Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Sometimes someone would bring wolf pups into a camp—a few tribes raised them for their fur—but it rarely worked out. The camp dogs killed them or they ran away or a nervous neighbor turned them loose or spirited them off. If you wanted to play with wolf puppies, you were better off going to a den. The parents would usually back off and you could dig the pups out. When Cree youngsters did this, they would sometimes paint the pups red around the nose and the lower limbs before putting them back. In their childhood game the pups were wolf warriors, just like themselves.

  Once in a great while someone brought an exceptional wolf pup home and things went differently. Such a wolf one time came among the Blackfeet.

  One spring two Blackfeet, Red Eagle and Nitaina, were hunting near Milk River in Montana after a heavy rainstorm. All the rivers were high; out on an island in one of them they spotted two wolves pacing anxiously back and forth. “There must be a den out there,” said Nitaina. “Let’s go see if there are any pups.”

  They had a difficult time getting the horses through the mud and water onto the island. The big wolves barked and howled at their approach and then left, swimming to the far shore. There was indeed a den. Six drowned puppies floated in its entrance and one sat there in miserable silence.

  Nitaina reached down and took the pup. “I will take him back,” he said.

  People in camp said it was no good to keep a wolf, but Nitaina insisted. The wolf stayed close to Nitaina’s lodge, afraid of the camp dogs and wanting nothing to do with people. Wherever Nitaina went the wolf came along, picking up his habits. When Nitaina chased horses, the wolf chased horses. When Nitaina shot a deer that did not fall, the wolf brought it down.

  When he was ten months old the wolf got in a fight with the camp dogs. He wounded several of them and people began to complain about having the wolf around. Nitaina ignored them. When the wolf greeted Nitaina he put his paws on his shoulders and mouthed his head. The man named him Laugher.

  Late one spring, when the grass was high, some of the men decided to go horse raiding against the Cheyenne. Nitaina wanted to take Laugher along but the leader said no, which was his right. Many of the men felt Laugher was a strange wolf and bad luck to have around.

  So Nitaina and Red Eagle and Laugher went southeast on their own, through Crow country to steal Sioux horses.

  This was the first time Red Eagle had really been with Laugher. He liked the animal very much. One day Laugher killed an antelope by himself and became so excited he ran back and forth between the dead antelope and Nitaina three or four times, urging Nitaina to come see what he had done. It was good. It meant they could eat without having to fire a shot, which would have revealed their presence.

  They went on for days, on foot, at night, sharing the antelope meat, until they came to the west side of the Bear Paws. Then they began traveling high on the mountains during the day, crossing Middle Creek and going up into the Little Rockies. One afternoon as they were rounding a bare rock butte Laugher stopped them suddenly. He put his nose on a rock and sniffed, and the fur on his neck stood up a little.

  “Either a war party or a bear has been through here,” said Nitaina.

  The men could find no tracks and urged the wolf to go on. Laugher moved slowly, working his ears and looking back often at the men creeping low behind him. When they reached the top of the butte, the men raised their heads slowly to peer over. For a moment they saw nothing. Then, within shooting distance, they saw a thin pall of smoke hanging in dense timber. Laugher, exposed on the ridge, began to howl. “No! No!” whispered Nitaina. But Laugher continued until two men were drawn out of the shadows to look around. They were Crows. They watched Laugher for a while, then went back into the trees.

  Red Eagle and Nitaina slipped off the slope and ran hard until they reached a patch of cottonwoods at the foot of the butte. They had intended to walk right down the front of the butte. It would have meant their lives if Laugher hadn’t sensed the Crows.

  That evening two men from the Crow war party sat as lookouts on the same butte where Nitaina, Red Eagle, and Laugher had been until morning, when they were joined by about twenty others and they all left.

