From the essay shelf
Wolves Are Not Metaphors
There are two wolves, and I have been confused with the wrong one all my life.
The first wolf is made of words. He is lone, fierce, proud and free. He howls at the moon from a crag. He is on a great many shirts. He stands for whatever the wearer would like to be thought: dangerous, independent, misunderstood. He is very old, this wolf. He is in the fairy tales and the sermons and the werewolf trials, and he has almost nothing to do with any animal that ever lived.
The second wolf weighs about as much as a large dog and is frightened of you. This essay is on his behalf.
What a wolf actually is
A wild wolf pack is a family. It is, in the usual case, a mother and a father and their children of the last two or three years. The parents lead because they are the parents. The youngsters follow, learn, help to raise the newest pups, and in time leave to find mates and ground of their own.
The famous "alpha," who fights his way to the top and rules by force, was described from early studies of unrelated wolves penned together in captivity, which is rather like studying family life in a prison yard. Those who went on to watch wild wolves found nothing of the kind, and the idea has long since been set aside by the people who know the animals best. It lives on only in the first wolf, the one made of words.
What wild wolves mostly do is walk. They cover enormous distances at a patient trot. They sleep a great deal. They fail at most of their hunts. They play, even when grown. They are devoted and attentive parents, and they will carry food long miles to an injured member of the family. A wolf alone is not a romantic figure. He is a young animal between homes, in the most dangerous year of his life, looking hard for company.
Why this matters to a therian
I am a wolf. I mean by that what any therian means: not in body, but in the grain of me, and for as long as I can remember. And for years I tried to be the first wolf. I cultivated a solitude that made me unhappy. I was curt, because wolves were supposed to be hard. I thought my longing for a household, for people to walk beside and look after, was a human weakness spoiling my animal nature.
It was my animal nature. That is the joke of it. Everything I had taken for the wolf was a costume from a story, and everything I had been trying to suppress was the wolf himself: the family animal, the walker, the bringer-home of food.
I do not think I am the only one who has made this mistake. Any of us whose theriotype is an animal with a reputation, the wolf, the raven, the fox, the snake, the great cats, will have met the legend long before the creature. The legend is louder. It is our business to listen past it.
What we owe
I have come to feel that to claim an animal's shape puts me under some obligation to the animal. Not a grand one. Three small things.
To know it truly. To read what careful observers have written, and prefer that to what is merely stirring. To be able to say what it eats, how far it ranges, how it raises its young.
To speak of it truly. Not to pass on the old slanders, and not to pass on the new flatteries either. The wolf is neither a devil nor a spirit guide. He is an animal, with an animal's dignity, which is quite enough.
To wish it well, at a distance. Real wolves do not want my company. The kindest thing I can do for them is to care that there is room left in the world for them to avoid me in. I will never run with a pack. I can, in whatever small ways are open to me, be on the side of there still being packs.
Not a symbol
When I say I am a wolf, I am not saying that I am wild or free or fierce. Those are the first wolf's words. I am saying that I am loyal, that I am restless on foot, that I am soft with the young and careful of strangers, and that I am happiest when everyone I love is asleep within earshot.
That is not a metaphor for anything. It is only, as nearly as I can tell it, what a wolf is.
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.