ONE OF THE PROBLEMS that comes with trying to take a wider view of animals is that most of us have cut ourselves off from them conceptually. We do not think of ourselves as part of the animal kingdom. Indians did. They thought of themselves as The People (that is the translation from the native tongue of most tribal names) and of animals as The Wolves, The Bears, The Mice, and so forth. From here on in this chapter, the line between Indians and wolves may fade, not because Indians did not perceive the differences but because they were preoccupied with the similarities. They were inclined to compare and contrast their way of living with, say, the weasel’s way or the eagle’s way. They would say, “We are like wolves in that we …” They were anthropomorphic—and animistic. Highly so. We aren’t talking, really, about our wolf anymore. We are talking about their wolf. We are, in a sense, in a foreign country.
The question the old Nunamiut man answered was an eminently sensible one in his view. The caribou-hunting tactics of wolves in the Brooks Range and those of the Nunamiut were similar. And similarity in hunting technique in the same geographical area was found elsewhere. Wolves and Cree Indians in Alberta maneuvered buffalo out onto lake ice, where the big animals lost their footing and were more easily killed. Pueblo Indians and wolves in Arizona ran deer to exhaustion, though it might have taken the Pueblos a day to do it. Wolf and Shoshoni Indian lay flat on the prairie grass of Wyoming and slowly waved—the one its tail, the other a strip of hide—to attract curious but elusive antelope close enough to kill. And if we have made the right assumptions at Paleolithic sites in North America such as Folsom, early man killed mammoths in the same mobbing way wolves did, because men did not yet have extensions of themselves like the bow and arrow. They had to get in close with a spear and stab the animal to death.
The correspondence in life-styles, however, goes deeper than this. Wolves ate grass, possibly as a scour against intestinal parasites; Indians ate wild plants for medicinal reasons. Both held and used hunting territories. Both were strongly familial and social in organization. To some extent both went to specific areas to hunt certain types of game. (Two or three wolf packs today come to hunt sheep at a place called Okokmilaga on the North Slope of Alaska’s Brooks Range. Various tribes, Ponca and Sioux among them, traveled to the same leks in South Dakota to hunt sage grouse.) Both wolf and Indian had a sign language. The tribe, like the pack, broke up at certain times of the year, and joined together later to hunt more efficiently. In times of scarcity, Indian hunters ate first; this also seems to be the case with wolves.
Highly intriguing is the fact that white-tailed deer in Minnesota sought security from Indian hunters by moving into the border area between warring tribes, where hunters were least likely to show up, and the fact that deer do the same with respect to wolves—seek security along the border zones between wolf territories, where wolves spend the least time hunting.
The most interesting correspondence between wolf and Indian, however, may be that involving the perception of territory.
When Indians left their own country and entered that of another tribe—a group of young Assiniboin warriors, for example, sneaking off on foot into the country of the Gros Ventre to steal horses—they moved like wolves: in small packs; at night and during the crepuscular hours; taking advantage of ground contours to observe but remain hidden; moving in and out of the foreign territory quickly. Often on foot and in unfamiliar surroundings, they had to remain invisible to the inhabitants. Elusiveness, therefore, was a quality Indians cultivated and admired. It served them as well as it served the wolf who, in a hard winter, trespasses into neighboring packs’ territories to look for food, to make a kill, and to go home before anyone knows he’s been there.
The definition and defense of home range was as important to the Indian as it seems to be to the wolf. The defense was mostly of food resources in general and of the physical area adjacent to the village in particular; under certain circumstances trespassers were killed. If a party of Flathead warriors was surprised in northern Idaho by a party of resident Kutenai, the Flatheads might be attacked and killed to a man. If it was bitter cold and storming, they might signal each other that it was too cold to fight (wolves probably wouldn’t). If the Flathead party was reduced to one man who fought bravely and was thought, therefore, to have strong medicine, he might be let go. Fatal encounters and nonfatal encounters between trespassing and resident wolves bear a striking similarity. In Minnesota, for example, in 1975, a small pack of wolves moving through the territory of a much larger pack was suddenly surprised by the larger pack. One animal in the small pack was killed, two ran off, and the fourth, a female, held ten or eleven wolves to a standoff in a river before they all withdrew and left her.
