Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  There were four or five men in the lodge and he joked with them about almost getting lost in the snowstorm. His friends put him to bed to rest, while they warmed food and went about drying and softening his clothes.

  Occasionally someone would come into the lodge and say something like, “Oh, our friend is here. It’s lucky he got in, he might have frozen in the storm.”

  Owl Friend stayed in the lodge four days, waiting out the storm. He noticed a number of unusual things, among them four pipes, four lances with red shafts and scalps tied to them, and four drums. There were also rattles decorated with feathers and weasel tails.

  On the fourth day the young men asked him to look around carefully at the things in the lodge. In addition to what he had already seen, Owl Friend noticed two hawk skins, two otter skins, two swift fox skins, a bear hide, and a wolf hide. The wolf hide was slit to fit over the head and eagle feathers were tied to the middle of its back.

  On the evening of the fourth day the young men began to put on some of these things and to arrange the lodge for a ceremony. One of the young men went out to ask an old man to call in the Wolf Soldiers.

  WARRIOR SONGS

  The songs men sang while they traveled—short songs of encouragement or songs about a lover or in praise of past deeds—were collectively called wolf traveling songs by the Cheyenne. Such songs often came to warriors in their dreams. Francis Densmore collected this one among the Sioux:

  A wolf

  I considered myself

  But the owls are hooting

  and the night

  I fear.

  A warrior might also call on wolves in song to come and eat the flesh of his enemies after a battle, or, by comparing himself to a wolf, warn young men of the dangers that faced them, as in the following:

  At daybreak I roam

  ready to tear up the world

  I roam

  At daybreak I roam

  shivers coming up my spine

  I roam

  At daybreak I roam

  eyes in the back of my head

  I roam.

  —Santee Sioux song sung by Weasel Bear. Translated by JIM HEYNEN

  Another man came over to Owl Friend. “You see us, the way we are dressing and preparing things?” he said. “This is the way you will do it.”

  As people came in, Owl Friend could see the storm was still blowing hard, piling the snow deep.

  A man named Wears His Robe Hair Out and three others began singing. The four lances were stuck in the ground. The four pipes were filled. The drums were smoked in sweet grass and one of the men struck the drum four times.

  “Owl Friend,” he said. “Watch closely. You will have to imitate us. Remember the songs.”

  Then the man looked up and said, “It will stop storming now,” and began the ceremony. The dancing and singing went on all night. Between songs they would smoke the pipes and someone would go outside to see the storm. “It is clearing off nicely,” they would say when they came back in. “You can see stars shining.”

  Music recorded for a wordless Blackfeet wolf song.

  They danced late into the night. Owl Friend watched how everything was done. When the dancing was over, they had a feast and the men put their clothes away. “Now we give it all to you,” they said to Owl Friend, and told him to go to bed. But before he did so he stepped outside. The sky was absolutely clear and most of the snow had melted.

  When he awoke next morning before sunrise Owl Friend was surprised to find himself out on the prairie. He was surrounded by wolves, whom he recognized, howling in the dim light, as the young men he had stayed with. “Do this dance for four days and four nights,” they said. “When you are through, rub this medicine [balsam root, Balsamorrhiza sagittata] on your body. You will be Wolf Soldiers!”

  With this the wolves left. Owl Friend returned to his camp with the dance and the other particulars of his dream to inaugurate the organization.

  The Wolf Soldiers was the last of the seven great Cheyenne soldier bands to be formed. The origin story contains the common elements of camaraderie, elaborate ritual, and demonstration of power (over the storm). The function of these soldier bands was to defend the camp against attack and to act as police during buffalo hunts and on moves through enemy territory.

  The Cheyenne Wolf Soldier ceremony was usually held in the late spring or early summer each year. It was both a ceremony of renewal for the members and an opportunity for young men to join. Members outfitted themselves as the wolf brothers had done in Owl Friend’s vision. Initiates wore only a breechcloth, and painted their hands and lower arms, feet and lower legs, and the lower portion of the face red, using crimson-colored earth or spring pussy willow buds.

