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Click to close Image by: istockphoto.com Click to close Image by: istockphoto.com Click to close Image by: Tracy Ane Brooks courtesy of Mission: Wolf. Obediah, a resident of Mission:Wolf: "I am here! I exist!"

 "Just as Little Red Riding Hood entered the wood, a wolf met her. Little Red Riding Hood did not know what a wicked creature he was, and was not at all afraid of him." - The Grimm Brothers, Little Red Riding Hood

"There are no new stories in nature, only new observers."
- Rick Bass, The New Wolves

In 1998, with hopes bigger than their fears, individuals with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released wolves on the Arizona-New Mexico border. This was the culminating moment of a reintroduction effort two decades in the making. With the opening of the holding pens, wolves stepped into their historic desert home for the first time in more than 50 years.

Canis lupus baileyi returned from the brink of extinction in the late 1970s when presumably the final five remaining Mexican wolves were found in the wilds of Durango, Mexico, and placed under human care. There, they became precious breeding stock, the Adams and Eves for the future of their species. The 50 Mexican wolves now in captivity and the 60 that roam free are all descendants of that small, lonely pack.

Today, nearly a decade after the return of wolf-song to the desert, there are half as many wild-roaming wolves as the recovery team had planned. Sixty percent of wolf deaths in the region result from human hands. Wolves perceived to be threats to livestock continue to be killed by the same federal agencies trying to save them. The story of the restored wolves seems to cast the canids in a familiar role, sitting in the crosshairs of age-old human fears.

As the landscape's language of wolves is resurrected, hopes and fears will continue to collide so long as new generations are told the old wolf stories. And with each wolf killed or captured to assuage the locals' fears - and with each child taught the same fearful tale - one less hope is allowed to howl on the wind.

In 1922, as government funded wolf extermination was nearing its end - and the final remaining wolves were proving to be elusive targets of mythological proportions - a professional wolf hunter unearthed his quarry north of Grand Junction, Colo. He found a den belonging to a notorious alpha pair that included Bigfoot, the Terror of Lane County. The paid professional crawled into the den and extracted the whelps, barely old enough to open their eyes. He killed the mewling pups and extracted their scent glands. With these, he marked his traps: The scent of the youngsters was meant to attract the parents. It did. Bigfoot and his mate were caught and killed. The government hunter was praised for his prowess, for making Colorado a safer, more civilized place.

In Catron County, N.M., heart of the Mexican wolf reintroduction effort, children are frightened. They won't play in the yard or walk home from the bus stop alone. The county called in a child psychologist who found the children startle more easily now, and they have become "clingy." The county's wolf investigation officer claims that kids from more than 15 families have been harmed psychologically by the presence of wolves. Terms like "post-traumatic stress disorder" are being assigned to resident children. The kids have more nightmares. The wolf investigator stands watch at ranches, equipped with night vision goggles, watching for wolves and giving the families peace of mind.

The county is now building fences around its school bus stops to protect its children from renegade wolves. County officials are working to prevent problems, "as opposed to waiting for one of these wolves to kill a child," according to the county manager.

The children in Catron County now stay inside, watching protective walls rise up and listening to the newest additions to old wolf legends and lore.

My husband and I recently visited a wolf sanctuary near Gardner, Colo., hoping to glean an understanding of why these creatures became the focus of a global genocide lasting half-a-millennia. We arrived late and camped on the property, our sleep punctuated by wolf-song and permeated by the feeling of having gone back in time. By daylight, however, with wolves behind fences - being fed ground horsemeat, vitamins and arthritis medication - the frontier feeling faded. Instead, I felt as if I were standing in the midst of a refugee camp. Though well cared for and loved by the staff at Mission:Wolf, the wolves were confined and consigned to these pens - locked up for life. With their exit from the womb, they entered a state of limbo, immediately becoming anachronisms in this domesticated and urbanized age. They no longer belonged anywhere else.

However, their howls belonged in the landscape. One wolf would test the air with its unique voice, and then 30 individual voices would slowly rise to a crescendo. The howls would then taper off until only one lonely voice remained with a lonely echo in response. The sound filled the voids that have existed for generations.

