THERE WERE WOLF tracks on the gravel road this morning. They ran along the roadside for a good quarter of a mile. If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily mistake them for the paw prints of a large dog. They were at least a hand span across, and the animal’s weight had pushed the prints deep into the muck. They veered off suddenly up a steep incline, as though the wolf had sensed something and decided to vanish. Small packs of coyotes dwell in the ridges behind our home. We’ve seen and heard them many times. Now and then they’ll ramble around eating the dog or cat food left out on people’s decks. But wolves are oddities here. I can recall seeing them once, out on the lake ice in the dead of winter. So the tracks surprised and enthralled me.
As I contemplated the wolf’s presence, ideas and shards of knowledge whirled through my head. I’ve never been close to a real wolf, but I was raised with the same mythology about the animal as everybody else. Wolves are creatures of mystery. They are beasties of the full moon, with long shadows. They are spectres, phantoms, shape shifters, amber-eyed denizens in the realm of our darkest fears. They are remnants of our primordial past, prowling the perimeters of memory: lank, lean and patient a shell.
I was twenty-four when I rejoined my people. Whenever my family took me out on the land, a keen thrill ran through me. As foreign as the bush was to me, I seemed to be connected to it. I was excited by the depth of the shadows among the trees, by the light splayed on a table of granite by the shore, by the smell of bog and marsh wafting across a bay. The land felt alive. When I was out there standing on it, I felt alive, too, fully alive for perhaps the first time in my life.
I felt that kinetic jolt of connection when we first moved here, and I experience it every morning when I walk. It’s not just the necessary task of walking the dog that calls me out; it’s the land itself, the lingering feel of wild. I thought I ’d never lose that sense of being joined when I first discovered it, but I learned it can be easily forgotten. I can seal myself off from that spiritual calm, that joyful feeling of belonging, with the simple act of closing a door. That bothers me. As a Native person whose ceremonial and spiritual sense stems from a relationship with the land, I don’t feel comfortable knowing I can shut that off like a light switch. As a human being with stewardship obligations to the planet, this embarrasses me. As a writer who often expresses themes of kinship, I’m stunned by the realization.
The easy way out is to say that we all have to work to survive, and my job involves being indoors at the computer. Moreover, I could add, the world demands a certain distance from us; we can’t be meditative and earth-conscious all the time. We can’t experience a primordial thrill with each breath. But that’s what we should strive for, I believe, that charge in the belly that says we are not alone and the world is not ours to order. The planet is not here for us. Rather, we are here for the planet. Something as simple yet confounding as a wolf track can take us back to that.