  At the conclusion of the ceremony each year a group of young Wolf Soldiers might elect to go raiding, as happened in the summer of 1819. Thirty Wolf Soldiers went north into Crow country, were surprised by a large Crow war party, and all killed. It was a tremendous blow to Cheyenne pride. The next year, the Wolf Soldier band having been all but wiped out, the other Cheyenne soldier bands—Dog Soldiers, Kit Fox Men, Red Shields—performed the ceremony of “Moving the Arrows Against the Crow” and attacked in revenge.

  In the summer of 1837 a group of Wolf Soldiers (the society had by now gotten a name for being hot-blooded) whipped a medicine man named White Thunder until he agreed to perform the Cheyenne renewal ceremony of the Medicine Arrows early. He did so, telling them it wouldn’t work; but they took no heed. Forty-two of them went against a Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche encampment on the Washita River in west-central Oklahoma and, in a moment of panic, revealed themselves when they were on foot and without cover. All of them were killed.

  The next spring a man who would later be called Yellow Wolf reorganized the Wolf Soldiers, renaming them the Bowstring Men, and set out to avenge the Cheyenne nation. They and their Arapaho allies struck a Kiowa and Apache camp on Wolf Creek in northwestern Oklahoma and met one of the most famous enemy warriors in Cheyenne history, a Kiowa named Sleeping Wolf.

  The Cheyenne charged across Wolf Creek into the Kiowa camp. Sleeping Wolf grabbed a war club and led a countercharge on foot, driving the mounted Cheyenne back, but not without being leveled himself three times by warriors counting coup. Racing back across the stream, Sleeping Wolf grabbed a horse and again charged the Cheyenne. The horse was shot out from under him and while he fought on, again on foot and surrounded in the water, three more warriors counted coup on him. Managing to get away to the creek bank and to grab another horse, he got halfway across before the animal was shot out from under him and another bullet broke his leg. Three more times he was struck by warriors before finally being killed.

  The Cheyenne and Arapaho were absolutely awed by this show of courage. Many of them, including all nine warriors who had struck Sleeping Wolf, would name their children for him. (The man was also known as Yellow Shirt for the buckskin shirt he wore that day, and Yellow Wolf is even today a common name among the Cheyenne.)

  A few Cheyenne warriors named for wolves have put on extraordinary displays of power in battle. One of them was Wolf Belly, in a fight at Beecher’s Island, northeastern Colorado, on September 17, 1868. Fifty-three soldiers and civilian scouts were entrenched on the island in a dry riverbed, all of them armed with the new Spencer repeating rifle and the army’s new Colt revolver. The first Indian charge was shredded in a withering fire. The second charge, led by Wolf Belly, was also stopped, but Wolf Belly himself ran completely over the trenches and, jeering at the whites, crossed them again and again. The whites thought he was insane. Not a bullet struck him.

  (In a curious aftermath to this battle, Capt. Louis Carpenter, patrolling some weeks later, came upon the burial scaffolds of nine of the Cheyenne killed at Beecher’s Island. He ordered his men to tear down the scaffolds so that wolves would desecrate the bodies. It was a common white belief at the time that the sole reason for elevating a body on a burial scaffold was to keep wolves from eating it. On the contrary, the
Indians elevated the body out of respect. It was clearly understood that the gross body would be returned in this way to the earth from which it came, by the action of the rains and the winds, and by scavenging eagles, coyotes, and wolves.)

  Another Cheyenne shaman, Wolf Man, was considered bulletproof after a fight on the Powder River in Wyoming in 1865 when, having been struck by two bullets, he simply shook them out of his vest.

