Anyone who has had a close relationship with wolves can never forget them. In some unexplainable way, these animals are able to give to their human friends an awareness and an understanding of life that was missing before the relationship. Perhaps this is because wolves are so extraordinarily perceptive and so joyfully eager to appraise and understand all the influences that surround them at all times.
No odor, no sound, no sight ever gets by them without being investigated, either from afar and with caution, if the animals feel threatened, or from very nearby if they are relaxed and comfortable in their surroundings. Day by day, wolves teach their human friends by their own examples; or perhaps I should say that they try to teach us, for the truth is that we make very bad pupils because our own senses have been dulled by centuries of neglect, while our cortex has become preoccupied with logic at the expense of intuition, the inherent gift of the wild that served early humans so well and that, if given a chance to do so, can yet allow us to attain understanding without becoming lost in a maze of “facts.”
Nevertheless, because they are such good communicators, wolves do manage to impart some of this near-mystical awareness to their human friends. As a result, we emerge the better from our contact with them. And the more we think about them afterward, when we recall quiet times of communion that united us with the primordial wild, the more vividly we remember them.
“In Praise of Wolves” (c) 1986 by RD Lawrence, ISBN 0-00-637703-3
Also available as an e-book.
Cry Wild 