Are you afraid of wolves?
It may not be a question you’ve considered recently. After all, how often does one encounter a large, wild canid in the course of day-to-day life? But consider, for a moment, the question in its broadest possible context. There’s the big bad wolf, and Peter and the Wolf, lone wolves, and of course the boy who cried wolf. Villainous wolves appear again and again, in folk tales and pop songs alike. We could be thrown to the wolves, or the wolves could be at our door. We have always been taught that wolves are to be feared.
But are wolves themselves that much of a threat? Or have they simply become a cultural shorthand for anything frightening? And what happens when the wolf is made to stand for ideas, or even people?
These are the questions that nature writer and journalist Erica Berry (who has written for Outside, Catapult, and The Atlantic, among others) pokes at, relentlessly, throughout Wolfish, released in February. Wolfish will, inevitably, end up getting categorized mostly as “Nature Writing,” and that’s okay - the label fits. But Wolfish is much more than a book about wolves. It offers a unique mix of hard science, literary criticism, sociology and personal memoir that puts it in the same liminal space as Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist (another Norwich Bookstore favorite).
Berry’s fascination with wolves as harbingers of, and metaphors for, fear, begins with the illicit killings of wolves in rural Oregon. “Why,” she writes, “in a time and place where wolves present no tangible threat to human safety, does a human kill a wolf…in the middle of a forest?” But it soon grows to encompass a fascination with the very nature of fear itself, as she finds wolves everywhere: in ancient myths, in xenophobic propaganda, and as a stand-in for very human predators.
But even as wolves are cast as symbols of fear, they also, time and again, serve as models of autonomy and freedom. Can one be separated from the other?
Because I’m about the same age as Berry, and because we both grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in similar families that offered relative safety, stability and privilege, I found myself relating to her struggles to understand her own fears and anxieties, which often seem to her to be rooted in nothing at all. In environments where she should, by all accounts, feel safe, she reckons time and again with the feeling that something is lurking at the edge of the forest. It’s a feeling many of us can identify with, and recognize in ourselves. But what are the implications of assigning it to another being?
Berry asks some big questions here, and not all of them can be answered. But even in the asking, she takes us to places we wouldn’t necessarily go on our own. Are we really afraid of wolves, in an increasingly scary world? How does one go about becoming brave - as a human, and especially as a woman? From Remus and Romulus to the journey of OR-7 - the first wild wolf to return to Oregon - Wolfish explores largely uncharted territory in a remarkable way.
Sam Kaas and Emma Nichols own and run the Norwich Bookstore.