratch harder for much less. All carnivores ate at the table of brother wolf and prospered as the bounty was maintained. Yet somehow thunderstick carrying skins never consume enough to fill their own empty hearts like Germanic mythical dragons whose hunger grows with each meal.

As we split hairs and split atoms the wolf shares its singular place at dinner with all pack members. Each shoulders equally a parental responsibility though the cubs most often are not their own. Their haunting calls for true family values renders cheep the rhetoric of elephants in suits and donkeys wearing ties. Penetrating eyes, once construed as demonic, demonstrate a level of understanding disturbing to those would hide the truth of their nature while leaving those who would reveal themselves never the same again. Where as man debates his genealogy, be it angel or ape in origin, wolves consider how best to flee encroaching human habitation. In a nation where due process of law and presumption of innocence were meant to prevail, ranchers shoot on sight thus taking in their own hands skewed sense of justice: guilty until proven otherwise. Should you, in body, slay the wolf you commit homicide against the soul of humanity. Yes homicide, for they are we, one in the same, and should be disowned no longer. America is the refuge and domain of immigrants while our canine brothers long to reside in their old house and roam free in the lands of timeless ancestral heritage. The good son of Utah’s and America’s wild places has come home asking to be welcome. With forgiveness in his heart, the wolf merits pardon for sins not committed. Are we beings of brilliant spiritual light or mere apes that talk?


-The Heretic