Some tribes were stricter about boundaries and more bellicose about trespassing incidents than others, as are some wolf packs. The boundaries of most Indian territories, like those of wolves, were fluid; they changed with the movement of the game herds, the size of the tribe, the evolution of tribal divisions, and the time of year. For both wolf and Indian, where the principal game animal was nonmigratory, as deer and moose are, territorial boundaries were more important than they were in areas where principal game species were migratory, like caribou. There are instances where neighboring wolf packs have fought each other and then joined territories, just as some tribes established alliances—the five nations of the Iroquois, for example. And I mentioned earlier that the Pawnee and Omaha, traditional enemies, had an agreement whereby each could enter the other’s territory to hunt buffalo.
The Indian practice of passing family hunting territories on to succeeding generations throws even more light on this interesting correspondence of territorial spacing, hunting rights, and trespassing. Family hunting territories were most important, again, where food could be found in the same place all the time. The salmon-eating tribes on the northwest coast and the Algonkian deer eaters in the northeastern woodlands both had appropriate family and clan hunting territories that were passed from one generation to the next. Among the Tlingit, a northwest coast tribe, each family had its own place on the rivers where it fished and an area where it gathered berries. No one else would fish or berry there unless invited to do so. In the eastern woodlands, especially in northeastern Minnesota, resident wolves seem to have a strong sense of territory as defined by the major food source (white-tailed deer), at least as strong as the family hunting territories that existed in that same country when the Chippewa lived there.
Which leads to another thought, more abstract, about trespassing. It was often assumed that Plains Indians went out intending to kill their rivals. This was not true. They went out to deliberately face rivals in a very dangerous game. The danger itself, the threat of death, was the thrill, not killing; and to engage in it repeatedly was recognized as a way to prove strength of character. Analogously, it might be valuable to consider the encounters of rival wolves as a similar kind of deadly recreation. Just as intriguing is the idea that some game animals assent to a chase-without-death with wolves. Caribou and yearling wolves, for example, are often seen in harmless chases getting a taste of death. Building spirit. Training. Wolf and caribou.
That wolves and Neolithic hunting people in North America resembled each other as predators was not the result of conscious imitation. It was convergent evolution, the most successful way for meat eaters to live. Conscious identification with the wolf, on the other hand, especially among Indians on the Great Plains, was a mystical experience based on a penetrating perception of the wolf’s lifeway, its gestalt. And it could, on occasion, become conscious imitation.
Native American perceptions of the wolf varied largely according to whether or not a tribe was agricultural. It was naturally among the hunting tribes that the wolf played the greater mythic-religious role because the wolf himself was a great hunter, not a great farmer. He was retained for a while in the mythology of agricultural tribes and regarded by them as an animal of great power and mystery, but his place there was slowly eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods of the harvest.
In the native American cosmology, insofar as it can be regarded as the same from tribe to tribe, the universe was perceived in six directions: the space above; that below; and the four cardinal divisions of the world horizon. Frequently on the plains the bear represented the west, the mountain lion the north, the wolf the east, and the wildcat the south. They were regarded as the creatures with the greatest power and influence in the spirit world.
It should be understood, however, that the Indian did not rank-order animals. Each creature, from deer mouse to meadowlark, was respected for the qualities it best seemed to epitomize; when those particular qualities were desired by someone, that animal was approached as one who knew much about that thing. The animals assigned the greatest cosmological significance—the bear, lion, wolf, cat, and eagle—were not regarded as the “best” animals. They were chosen primarily because they were the great hunters. The stealth of the cats, the endurance of the wolf, the strength of the bear, the vision of the eagle—these were the qualities held in high esteem by human hunters.
