Looking for the Invisible Infinite in the Footprints of Wolves

Essay

By Kathleen Stocking | Nov. 26, 2021

There’s a faint bluish cast to the day, a Delft blue, like the blue of the sky in Vermeer’s paintings, blue like moonlight, but in the day. 

In my mind I see footprints through the snow, out across the ice to the island.  I think they are wolf tracks, but how would I know? My mind works, most days, by what poet Walt Whitman calls “the law of divine indirections.”  

The first wolf I ever saw was in the line outside the Vermeer exhibit in Washington, D. C., in 1996, the boon companion of a male scientist. The man says once he’d had to go on a research expedition and left her with his mother and his companion stopped eating while he was gone and was near death when he came home. He never left her again.    

We don’t understand love, except to know that it’s real. It seems to be the mysterious core of us. But what is its purpose?  

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I read about wolves. Wolves in myth. Wolves becoming extinct. The wolf pack on Isle Royale. The wolves reintroduced to the Rocky Mountains. The female wolf written about in the Smithsonian magazine who traveled 3,000 miles to find a mate; she had a chip in her that’s how they knew. 

Wolves nurture and teach their pups, just like people do. They play with them. They teach them how to hunt. People and wolves hooked up sometime long ago, and wolves became dogs.  
     
Look at the body language of your family dog someday. See how your dog will paw the ground as an invitation to play, roll on its back to show submission, wave its tail in greeting, and circle around, trying to find the right place to lie down, all the while lining up with the earth’s magnetic field. 
I had a big, white wolf-dog once; he would breathe in sync with me as I was falling asleep. I’ve heard of other wolf pets doing this.

Wolves sit deep in the human subconscious. Some men want to kill them, to have that trophy. Others want to study them because in wolves’ ways of working together and loving each other, they are like us. They live and die for each other.

Death. Five million people have died from the novel coronavirus. In “Journal of the Plague Year,” from the 1600s, Daniel Defoe writes about the carts coming through the streets to collect the dead, the sound of the huge wooden cartwheels on the cobblestone roads, echoing through the empty town; the cartman, calling out, in a ringing, sonorous voice, “Bring out your dead.” Defoe writes about “the brutal courage of the poor” and how they take the worst jobs, eagerly and without complaint, to feed their families.

My friend’s mother died. A schoolmate’s wife died. Five million. We all know someone. But it isn’t just the deaths from the pandemic. It’s the pilot who is now driving a bus. It’s the single mother of three who had a stroke and had to put her children in foster care and is herself now in adult foster care. It’s the migrants and their children in the forests of Belarus, freezing. It’s the children in Yemen, starving. It’s the Haitians and their children drowning in the river. It’s the wildfires, the droughts, the floods, the famines. 

You think you’re reading Revelations, but it’s the daily newspaper. We are all going through all the stages of grief all the time: shock, anger, depression denial, bargaining, acceptance. Not always in that order, but always in waves. That’s how grief comes. In waves. Everyone describes grief this way, as coming in waves. 

So that’s the water in my grieving mind’s image, frozen, and the tracks will lead to land. In Native American mythology, in some of the tribes, the wolves are a brother to man. In other groups, ancient ones, the wolves were the link between life and death. In the European legends, the wolf was the one Little Red Riding Hood needed to fear. 

“This is the time for reflection. What kind of world do we want?” writer Isabel Allende asks rhetorically during COVID, and then she answers her own question: “We want a world of beauty, we want a civilization based on mutual respect, and respect for other species and for nature. We want the kind of world where peace, empathy, decency, truth, and compassion, prevail. Above all, we want a joyful world. Together we can achieve it.”

One rainy evening a friend and I escape the plague, finding our way through the pines to Interlochen’s Dendrinos Chapel, the one with all the organ pipes. The conductor is lively, moving like an athlete. The student singers on the stage are in black attire and black masks. How can they sing in their masks? They do. Their youth alone is a song. They sing “Heaven Unfolding,” and “Our Light in Our Night,” and “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” songs to give us hope. Hope is a form of love.

“It is an unnameable (stet) boon love hauls down, that people rightly prize as the best of life,” Annie Dillard writes in a story set on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in winter. “Not only will a cave-dwelling pair cull food and kill so kids thrive, but their feeling for each other, not to mention for the kids, brings something beyond food people need.” 

We are smarter because someone loves us and takes care of us, like wolves, a little. But we live longer. There are neurons we are born with that are only activated if another person picks us up and holds us and talks to us and takes care of us. We have about 25,000 genes, most of which have something to do with the brain.     

Love makes the brain work better. All those endorphins. All those neurons. Or whatever is up in there. But you don’t need to understand the science to know that love is good, all kinds: brotherly love, God’s love, romantic love, love of beauty. Out of love we make music, make art, make families, build planes, make poetry, make meaning, make what is best about us. 

Stocking writes from Traverse City.