Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

“Well now, you don’t have to rewild on such large scales. You can start small, in your own backyard. I’ve been growing wildflowers for years and oh—all sorts of wee creatures have been coming to visit me.”

“But now, change is frightening to some,” she concedes after a little while. “And when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”

I stop being a woman, a human, an animal, whatever I was. I am fury dressed in flesh.

we both look up to see what the sky does, how it dances green and purple and blue, the colors too brilliant to be in Werner’s, and I am crying still but now it is for the beauty of the world, and for its gentle pull, for the mystery of it and its timing, for its deep, deep knowing, when I was so close to the edge and now I am returned,

Wolves don’t like the taste of penned animals, they like game meat, and they like to hunt it. It’s called their prey image. Sheep and cattle, as vulnerable as they are, are not part of that prey image. They’re a last resort to a starving wolf.

“Animals learn their lessons. They’re smarter than people that way.”

I marveled anew at the complexity of the power dynamics between wolves. They are capable of recognizing personality traits, of knowing that inner strength is as powerful as physical. Dominance often has nothing to do with size or aggression.

I feel wolf; I am forgetting myself.

You can’t be angry with an animal, can’t hate it, get revenge upon it. That doesn’t make sense. She didn’t kill because she was cruel. She killed because there are instincts in her body telling her to do so, to protect against threats, to survive, sustain herself, live on.

You have gone the way Dad did, like the animals do. You have gone into the wild to die. Or maybe, you have gone to live.

I must again acknowledge the wild creatures and places in this world, which inspired every word of this novel. The gentle they have shown us far outstrips anything we have ever shown them in return. Though Scotland has not yet passed an initiative to reintroduce wolves, it’s my hope that they—along with the rest of the world, and especially my homeland of Australia—will further embrace the essential work of rewilding, and maybe in doing so, we will begin to rewild ourselves.