The Pawnee of present-day Nebraska and Kansas differed from most other tribes in that they divided their world horizon into four semicardinal points, assigning the wolf to the southeast. In the Pawnee cosmogony the wolf was also set in the sky as a star, along with the bear and the two cats, to guard the primal female presence, the Evening Star. The Wolf Star was red—the color associated with the wolf by virtually every tribe (red did not signify blood; it was simply an esteemed color).
In time, the wolf became associated among the four seasons with summer, among the trees on the plains with the willow, among the great natural forces with clouds (the others being wind, thunder, and lightning).
Like the Nunamiut, most Indians respected the wolf’s prowess as a hunter, especially his ability to always secure game, his stamina, the way he moved smoothly and silently across the landscape. They were moved by his howling, which they sometimes regarded as talking with the spirit world. The wolf appears in many of their legends as a messenger in fact, a great long-distance traveler, a guide for anyone seeking the spirit world. Blind Bull, for example, a Cheyenne shaman, was highly respected among his people before his death in 1885 as one who had learned about things from the comings and goings of wolves, from listening to their howls. The wolves, for their part, took Blind Bull’s messages to various places in the real and spiritual world. The wolf as oracle, as interlocutor with the dead, is an old idea.
The wolf was also held in high regard because, though he was a fiercely loyal familial animal, he was also one who took the role of provider for the larger community (for carrion eaters like the fox and raven). This was something that tribal Indians understood very well, for in difficult times a man had the dual responsibility of feeding his own family as well as others. An Hidatsa man named Bear in the Flat acknowledged this lifeway of the wolf when he took as one of his sacred medicine songs the “Invitation Song” of the wolf—the howl the wolf used to call coyotes, foxes, and magpies to the remains of his kill. (The situation is neatly imitated among Bella Coola hunters, who sing a song to call the wolf to one of their kills—a bear. They would take a bear’s hide but believed bears did not wish to be eaten by humans.)
Family cohesiveness, the key to life in hunting families. A father is flanked by two generations of his family-pups to the left, yearlings to the right.
The interrelationships between one’s allegiance to self and household on the one hand and one’s duty to the larger community on the other cannot be overemphasized; it was a primal, efficient system of survival that held both man and wolf in a similar mesh.
Consider again the Indian’s perception.
Each of the animals—mosquitoes, elk, mice—belonged to a separate tribe. Each had special powers, but each was dependent on the others for certain services. When, for example, the Indian left his buffalo kill, he called out to the magpies and others to come and eat. The dead buffalo nourished the grasses; the grasses in turn fed the elk and provided the mouse with straw for a nest; the mouse, for his part, instructed the Indian in magic; and the Indian called on his magic to kill buffalo.
With such a strong sense of the interdependence among all creatures and an acute awareness of the ways in which his own life resembled the wolf’s (hunting for himself, hunting for his family, defending his tribe against enemy attack as the wolf protected the den against the grizzly), the Indian naturally turned to the wolf as a paradigm—a mirror reflection. He wished directly for that power (“Hear me, Great Spirit! I wish to be like the wolf”); and he imitated him homeopathically by wearing his skin. He wished always to be as well integrated in his environment as he could see the wolf was in the universe. Imagine him saying: “Help me to fit, to be valuable in the world, like the wolf.”
To fit into the universe, the Indian had to do two things simultaneously: be strong as an individual, and submerge his personal feelings for the good of the tribe. In the eyes of many native Americans, no other animal did this as well as the wolf.
The wolf fulfilled two roles for the Indian: he was a powerful and mysterious animal, and so perceived by most tribes; and he was a medicine animal, identified with a particular individual, tribe, or clan. In the first role he was simply an object of interest, for reasons already given. He might be marginally so in the eyes of some (most California tribes, where there were no wolves, thought little of the wolf) or of major importance to others (Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee).
At a tribal level, the attraction to the wolf was strong because the wolf lived in a way that made the tribe strong: he provided food that all, even the sick and old, could eat; he saw to the education of his children; he defended his territory against other wolves. At a personal level, those for whom the wolf was a medicine animal or personal totem understood the qualities that made the wolf stand out as an individual; for example, his stamina and ability to track well and go without food for long periods.
