From the essay shelf
Notes From a Howl
A howl, for anyone who has not been to one, is only a gathering. People have called them that since the first, in the autumn of 1994, and the name has stuck partly because it is funny and partly because, every so often, somebody does. Most of the howls I have been to involved no howling at all. They involved walking, food, a fire if we were lucky, and a great deal of talk about everything except therianthropy.
I went to a small one last month, eleven of us, and I wanted to write it down while I still remember it properly. I am a dog, as some readers will know, and of all the things that come with that, the strongest is how much I love this: people arriving, one after another, and being glad to see each of them.
The arrangements
The organizer is a woman in her sixties who keeps bees and has been going to howls since the 1990s. She does things properly, and I want to describe how, because the dull part is the part that makes the rest possible.
Nobody was told where the walk would be until we had met. We met first at a cafe by the bus station in a small market town, at eleven on a Saturday morning: in daylight, in public, where anyone who felt uneasy about anyone else could simply finish their coffee and go home. Everyone there was an adult; she is firm about that, and says so in the first message she sends. Before we left the cafe she asked each of us whether someone at home knew where we were and when to expect us back. Two people had not told anyone. They did it there, at the table, while we waited, and nobody made them feel foolish. She had a list of who was driving whom, the number of the friend she had left her own plans with, and a small first-aid kit in her backpack that she says she has opened twice in thirty years: once for a wasp and once for a blister. There was nothing to drink stronger than cocoa. That is another of her rules.
I have been to gatherings run less carefully, and they were fine, and I would still rather go to hers. A howl is a meeting of strangers who happen to share something private. The arrangements are what let you relax enough to enjoy it.
The walk
We drove in three cars to the edge of a public wood, the kind with a gravel parking lot and a map on a board, and walked for about two hours on a path that climbed gently to a ridge and came down again beside a stream. It had rained in the night. The beeches were turning, and the leaves on the path were the color of a fox and as slippery as soap.
Walking is the best way I know for strangers to talk, because nobody has to look at anybody. For a while I walked beside a young man who had driven three hours and had never met another therian in his life. He talked about his work, which is fixing furnaces, and his sister's wedding, and not once about anything else, and I watched his shoulders come down a little with every mile. For a while I walked beside a woman of about fifty, a hare, who went very fast and then stopped dead to listen and then went very fast again, and was entirely unembarrassed about it.
At one point a farm dog somewhere below the ridge began to bark, and I am sorry to report that I stopped, and turned my head, and that somewhere behind me the tail I do not have went up like a flag. Two people laughed. One of them was the organizer. "There she goes," she said. It was the kindest laugh I have heard in a long time.
The fire and the food
The path came out at a small campground on the far side of the wood, which rents a fire ring and a covered table by the half day. The organizer had booked it weeks before. There is a kind of person who brings firewood that is actually dry, and she is that person, and so we had a fire within ten minutes.
Everyone had been asked to bring one thing to share. We had a great pot of lentil soup that had ridden in somebody's trunk wrapped in two blankets, two loaves, a bag of apples from someone's grandmother's tree, a wedge of cheese, a jug of hot cocoa, a tin of cookies so old that nobody would touch them, and a dish of something brown that the young man had made and was too shy to name. It was very good. He admitted, eventually, that it was his mother's recipe and contained an alarming amount of garlic.
I will not pretend there is anything mystical in a group of people eating soup. But it is a very old way of saying "you are welcome here," older than any word we use for ourselves, and I watched it work on everyone around the fire, one by one.
Reading aloud
After the food, someone produced a book. This is a custom of this particular group: one person reads something aloud, everyone else listens, and nobody discusses it afterward unless they want to. This time it was the old Breton lay of Bisclavret, the knight who was a wolf three days in every week and kept his faith when his clothes were stolen. The man reading had a slow, low voice and stumbled over the names, and it did not matter in the least. When he reached the part where the wolf runs to the king and takes hold of his stirrup, the woman who was a hare put her hand over her mouth. Nobody said anything. He read to the end, and closed the book, and someone put another log on.
Then the youngest of us, a woman of nineteen, read a poem she had written on the bus that morning, about a fox in a city. It was rough in places, as poems written on buses are, and it was entirely true, and her voice shook only on the first line.
One quiet moment
By five the light was going and the fire had burned down to a red bed, and people were carrying things back to the cars. I had gone back for a forgotten scarf, and found the organizer and the young man who fixes furnaces sitting on the bench by the embers, not talking. He was holding a mug in both hands. She was looking at the fire. It was clear that something had been said, or not said, and that it did not need me.
I picked up the scarf as quietly as I could. As I turned to go he said, to no one in particular, "I did not know you could just sit with people." And the organizer, who has been doing this for more than thirty years, said, "No. Nor did I, the first time."
That was all. Nobody howled. Somewhere off in the dark the farm dog barked once more, and stopped. We drove back to the bus station in the three cars, and said our goodbyes in the parking lot, and everyone sent a message to the person at home to say they were on their way.
I have been to larger gatherings, with more to see. I do not think I have been to a better one. If you are thinking of going to your first, I would say: choose a small one, run by someone careful, that meets in daylight in a public place, and make sure someone at home knows where you are. The history of howls and gatherings will tell you how long people have been doing this. The rest you will learn at the fire, from the person beside you, who is probably as nervous as you are, and who has, I promise, brought soup.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.