  In another week Red Eagle and Nitaina came on a Sioux camp on Little River. Expecting raids, the Sioux kept their horses in close to the lodges at night but turned them out during the day. Waiting their chance, the two Blackfeet grabbed two good-looking horses one morning, threw war rope bridles around their jaws and, rounding up thirty or forty others, broke for home. The Sioux immediately gave chase but Red Eagle and Nitaina, by jumping from one horse to another, were able to keep fresh mounts under them and stay ahead. They rode without stopping the rest of the day, all night, and into the next day, pushing the horses ahead of them. Laugher was a great help, keeping the horses moving and together. Finally they took a short rest at sundown.

  They kept moving like this, taking only short rests, until they came in two days to the mouth of the Milk River. They had not seen Sioux behind them after the second day and felt safe now taking a long sleep.

  Red Eagle took the first watch but could not stay awake. When he awoke, it was with a jolt. Nitaina was yelling: “Mount! Mount! Look at what’s coming!”

  A war party on foot broke out of the trees at a distance and began firing. In a panic the two Blackfeet jumped on their horses and rode out, with Laugher bunching the herd and pushing behind them. One horse was killed. They didn’t stop riding for two days, until they swam the horses across Milk River and north into their own camp.

  Laugher, once again, had saved them. It was he who had seen the war party hiding in the trees in time to waken Nitaina.

  The Blackfeet in camp came to feel differently about the wolf after hearing what he had done, but Laugher remained distant. In a medicine lodge ceremony where all the men told of the times they had counted coup, Nitaina stood up and spoke for Laugher, and the men sent up war cries and banged on their drums, very pleased at this.

  Some of the older men asked Red Eagle and Nitaina to bring Laugher and go after horses with them now, but they said no. The two men preferred going alone. They went once more that summer against the Cheyenne and with Laugher’s help again got twelve good pinto horses.

  That winter Laugher began to disappear for days at a time. Finally he went off for three or four weeks and when he returned he was not alone. He stood on a hill near the village and appeared to be urging another wolf with him to come the rest of the way into the village. When the wolf wouldn’t come, Laugher went alone to Nitaina’s lodge but he did not stay long. He seemed restless, kept standing in the door and, finally, with a glance back at Nitaina, he left.

  Nitaina did not see him for almost a year. Then he was with a third wolf, traveling across a valley in the Sweet Grass Hills. Two of the wolves ran off when they saw Nitaina approaching. Laugher stood watching for a few more minutes, then he, too, trotted off.

  The next spring Red Eagle suggested that they go look for another wolf pup, maybe they would get lucky and find one like Laugher. But Nitaina said no.

  The spirit that kept a people together through time, even as individuals passed away, was one of the most deeply felt emotions in the native American soul. Every year in small and large ways the spirit of life, of tribal identity and solidarity, of the individual’s place in the tribe, was renewed. And the wolf played a role here too, in some of the Pueblo masked rituals like the Hopi Snake Dance, and in the Sun Dance ritual of the plains. I would like to close this chapter by looking at two of these ceremonials, one from the Nootka and the other from the Pawnee.

  The wolf ritual of the lower Pacific northwest coast, among the Nootka, Kwakiutl, and Quillayute, was the major masked ritual in this part of the country. Usually held in the beginning of winter before a full moon, it was hosted by someone prominent in the village and served to welcome young people formally into the tribe. Tribal initiation in the wolf ceremony was central to one’s sense of identity with the tribe, and participation was necessary before one
could take part in any other ceremony. It also renewed a sense of tribal identity for former initiates who participated.

  Although the ceremony differed slightly among the various tribes and clans, lasting five days with some, nine days with others, it derived from the same myth and was performed in essentially the same way.

  The mythic basis for the initiation ceremony (as distinct from healing and puberty ceremonies like the Whirling Wolf Dance or Crawling Wolf Dance) was the stealing of a young man by a pack of wolves. The wolves tried to kill him but could not and so they became his friends. They taught him about themselves, then sent him back to his village to teach his tribe the rites of the wolf ceremony. The young man told his people that it was necessary for the strength of the tribe, for their success in war, and everything else they did, that they should be like wolves. They must be as fierce, as brave, and as determined as the one who is the greatest hunter in the woods. In this ceremony people are “stolen” by wolves, go through a terrifying confrontation, and emerge wolflike.

