About Wolves

"Wolves may feature in our myths, our history, and our dreams, but they have their own future, their own loves, their own dreams to fulfill."

--Anthony Miles

"Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves."

--Barry Lopez

"We have doomed the Wolf not for what it is, but for what we have deliberately and mistakenly perceived it to be..the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer..which is, in reality no more than a reflexed images of ourself."

--Farley Mowat

Wolf at Beaver Creek

by Mike Burwell

(from The Cartography of Water)

This gray shape before me

not any known thing.

From twenty feet, my eyes slide

into other eyes, full

of wild streaks of darkening sky.

The creek rushes in its small calling.

He moves first, turns from the trail,

trots off, turns, stares,

trots, stops, stares

three more times before the willows

swallow him. I am rooted under clouds

ripping in winds too high to hear,

that other eye heaving in the heart.

"Wolf is the Grand Teacher. Wolf is the sage, who after many winters upon the sacred path and seeking the ways of wisdom, returns to share new knowledge with the tribe. Wolf is both the radical and the traditional in the same breath. When the Wolf walks by you-you will remember."

--Robert Ghost Wolf