That each perception contributed to and reinforced the other—as the individual grows stronger, the tribe grows stronger, and vice versa—is what made the wolf such a significant animal in the eyes of hunting peoples. The inclination of white men to regard individual and social motivations in themselves as separate led them to misunderstand the Indian. The Indian was so well integrated in his environment that his motivation was almost hidden; his lifeway was as mysterious to white men as the wolf’s.
This is obviously a complex thought, but in the light of it, the Indian’s preoccupation with wolves becomes more than quaint. The wolf was the one animal that, again, did two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves.
This association with, and imitation of, the wolf among American Indians was absolutely pervasive. The two great clan divisions of the northwest coast tribes were the wolf and the raven. One of the three divisions of the southern Arapaho were Haqihana, the wolves; one of the ten Caddo bands were Tasha, the wolf. A Cherokee setting out in winter on a long journey rubbed his feet with ashes and, singing a wolf song, moved a few steps in imitation of the wolf, whose feet he knew were protected from frostbite, as he wished his to be. Nez Perce warriors wore a wolf tooth pushed through the septum of their noses. Cheyenne medicine men wrapped wolf fur around the sacred arrows used to motion antelope into a trap. Arikara men wove wolf hair and buffalo hair together in small sacred blankets. Bella Coola mothers painted a wolf’s gallbladder on a young child’s back so he would grow up to perform religious ceremonies without making mistakes as a hunter. An Hidatsa woman experiencing a difficult birth might call on the familial power of the wolf by rubbing her belly with a wolf skin cap.
All that I have been saying about interdependence in a tribe, about individual, personal medicine power and homeopathic imitation, comes together in a famous story that Plenty Coups told many years ago about a Crow medicine man named Bird Shirt.
In a battle with Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho near Pryor Creek, Montana, a Crow named Swan’s Head took a large bullet square in the chest that tore through his lungs and came out his back. He held on to his horse, which turned and carried him back to the Crow village. By the time he arrived, the horse glistened red with the man’s blood.
Three medicine men, Hunts to Die, Wolf Medicine, and Bird Shirt, believed he could be saved. Bird Shirt requested that a brush lodge be built next to the river which ran near the camp. After moving Swan’s Head there, he asked for absolute silence. The people who gathered to watch were pushed back to keep a wide path open from the lodge to the water and told to keep any dogs away.
Bird Shirt took his medicine bundle and entered the lodge. He took a wolfskin out of the bundle. As Plenty Coups goes on:
“It was a whole wolfskin with the head stuffed. The legs of the skin were painted red to their first joints and the nostrils and a strip below the eyes were also red. I watched Bird Shirt paint himself to look like his medicine skin. His legs to the knees, his arms to their elbows, his nostrils, and strips below his eyes were made red, while he sang steadily with the beating drums. He painted his head with clay until it looked like that of the buffalo-wolf, and he made ears with the clay that I could not tell from a real wolf’s ears, from where I stood. All the time he was singing his medicine song with the drums while the people scarcely breathed.
“Suddenly the drums changed their beating. They were softer and much faster. I heard Bird Shirt whine like a wolf mother that has young pups, and saw him trot, as a wolf trots, around the body of Swan’s Head four times. Each time he shook his rattle in his right hand, and each time dipped the nose of the wolf skin in water and sprinkled it upon Swan’s Head, whining continually as a wolf mother whines to make her pups do as she wishes.
“I was watching—everybody near enough was watching—when Swan’s Head sat up. We then saw Bird Shirt sit down like a wolf, with his back to Swan’s Head, and howl four times, just as a wolf howls four times when he is in trouble and needs help. I could see that Swan’s Head’s eyes were now open, so that he could see Bird Shirt stand and lift the medicine wolfskin above his own head four times whining like a wolf mother. I seemed myself to be lifted with the skin, and each time there was, I saw, a change in Swan’s Head. The fourth time Bird Shirt lifted the wolf skin, Swan’s Head stood up. He was bent, his body twisted, but his eyes were clear while Bird Shirt trotted around him like a wolf, whining still, like a wolf mother coaxing her pup to follow her.