  Among the Makah, a division of the Nootka, the ceremony begins with the gathering in the evening of the older men in the tribe, dressed in cedar and hemlock branches and blowing on small wolf whistles made of bone. They gather the young initiates quietly from their homes and take them to the house where the ceremony, the Klukwalle, is to be performed. On the second day messengers go through the village specifically asking each person in the tribe to come that evening to Klukwalle.

  Toward dusk the people begin to gather and the procession winds its way to the ceremonial house.

  Inside, to the accompaniment of drums and bird rattles, each member of the tribe sings his tse-ka, or personal medicine song, around a central ceremonial fire. The evening builds with tse-ka singing until someone throws back his head and the first wolf howl is heard in the lodge. Soon everyone is howling and then the howls of real wolves, responding from the woods outside the lodge, begin to be heard, louder and louder. Outside, human wolves are banging on the walls; the children are terrified. Some of the participants have already put on wolf masks and have begun to act threateningly. They are restrained with cedar bark ropes until the evening grows tame, with a fading of the songs and a quieting of the wolves banging on the walls.

  Wolf mask, Kwakiutl.

  The third day begins with a ritual cutting of the flesh on the initiates’ arms. Among the Makah this might have been a reenactment of a gashing that their culture hero, Ha-sass, subjected himself to. (Ha-sass wished to learn the ways of the wolves but he was afraid that if they smelled his blood they would know he was human. He had his brothers cut him with shell knives until his blood was drained away before he went to the cave where the wolves lived.)

  When the gashing is completed, the initiates go outside for the first time in a procession through the village, with their wounds dripping. After noon they either go to their own homes or back to the ceremonial lodge to rest for the evening performances.

  After dark the tribal members again wind in a procession past all the homes to the ceremonial house. More masks are now evident, including the raccoon mask and the honeybee mask. The tse-ka songs are sung, the bird rattles and drums are heard, the wolf cries go up, and for the first time there is dancing. The people in the wolf masks become more and more agitated and try to put the fire out. Restrained by the cedar ropes the wolves go into the wolf frenzy to show their power, and the initiates, many of them terrified by the howling and dancing of the wolves, begin their own dances to demonstrate a willingness to be in touch with these spirits. The frenzy of the wolves builds until they finally succeed in stamping out all the fires.

  After a period of darkness the fires (for warmth and light but with spiritual overtones) are rekindled and the people eat.

  The fourth day of the ceremony marks its climax, when all the members of the tribe put on their personal masks reflecting individual identity—deer, woodpecker, eagle—and costumes and proceed to the lodge to take part in the larger tribal ceremony. Waiting inside are unmasked members of the tribe who, at the appointed time, unmask each person, symbolically returning him to his human form. The unmasking of those people who are wearing the wolf masks calms the wolf frenzy. In their sudden serenity is evidence of their rebirth; the strength of their bearing shows they have internalized the strength of the wolf.

  By now the young initiates have decided which animal will be their personal animal and have fashioned a mask to a likeness. The evening ends with a feast and a breaking of their fast. On the morning of the fifth day they will go down on the beach and dance with their masks on for the first time.

  The Makah Wolf Ritual represents a middle ground between the sort of rituals in which the children are stolen by tribal members in wolf masks, returned after a few days of mourning, and revived by tribal members, and the more bizarre rituals of northwest coast tribes to the north, where the spirit of the wolf is replaced by the spirit of the cannibal.

  However it is played out, the wolf ritual represents a personal and tribal renewal in the context of those warrior qualities that the wolf was thought to possess and that would stand tribe and individual alike in good stead.

  A different aspect of tribal identification with the wolf is seen among the Pawnee, whose climatic renewal ceremony came in the spring. Called the Captive Girl Ceremony or Morning Star Sacrifice, it involved the ritual death of a young, non-Pawnee woman who was stolen in a raid. In the cosmogony of the Pawnee, Morning and Evening Star had warred and Morning Star had won; from their union the first human being was born, a girl. From time to time Morning Star revealed himself in a dream to a Pawnee warrior, telling him he wanted a girl for himself in return for the one he had put on earth.