  WOLF MEN

  Wolf Goes to Drink, Crow

  Wolf’s Sleeve, Apache

  Mad Wolf, Seminole

  Wolf Calf, Blackfeet

  Wolf Eyes, Hidatsa

  Wolf Lying Down, Kiowa

  Wolf Necklace, Palouse

  High Wolf, Lakota

  Yellow Wolf, Nez Perce

  Many Wolves Waiting Near the Village, Tlingit

  Wolf Walking Around a Person, Tlingit

  Wolf Chaser, Crow

  Wolf Bear, Crow

  Wolf Orphan, Blackfeet

  Wolf Robe, Acoma

  Wolf Standing Alone, Kiowa

  Wolf Face, Apache

  The most honored warrior among the Cheyenne in the closing days of the plains wars was named Little Wolf. In September 1878, together with Dull Knife, he led 278 men, women, and children off the reservation in Oklahoma and north toward their ancestral home on the Yellowstone River in southern Montana. Their flight was arduous. Little Wolf distinguished himself in skirmish after skirmish but it all came to a tragic end, fighting in bitter cold without food or clothing that winter. The few left alive, including Little Wolf, were broken people.

  The wolf name is still common among the Cheyenne: John Fire Wolf, Wolf Satchel, Blind Wolf are alive today.

  Nothing has been said so far of women in connection with the wolf because where the wolf figured strongly, among shamans and warriors, there were few women. A woman’s involvement with wolves was more often a matter of her rolling up the sides of her buffalo hide tipi out of reach and putting her family’s belongings on a scaffold if they were going to be away for a while, to keep the wolves from getting into things. If a Cheyenne woman, for example, wanted to cure wolf hides, she had to protect herself against the consequence of touching such a powerful animal by undergoing a purification ceremony. A member of the Young Wolf Medicine Society painted her with red paint in the familiar way: the hands and feet, a circle on the chest representing the sun, and a crescent moon over the right shoulder blade, and lastly the face from the middle of the nose to the throat. A wolf hide resting on white sage (Audibertia polystachya) was similarly painted, but with a half moon on the right shoulder and a full circle on the back.

  This ceremony was performed for a number of women at the same time. After snipping bits of hair from the wolf pelt, the women circled the camp—pausing at cardinal points to howl—and were then dusted by the master of ceremonies with white sage to signify removal of the paint, the end of the ceremony.

  Women show up frequently in native American folklore and history as wives to wolves or their helpers. A Bella Coola woman who once helped a wolf with a difficult birth and helped still another wolf choking on a bone was widely known as a seer on the British Columbia coast, her shamanistic powers being a reward from the grateful wolves. Among the most moving of all these stories is one from the Sioux, about Woman Who Lived with Wolves.

  The woman’s husband had treated her very badly and one evening, during a storm, she left, determined never to return. She traveled all night while the snow fell and covered her tracks. When the snow stopped falling, she started to leave a trail, so she climbed up to a ridge swept clear of snow and went on. She did not want her husband or her relatives ever to find her. She burned with a deep anger.

  Walking down the ridge, she came to a cave which she entered to rest. She wrapped her robe around her and went to sleep. Sometime later she felt a slight movement. Opening her eyes, she saw dark forms poised over her. They slowly began to pull the wet robe away from her. She could tell now that they were wolves. As she lay there frozen in terror, the wolves curled up next to her and she felt their warmth. She turned her head very slowly until she was looking one of them in the face. He was asleep.

  That evening the wolves left to hunt, returning in the morning with deer meat for her. She was so hungry she ate the meat raw. That evening she went out on the ridge to watch the winter sky, feeling her pain and anger. The wolves sat with her; they did not say anything. When she felt the pain the most, one of the wolves walked over and stood next to her.

  She lived with the wolves for a long time, making her clothes from the deer hides they brought her and sharing their food, though she cooked her meat now, in a hole where the fire would not be seen. In time she learned how the wolves spoke and was able to talk with them. They told her about the places they had been.

  One afternoon when they were all asleep in the sun, she realized it was time to go. Just as this thought came into her mind, one of the wolves opened his eyes and was looking at her.

  Woman Who Lived with Wolves did not want to go back to her village, even though she was now a medicine woman. Instead, she went out on the prairie to live.

  One day some young Sioux men were chasing horses when they saw Woman Who Lived with Wolves running in among them. She had accidentally been swept up in their drive, and though she could keep up with the horses, she knew she could not break away without being roped.