“Bird Shirt walked out of the lodge, and when Swan’s Head followed him I could scarcely hear the drums or the men’s voices singing his medicine song. I felt that I was with Swan’s Head when he stopped once, twice, three times and then into the open way to the water behind Bird Shirt, who kept making the coaxing whine of a wolf mother, until both had stepped into the water.
“Not once all this time had the drums stopped, or the singers, whose voices rose and fell with the drums. Everybody was watching the two men in the river.
“Bird Shirt led Swan’s Head out into the stream until the water covered his wounds. Then he pawed the water as a wolf does, splashing it over the wounded man’s head. Whining like a wolf, he nosed the water with the wolf skin and made the nose of the wolf skin move up and down over the bullet holes, like a wolf licking a wound.
“‘Stretch yourself,’ he told Swan’s Head; and when Swan’s Head did as he was bidden, stretching himself like a man who has been asleep, black blood dripped from the holes in his chest and back. This was quickly followed by red blood that colored the water around them, until Bird Shirt stopped it. ‘Bathe yourself now,’ said Bird Shirt, and obediently Swan’s Head washed his face and hands in the running water. Then he followed Bird Shirt to the brush lodge where they smoked together. I saw them… .”
Thus were wolf and man one.
Oto Indian wolf bundle.
Though the wolf was respected, he had his uses, too. Wolf fur was good for a parka ruff. A wolf pelt was powerful medicine, a good item in trade. Wolves sometimes preyed on an Indian’s fish traps or meat caches or got after his horses. Indians rarely killed wolves, but when they did it was for these reasons.
The common methods for capturing and killing wolves before steel traps were available were the pit fall and the deadfall. The pit fall consisted of a deep hole, wider at the bottom to keep the wolf from running up the walls, covered over with grass and brush, and baited with meat. Some tribes put sharpened stakes at the bottom to kill the wolf when it fell in.
Deadfalls of rock, ice, and slabs of snow were more common in the north where pits were hard to dig. Pulling on a piece of bait, the wolf would trip a balanced weight that crushed or pinned him.
Rawhide snares that caught the animal around the neck were also in use. Some Eskimos coiled sharpened willow sticks or strips of baleen in frozen tallow balls, which were then left out for the wolves to eat.
Two sorts of knife trap were also used. A wolf knife consisted of a sharp blade encased in fat and frozen upright in a block of ice. The wolf licked the fat until he cut his tongue badly enough to bleed to death. The other knife trap was a baited torsion spring that stabbed the wolf in the head when triggered.
But it never was easy.
Among the Cherokee there was a belief that to kill a wolf was to invite retribution from other wolves. Many tribes felt that killing a wolf would cause game to disappear. And there was widespread belief that a weapon that had killed a wolf would never work right again. It either had to be given away, usually to a child to be used in future as a toy, or taken to a shaman to be cleansed. A Cherokee cure for a gun that had killed a wolf was to unscrew the barrel, insert small sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum) sticks ritually treated in a fire, and lay it in a running stream till morning.
When the Kwakiutl of coastal British Columbia killed a wolf, they would lay the carcass out on a blanket. Small strips of meat would be cut off and each person who had participated in the killing would eat four of them, expressing his regret at the wolf’s death and calling him a good friend. The remains of the carcass were wrapped in the blanket and carefully buried.
The Ahtena Indians of southern Alaska brought a wolf they’d killed into camp on their shoulders, chanting: “This is the chief, he is coming.” The dead wolf was taken inside a hut, where he was propped up in a sitting position and a banquet meal was set before him by a shaman. Each family in the village contributed something. When it was felt the wolf had eaten all he wanted, the men ate what was left. No women were permitted inside.
When certain Eskimos killed a wolf, they would bring it to the edge of the village and leave it out there for four days. The man who had done the killing would walk around his house four times, expressing his feelings of regret for the wolf, and abstain from relations with his wife for four days.