There was more substance to the howling than I ever could have imagined. The vocalizations were enormous containers of music and emotion that both announced, I am here! I exist! and a longing for something more. The howls were haunting, mournful, alive and keening. They were symphony and dirge simultaneously.

The founder of the sanctuary, Kent Weber, explained to us that the wolves were more actively howling than normal, and for good reason: They were grieving. In recent months, three of the elders at the sanctuary had died, leaving their mates alone for the first time in over a decade. It was a dirge we were listening to, and the wolves' capacity for sorrow was startling.

If the grieving for three pack-mates was this palpable, how might we measure the grief of an entire slaughtered species over the decades and centuries? Even the voids the wolves have left on the landscape, vast as they are, cannot begin to contain that kind of ache. How do we atone for authoring such a tragedy?

Several family dogs have been killed by wolves in Catron County. One teenaged hunter was approached by wolves while out hunting. He stayed calm and so did they. No one was hurt. A horse was killed in its corral on one remote ranch, and wolves left scat only a foot from the family's doorstep after feasting on the beast. A nine-year-old girl was rounding up horses when her dog was attacked. The dog lived, but the girl was understandably upset. And according to statistics compiled by Defenders of Wildlife - a nonprofit that pays ranchers full market value for confirmed wolf-related livestock losses - there have been 136 total livestock depredations since the release of the wolves in 1998.

This is half of the story.

Conversely, in North American history, there has never been a documented incident of a healthy, wild wolf killing a human. Not one. Meanwhile, 4.7 million people are attacked by domestic dogs annually, resulting in an average 20 deaths per year. Yet, we are not systematically destroying our pets, nor are we teaching our kids that dogs will eat them alive. Instead, we discuss the viciousness of wolves and how our families and livelihoods are imperiled by their presence. And we are literally and figuratively fencing in our children to protect them from the evils of the wild.

Just more than a dozen wolf-livestock encounters per year during wolf reintroduction hardly seems worth the frenzy, but I do not live near the Blue Range where 60 wolves now wander free. I do not reside in Catron County, a land with its own history, sense of place and purpose. My animals are not my livelihood. And I do not have children. Perhaps I would feel differently if my progeny and my profits ran among wolves.

But having heard wolves howl their longing into the Colorado night - I doubt it.

A picture sits on my desk as I write this: An older man crouches at the edge of a wolf den with a shovel in one hand and a dead pup in the other. Eight dead whelps lie scattered at his feet. He has the grim look of necessity on his face. The pups are all too young to have their eyes open. The one in his hand, like the others, is hardly larger than a potato. The whelps on the ground have their tiny legs splayed in all directions, like so many rag-dolls dropped from young and clumsy fingers. The shovel seems to be implicated in their death.

This photo haunts me. I don't need it on my desk to see it. I go to sleep with it at night and take it to work with me. The photo won't leave me alone. I want to somehow take the shovel to the man in the photo, even though he's long dead. Even though it's just a picture. Even though I'm powerless to change the past.

And yet, part of me knows that there is more to this man than the picture portrays. He was likely a father and a grandfather. Perhaps he went home after the deed was done, perhaps he felt some remorse as he washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and then maybe he let go of any sadness as he embraced his grandchildren, knowing that he'd done something to make the world safer for those small beings now in his arms.

It is only conjecture, most of it. But I do know this man was more than just a cold-hearted killer. Such is human nature: We are bigger than the pictures immortalizing us.

Those of us that want to see wolves return to our remaining, struggling wild places, we tend to marginalize the anti-wolf crowd. We reduce their motives and actions to denigrating terms: redneck, white trash, hick. We want to box them in, label them and disallow any complexity behind their attitudes. We try to cast them as simple, flat characters - just as they do to the wolves. It is much easier to discount that which we cannot understand.

Perhaps the problem - on both sides - is not so much our attitudes toward wolves or wildness, but the stories we repeat to ourselves and our children. Maybe it is a lack of deep listening and compassionate understanding, so busy are we in perpetuating our own beliefs. We have become blind to the multiplicity of possibilities within a single creature, be it man or beast. What might happen if we were to delve, wholeheartedly, into the narrative of another instead of our own?

In the wild, there are no saints and sinners, there is no black and white. Wilderness, just like the human psyche, is an immense grey area.

