Wild beasts

by J. Hampden Porter

“The common wolf,” says Lockington, “is the largest and fiercest animal of the group, and the only one that is dangerous to man.” Its average length is about four feet six inches, it stands rather more than two feet high at the shoulder, and it is a little higher behind than before. These dimensions vary in geographical varieties; the French wolf being smaller than the German, the Scandinavian larger, heavier, and deeper in the shoulder than the Russian; while wolves on this continent are not so large as those of the Old World. All Asiatic forms north of the Altai Mountains are modifications of the common wolf of Europe, and the same is true of black wolves in the Pyrenees and highlands of France, Spain, Italy, and Russia, as well as of the white, lead-color, black, and dull-red varieties of America. As a rule, the wolf dwindles and degenerates within the tropics. Canis pallipes, the Indian form, approaches the jackal, according to Huxley, more closely than the members of any other climatic group, and as Professor Baird remarks, the coyote—Canis latrans, replaces the jackal in the New World.

Finally, the wolf, though a flesh-eater and beast of prey, possesses traits of structure which distinguish carnivora less highly specialized than Felidæ. Unlike the cats, its limbs are long and less united with the body; freer in their movements, and adapted to running rather than to the short, bounding rush and spring of the latter. Wolves are very powerful animals in proportion to their size; active, hardy, with strong and formidably armed jaws. Their senses are all extremely well developed, their speed is great, and the tireless gallop of the wolf has given rise to stereotyped phrases and comparisons in many languages.

Leaving now the zoölogical relations of wolves, their habits, character, and capacity present themselves for consideration. At the commencement of such an inquiry we find sources of information upon some of these points which are valuable in themselves, and in their general tenor conclusive.

Cuvier (“Règne Animal”) asserts that the wolf is “the most mischievous of all the carnivora of Europe,” and it would have been possible to know this from the folk-lore of those countries alone. In mythology and minstrelsy, in fireside story and local legend, wolves stand foremost among wild beasts in nations of the Celtic and Teutonic stocks. Their fierce visages look out from all the darker superstitions of the Old World, and echoes of their unearthy cry linger in the saddest of its surviving expressions of dread, foreboding, and despair. Hans Sachs called them “the hunting dogs of the Lord”; but this is a conception restricted to a single religion, and nearly everywhere from Greece to Norway, the wolf has been an object of horror and hate, an incarnation of evil, the emblem, agent, or associate of those unseen beings under whose forms terror personified unknown and destructive forces.

All this is not meaningless; great masses of men do not combine to give a “bad eminence” to anything that is insignificant. They do not often fear harmless objects, and they never do so when these are familiar. Cuvier says in his description of the wolf, that “its courage is not in proportion to its strength.” But it is certain that packs once howled at night around Paris, and tore people to pieces in her streets; that they ravaged, and killed man and beast, in every part of Western Europe, made public highways unsafe, and put travellers by forest roads in constant peril of their lives. When the traditions and myths referred to were formed, things were much worse in this respect than in Cuvier’s time, and we may be absolutely sure that these animals’ reputation rests on a strong foundation of fact. It was not the accident of an idle fancy that pictured gaunt gray wolves, dripping with blood, that bore the spirits of death upon northern battle-fields. Geri and Freki, the wolves of Woden, battened on the fallen in Valhalla. On earth and on high, fantasy grouped its most tragic conceptions around “the dark gray beast” of early Sagas; and it was believed that chained in hell, the Fenris wolf awaited that day when the demons of the underworld should be loosed, and with the bursting of the vault of heaven, “the twilight of the gods” would come.

Very little good has ever been said about a wolf. But on the Western Continent there is an almost complete absence of evidence to show that imagination was affected by this creature in the same manner as was common among European nations.

Henry R. Schoolcraft (“Indian Tribes of North America”) remarks that “the turtle, the bear, and the wolf appear to have been primary and honored totems in most tribes.... They are believed to have more or less prominence in the genealogies of all who are organized upon the totemic principle.” None knew wolves better than the aborigines of this country, and it is most improbable that beasts which so powerfully affected the thoughts and feelings of men in a similar social phase elsewhere, failed to conduct themselves similarly here. The cause for this striking difference is probably to be found in the peoples and not in the animals; more especially as every element was present in the situation where the former were placed, that would have fostered the growth of superstition. “The Indian dwelling or wigwam,” says Schoolcraft, “is constantly among wild animals, ... whether enchanted or unenchanted, spirits or real beings, he knows not. He chases them by day, and dreams of them by night.... A dream or a fact is equally potent in the Indian mind. He is intimate with the habits, motions, and characters of all animals, and feels himself peculiarly connected at all times with the animal creation. By the totemic system, he identifies his personal and tribal history and existence with theirs; he thinks himself the peculiar favorite of the Great Spirit, whenever they exist abundantly in his hunting-grounds, and when he dies, the figure of the quadruped, bird, or reptile which has guarded him through life, is put in hieroglyphics on his grave post.”

This is not an exaggerated statement, and the fact is that the wolf was not only a tutelar of gentes and emblem of their confraternity, but also, as in case of the fabled founders of Rome, a protector of helpless innocence. In the cycle of legends and myths that gather around the culture-hero Hiawatha, we find the pretty tale of the “Wolf-brother.” When the orphan child had been forsaken by all who were bound through natural affection to cherish it, wolves admitted the deserted little creature to their company, and gave the food that supported its life.

With southern tribes the coyote takes the place of the northern wolf; and how it happened that this “miserable little cur of an animal,” as Colonel Dodge calls it (“Plains of the Great West”), became the guardian of anybody or anything, passes understanding, unless it be due to the fact that there is more cunning and rascality wrapped up in its skin than exists in that of any other creature whatever. Nevertheless, it is true that this jackal of the West undoubtedly occupies the position spoken of. Dr. Washington Mathews (“Gentile System of the Navajo Indians”) has shown that a coyote is the tutelar of at least three gentes in this great tribe, and Captain John G. Bourke (“Gentile Organization of the Apaches of Arizona”) traced this animal in the same capacity through several branches of the Tinneh family. He found coyote gentes in the Apache, Apache-Mojave, Maricopa tribes, and among the Pueblo Indians as well; at Zuñi, San Filipe, Santana, Zia, and other places. In his “Notes on the Apache Mythology,” Captain Bourke gives a clue to the undeserved honors which this beast has received. His researches make it plain that these natives fully appreciated its astuteness. The coyote made a bet with the bear and won it; and by its means, also, men were provided with fire. There was nothing Prometheus-like in his conduct on this occasion; not a trace of the spirit which prompted the Titan. Far from it; he stole a brand the celestial squirrel dropped, and set fire to the world.

Like other wild beasts, the wolf has suffered at the hands of those who have described him. Men who, according to their own showing, had the most limited opportunities for learning anything about them have so often pronounced authoritatively upon the character of this race, and have so constantly confounded observation with inference, that closet zoölogists are now provided with a body of extemporaneous natural history in which the real animal has become as purely conventional as an Assyrian carving.