  After many miles the horses began to falter and the young men concentrated on running down the woman. They finally got some ropes on her so she couldn’t move. They recognized her as the woman who had run away and returned with her to the village.

  Woman Who Lived with Wolves remained distant among her people. They were kind to her, her relatives especially. She did not see her husband and no one said anything about him.

  In time, in response to their questions, she told them of the time she had spent with the wolves. A man named White Bull was contemptuous of her and wanted to test her power. He was a powerful medicine man but insecure. He made people uncomfortable. White Bull told Woman Who Lived with Wolves to stand apart from him, that they would “shoot” things at each other to see whose power was strongest. White Bull went first. He shot her with bumblebees and rolled-up balls of buffalo hair. Woman Who Lived with Wolves did not flinch. Finally he shot her with “one of those small worms that comes out of the head of the elk.” This staggered the woman, but she did not fall.

  Then it was Woman Who Lived with Wolves’s turn. She shot White Bull with a grasshopper and it was finished.

  Her people believed in her and gave her her wolf name.

  Wolves were not always benevolent figures in myth and legend nor strictly models for a warrior’s admiration. Indians understood them in a wider context. Wolves, like grizzly bears, could, after all, kill Indians. Those who tended to fear the wolf the most were the woodland Indians, who encountered them suddenly, usually at close quarters. Those who commonly saw them out in the open, on the tundra, for example, where they could more easily appraise the wolves’ motives, were much less fearful. But even they kept their distance. The nether regions of many tribes’ spirit worlds were inhabited by wolves which, in this context, were enemies. Nuliayuk, a great female sea spirit of Canadian Eskimos, was guarded in her undersea house by wolves. And there were enormous mythic wolves that lived near the Naskapi’s Caribou House and whose attacks hunters risked if they dared draw near.

  Rabies was a real reason to fear wolves, for there were few more horrible deaths. A Blackfeet man bitten by a rabid wolf was bound with ropes and rolled in a green buffalo hide. A fire was built on and around him and he was subjected to this intense heat until the hide began to burn. The disease was believed to leave in the man’s profuse sweat.

  Other tribes, notably the Navajo, feared wolves as human witches in wolves’ clothing. The Navajo word for wolf, mai-coh, is a synonym for witch. There is a good deal of witchcraft among the Navajo and belief in werewolves provides explanations for otherwise inexplicable (to them) p
henomena. Witchcraft and werewolves are (the belief is current) more on the minds of some Navajos than others, specifically the more insecure, those who have many bad dreams or who suffer from a sickness or misfortune all out of proportion to those around them. Such people might be viewed by other Navajos as suffering the attention of werewolves.

  A Navajo witch becomes a werewolf by donning a wolfskin. If he means to kill someone, he travels to his hogan at night, climbs up on the roof, and tosses something through the smokehole to make the fire flare, revealing where people are sleeping. He then pushes down a poison on the end of a stick, which the victim inhales. (Dirt rolling off the roof at night is a sign that a werewolf is about.)

  In addition to killing people, Navajo werewolves raided graveyards and mutilated bodies. By taking the finger of a dead male or the tongue of a dead female (corresponding to the penis and the clitoris, respectively) and placing it near a living person, the werewolf ensured the vengeance of the spirit against the person, the spirit assuming that the living person had stolen the finger.

  Modern Navajos are cautious around dead people and graves, and reluctant to press for the identity of a suspected human-wolf for fear of retaliation. If one is to be killed, they feel it wise to spread the task among three or four people. Most suspected werewolves are men and highly aggressive.

  As a protection against witchery, Navajos even today keep gall around the house or on their person, sometimes wolf gall.

  No matter who it was, whenever wolves were close everyone was a little nervous. One of the things wolves did in Indian camps that must have caused an eerie tension was to wander among the horse herds at night, drifting about in their shadowy way, lying down to rest among the animals or perhaps chewing through a rawhide picket rope. And then moving on, rarely disturbing even the high-strung horses.