Because there was such risk involved, a common practice of those who needed a wolfskin was to hire someone who knew the rites of atonement to kill the wolf. This person then might explain to the dead wolf that he had been hired by some other village so the wolf would take out any revenge at the wrong place. The Chukchi Eskimo of northeastern Siberia routinely told any wolf they killed that they were Russians, not Eskimos.
THE WOLF AND THE INDIAN DOG
The wolf was an important part of tribal, ceremonial, and individual life but he was nevertheless regarded as Other by the Indian, distinct from man and never to be confused with a dog. Indians probably brought three or four different breeds of dog with when they came to America, which they continued to breed to each other. Dogs were to be used: their hair for weaving, their flesh among some tribes for food. They were to pull travois and sleds, to pack food paniers and firewood, and to hunt game. They were pets. Any that proved a nuisance by getting into food caches or digging under tipis were quickly dispatched.
Crossing wolves with dogs almost always produced hybrids that were headstrong and dangerous, so Indians rarely tried it. Dogs several generations removed from a cross might prove gentle, obedient, intelligent, and very hardy, but few Indians were interested in this kind of special breeding. More fundamentally, dogs and wolves were poles apart in the Indian mind; it did not seem appropriate to mix them. The wolf had a soul in Nunamiut Eskimo eyes; not so their sled dogs. In the Sioux language the term for wolf was shunkmanitu tanka, “the animal that looks like a god (but) is a powerful spirit.” The wolf was integral to many religious ceremonies; the dog unceremoniously kicked out of any ceremonial lodge.
There is a story that neatly summarizes native American perceptions of what wolf and dog might have thought of each other. A Crow woman was out digging roots when a wolf came by. The woman’s dog ran up to the wolf and said, “Hey, what are you doing here? Go away. You only come around because you want what I have.”
“What have you got?” asked the wolf.
“Your owner beats you all the time. Kids kick you out of the way. Try to steal a piece of meat and they hit you over the head with a club.”
“At least I can steal the meat!” answered the dog. “You haven’t got anything to steal.”
“Hah! I eat whenever I want. No one bothers me.”
“What do you eat? You slink around while the men butcher the buffalo and get what’s left over. You’re afraid to get close. You sit there with your armpits stinking, pulling dirt balls out of your tail.”
“Look who’s talking, with camp garbage smeared all over your face.”
“Hrumph. Whenever I come into camp, for a good life, that’s all that’s wrong with my owner throws me something good to eat.”
“When your owner goes out to ease himself at night you follow along to eat the droppings, that’s how much you get to eat.”
“That’s okay! These people only eat the finest parts!”
“You’re proud of it!”
“Listen, whenever they’re cookin in camp, you smell the grease, you come around and how, and I feel sorry for you. I pity you… .”
“When do they let you have a good time?” asked the wolf.
“… I sleep warm, you sleep out there in the rain, they scratch my ears, you—”
Just then the woman shouldered a bundle of roots, whacked the dog on the back with a stick, and started back to camp. The dog followed along behind her, calling over his shoulder at the wolf, “You’re just full of envy for a good life, that’s all that’s wrong with you.”
Wolf went off the other way, not wanting any part of that life.
The pelt was normally all that was taken from a wolf, though teeth, claws, and internal organs were needed for decorative or religious purposes. The pelt was used by shamans in curing ceremonies like the one Bird Shirt performed; to wrap sacred, usually commemorative, articles to make a “wolf bundle”; and as totemic representation of the wolf’s presence. Kills in the Night, a Crow medicine woman, for example, used a wolf pelt to escape a Lakota war party that was chasing her and her daughter, Pretty Shield. After dusting their horse tracks with it, Kills in the Night put the wolfskin over their heads and singing a medicine song led her daughter away. The Lakota became confused in a sudden thundershower and lost the woman’s trail.
The most widespread use of the wolf pelt on the plains, however, was among scouts, who used it in imitative disguise.