Wolves are complex creatures. They are intelligent, intuitive, and inquisitive. They form deep bonds with one another: they mate for life, they play and cuddle, and the whole group participates in caring for the young and the infirm. They cooperate. They demonstrate altruism.

And they are predators. They take life to maintain it. They kill other animals, including pets and livestock. Sometimes, they attack each other. Wolves are capable of intense ferocity and viciousness. They are finely tuned killers.

To deny any of these facts is to tell only half the story. And to swap the villain for the hero in our persistent wolf lore - to now cast the wolf-hunting human as wicked and the wolf as noble - gets us nowhere. It's still the same story, just told backwards. What we need is to expand our story, not reframe it.

Open space in the mind and heart is just as necessary as its preservation on the ground. We need to set aside room for the range of possibilities. We need to embrace the variations of grey. Including grey wolves. And the greys of humanity.

There is a Norse legend about wolves that tells of Sol and Mani, children of the gods who were entrusted with driving the chariots of the sun and moon across the sky. These were not well disciplined children, and they drove their respective chariots willy-nilly through the ether. This did not please Gulveig, the hag of death, so she sent forth two wolves, Skoll and Hati, to chase the sun and moon chariots. The wolves were not fast enough to catch the celestial bodies, but they persist in hunting, and thus arise our days and years.

If Skoll and Hati ever do seize sun and moon, life ends. But, in the meantime, the wolves keep the chariots moving across the sky, thus ensuring that all life on earth continues to move and grow.

This is wolf lore with room for the light and dark, one that accurately depicts the line we all walk between life and death, saint and sinner, creation and destruction. It is a story with as much room for the nature of wolves as the heavens will afford.

Perhaps we don't need to create a new, expansive story. We just need to delve deeper into our existing trove of legends.

Catron County is a land full of stories - its people's attitudes toward the wolves support this. The residents' reactions are not visceral; rather, they are based in communal belief as supported by storytelling. A visceral reaction would have to be innate, and I do not believe that children come into this world with an instinctual fear of the wild. Nature does not instill a fear of nature. But a nurturing influence would.

We send our children to bed with fables of child-eating Big Bad Wolves, and there are no teddy wolves in their arms as they drift off. By day, the young ones in our family hear the stories we tell about work, financial security, and making it in an unpredictable world. In Catron County, this means telling stories about wolves, the threat they pose to local livestock and livelihoods, and how we just don't know when one of the canine interlopers might steal off with a defenseless child.

Objectively, such concerns don't hold water. Wolves don't eat children, and international livestock markets are more likely to drive a rancher out of the business than are wolves - especially when ranchers are compensated for their wolf-induced losses. Even bovine respiratory infections are more dangerous, killing 40 times more cattle than Canis lupus.

Yet, these tales ring true subjectively to their tellers, people who feel powerless and vulnerable in the face of change. The wolf is emblematic of all we cannot control, a symbol for all that threatens us. And it is much easier to hate or destroy a wolf than it is to leave a mark on the global livestock market.

It is the power of wolves as a symbol that transcends generations, that continues to frighten us when all the facts should assuage our fears. Centuries of inherited symbolism cannot be forgotten overnight, especially when real howls reach our alert and sleepless ears. However, it is within our power - as parents and educators - to affect the stories and fears held by a younger generation, one that still contains large open spaces of the mind - spaces vast enough to let the wolves roam free in a new kind of reintroduction and recovery effort.

Across the plains in the late 1800s, buffalo corpses - valued only for their skins, and thus left to rot - were laced with strychnine to at least serve the purpose of killing wolves. Near Hutchinson, Kansas, the poisoned wolf bodies were tossed into the road that crossed Swampy Creek. Eventually, enough wolf bodies and bones filled the swamp to allow wagons safe passage.

What if we were to lay down our persistent and prodigious wolf lore in a similar fashion? What if the bones of those dead tales could provide safe passage across treacherous ground, leading us to a new understanding of the stories we tell and how they shape our world? What if we could listen deeply to a howl and hear it as celebration or sorrow, but not as a threat?

Then, perhaps, safe from shaky ground, we could begin to atone for the tragedy of wolf extermination that we authored. It is a story still writ large - and largely silent - upon the landscape.

Jen Jackson writes from Moab, Utah, where she lives in appreciation of powerful stories and fierce landscapes.