  The symbolism of the ceremony is elaborate but its focus is on death and rebirth. Since the wolf was the first animal to experience death (in the Pawnee creation legend opposite), his symbolic presence is essential. He arrives in the person of the Pawnee Wolf Man, the keeper of the sacred “wolf bundle.” He takes care of the captive girl from just before the winter buffalo hunt when she is stolen until the sacrifice takes place in the spring. He treats her kindly, sees to her needs, and it is he, finally, who walks her to the sacrificial scaffolding.

  The Pawnee were in some ways the most complex of the plains tribes because they were both an agricultural and a hunting people. The renewal of their corn crops and their annual buffalo hunts were two driving forces in their ceremonials and in all of them the life-death cycle—which functioned through the agreement with the Animal Master and the renewal cycle of the crops—was central. The wolf, that Red Star of Death in the southeastern sky, was associated with both corn and buffalo in the Pawnee mind; the birth and death of the Wolf Star (Sirius) each night as the earth turned was but a reflection of the wolf’s coming and going from the spirit world, down the path of the Milky Way, which they called the Wolf Road.

  The wolf was a symbol of renewal, just as the willow, the sacred tree of the southeast, was a symbol of death and rebirth. When the willow was cut down it grew back quickly, just as the wolf who was the first to be killed became the first to return from the dead. At that time, in the heyday of the Pawnee, anyone could look out on the prairie and know these things were true. He could hear the songs of the wolf, like the songs that took up a man’s life from birth; he could see the wolf trotting, trotting, trotting, like a warrior, like people moving camp, in the great coming and going that was life.

  THE PAWNEE CREATION LEGEND

  It is told in the creation legend of the Pawnee that a great council was held to which all the animals were invited. For a reason no one remembers, the brightest star in the southern sky, the Wolf Star, was not invited. He watched from a distance, silent and angry, while everyone else decided how to make the earth. In the time after the great council the Wolf Star directed his resentment over this bad treatment at The Storm that Comes out of the West, who had been charged by the others with going around the earth, seeing to it that things went well. Storm carried a
whirlwind bag with him as he traveled, inside of which were the first people. When he stopped to rest in the evening he would let people out and they would set up camp and hunt buffalo.

  One time the Wolf Star sent a gray wolf down to follow Storm around. Storm fell asleep and the wolf stole his whirlwind bag, thinking there might be something good to eat inside. He ran far away with it. When he opened, it, all the people ran out. They set up camp but, suddenly, looking around, they saw there were no buffalo to hunt. When they realized it was a wolf and not Storm that had let them out of the bag they were very angry. They ran the wolf down and killed him.

  When The Storm that Comes out of the West located the first people and saw what they had done he was very sad. He told them that by killing the wolf they had brought death into the world. That had not been the plan, but now it was this way.

  The Storm that Comes out of the West told them to skin the wolf and make a sacred bundle with the pelt, enclosing in it the things that would always bring back the memory of what had happened. Thereafter, he told them, they would be known as the wolf people, the Skidi Pawnee.

  The Wolf Star watched all this from the southern sky. The Pawnee call this star Fools the Wolves, because it rises just before the morning star and tricks the wolves into howling before first light. In this way the Wolf Star continues to remind people that when it came time to build the earth, he was forgotten.

  In the latter part of the nineteenth century in preparation for the Hidatsa Sunrise Wolf Bundle Transfer Rite, an old man named Small Ankles lamented with his son that it was going to be hard to do the ceremony properly because it was hard to find a wolf around anymore. In the transfer rite the Hidatsa engaged in a kind of “historic breathing,” inhaling the past and emphasizing its place in the now, the present. To lose the ceremony would be to lose the past, to be undefined, nothing, broken. The time of the Indian, Small Ankles knew, was waning, as was the time of the wolf.