The Skidi Pawnee were plains scouts extraordinaire. The hand sign in plains sign language for Pawnee was the same as that for wolf: index and middle finger of the right hand were raised in a V next to the right ear, then brought forward. Waving the sign from side to side signified the verb to scout. Dressed in their wolf skin cloaks, known as the Wolf People because the wolf figured so strongly in their foundation myth, there were no others like them. The Cheyenne, Comanche, and Wichita called the Pawnee wolves because “they prowl like wolves … they have the endurance of wolves, and can travel all day, and dance all night, and can make long journeys, living on carcasses they find on their way, or on no food at all.”
The Pawnee conceptualization of the wolf was that he was an animal who moved like liquid across the plains: silent, without effort, but with purpose. He was alert to the smallest changes in his world. He could see very far—“two looks away,” they said. His hearing was so sharp he could even hear a cloud as it passed overhead. When a man went into the enemy’s territory he wished to move exactly like this, to sense things like the wolf, to be Wolf.
The sense of being Wolf that came over a Pawnee scout was not the automatic result of putting on a wolf skin. The wolf skin was an accouterment, an outward sign to the man himself and others who might see him that he was calling on his wolf power. It is hard for the Western mind to grasp this and to take seriously the notion that an Indian at times could be Wolf, could actually participate in the animal’s spirit, but this is what happened. It wasn’t being like a wolf; it was having the mind set: Wolf.
White historians wrote off the superior tracking abilities of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Crow scouts that the army used to “native intelligence” and a “hocus-pocus” with wolfskins. What was actually present was an intimacy with the environment, a magic “going in and out,” so that the line of distinction between a person and his animal helper was not always clear. The white, for the most part, was afraid of, separated from, the environment. He spent his time flailing at it and denouncing it, trying to ignore that in it which confused or intimidated him.
Pawnees wore their wolf pelts like capes during exploration of an enemy territory, the flat pelt falling across the shoulders and the wolf’s head coming up over the man’s head so the wolf’s ears stood up erect. (Hidatsa scouts slit the pelt vertically and wore it over the shoulders, with the wolf’s head lying against the chest.) A Sioux named Ghost Head wore a wolf skin tied tightly around his waist whenever he went against his enemies. In the evening he would make a small fire, smoke the skin in sweet grass (Hierochloe odorata), and seek to align himself with the wolf spirit represented therein, asking that the presence of his enemies be revealed to him by the (real) wolves around him, whom he considered his helpers.
It was customary for scouts returning to camp or signaling to each other to howl like wolves.
Before moving on to a deeper consideration of wolves and warriors, I would like to encourage some reflection on all these ideas by mentioning several ways in which the wolf was associated with the more or less mundane among various tribes. The number of examples is remarkable.
The wolf showed up as a child’s carved, wooden toy among the Nehalem Tillamook on the Oregon coast and three thousand miles away, among the Naskapi of Labrador, in a game of lots called wolf sticks, in which the wolf stick was the long stick among several shorter ones. On the plains, children played a game of tag called wolf chase with a “rabbit” who was “it.” In the north, Eskimos made an object (known to anthropologists as a bull-roarer) that made a noise when whirled overhead on the end of a tether, which they called a wolf scarer.
The Sioux called the December moon The Moon When the Wolves Run Together. The Cheyenne believed a wolf’s being caught asleep at sunrise was a sign of its imminent death. In a story the Crow told, the pin-tailed grouse was created with a wolf claw for a beak. So-called wolf berries (Symphoricarpus occidentalis) that grew in the upper Missouri country were used in solution as a wash for inflamed eyes. And wolf moss (Everina vulpina) was boiled to produce a yellow dye by several tribes.
We who have largely lost contact with wild animals, have indeed gone to lengths to distinguish ourselves from them, can easily miss the significance of such a view of the human world in which the natural world is so deeply reflected. The view is fully integrated. It produces, often, an utter calm, a sense of belonging.
It is this need, I think, that people most wish to articulate when they speak of “a return to the earth.”