Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018

Portraying wolves fairly and accurately
From zero to sixty (legs, that is)

By William Huggins

“Demand evidence, and think critically.”

—NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

Of all nonhuman animals used, abused, misused, misrepresented, mistreated, and turned into poor clichés of their actual selves over the course of literary history, few have been so wrongly written about as wolves (Canis lupus). Such poor representation has consequences in realms both literary and temporal. Consider that wolves have been exterminated from over 90 percent of their historic range. A systematic elimination of a keystone species, essential to planetary ecological health, emerges from a cultural history built on poor storytelling—that the wolf is a threat to human pastoral land management, not a benefit. Misrepresenting the wolf in story has led to blaming the species for more than its share of damage done, primarily economic, such as preying on cattle and sheep—which more often than not is the fault of domesticated dogs gone feral.

Putting a nonhuman animal in a story means we, as writers and readers, must be honest about how that four-legged sentient being might behave in its real life, which means we must be scientifically literate enough to give agency to the nonhuman animals about whom we write. Or, as S.K. Robisch notes, “All of the components used in framing an argument are both proactively and retroactively affected by the argument, including any ecological components. This means when we put a wolf in a story, the story at that point must be responsible to the wolf.”¹

Demonization of the wolf

For the most part, from the earliest religious literature the wolf has been demonized for its purely natural proclivities. Most of the world’s major religions portrayed wolves in a particularly unkind light. In Tablet VI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar returns a shepherd’s love for her by turning him into a wolf, the very bane of his profession. In the Kaushitaki Upanishad, Indra delivers Arunmukhas to wolves. The Christian Bible is replete with negative connotations for wolves, in line with Matthew 7:15’s “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Not to be left out, the Koran’s sole mention of wolves, chapter 12, has them responsible for Joseph’s death. St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio stand as an extremely rare example of wolf tolerance, only because St. Francis convinces the wolf to leave the village alone. So the dichotomy of one vision of the wolf stems from our earliest writings: civilization versus the wild.

Children’s stories have been no less unkind. One exception might be Aesop’s Fables, which are almost evenly balanced; the pithy morals that close each fable don’t wholly make wolves evil but give them some leniency for natural actions. In most children’s stories, wolves are a convenient foil for the heroes or heroines: think Red Riding Hood or the Three Little Pigs, obvious examples of a comforting civility threatened by a wild world. First impressions are important because children form biases at an early age.

Medieval bestiaries often compared the wolf to the devil, hunting sheep with cunning and guile—which is, of course, true, at least in the case of the wolf. In Europe, Portugal, Spain, and Italy contain the only wolf packs considered sustainable at this writing, though wolves have slowly been migrating back into areas they once occupied hundreds of years ago, like Poland and Germany. The British Isles are entirely devoid of wolves. Even great poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed from the bestiaries and noted wolves negatively in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and the nearly unreadable The Parson’s Tale.

This same medieval mind with all its unfair cultural biases crossed the Atlantic with early Euro-American settlers. With better guns and ammunition than their European forebears, the settlers of America and Canada declared an unnecessary war on wolves that removed the species almost entirely from the entire North American continent—and continues today.

Recent young adult books, possibly because of better scientific understanding of wolves’ role in nature or a more forceful conservation movement, have turned the tide a bit: Kathryn Lasky’s Wolves of the Beyond series and Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother series both do a fair job of showing wolves as they more naturally behave, especially in their devotion and dedication to their young, in which the entire pack plays a role. Though these books do not represent wolves scientifically, they at least give young readers the chance to consider other characterizations besides The Big Bad Wolf.

Wolves in genre fiction

Science fiction and fantasy have not been entirely accurate in representations of wolves, either. The Lord of the Rings takes a staunchly medievalist approach, turning them into agents of the dark forces. Whitley Strieber, in The Wolfen (William Morrow & Co., 1977), presents wolves as intelligent actors in their revenge strategy but the story goes a bit off the rails—The Wolfen is one of those rare moments where the movie might have done a better job representing wolves as they naturally act than the book. Many other examples exist, perhaps most recently the relationship of the Starks to their direwolves in Game of Thrones. Yet while an opportunity may have existed to show wolves in a more natural light, Game of Thrones’ direwolves function more as devoted pets. Though Arya does release Nymeria, the possibility of warging with direwolves takes some of their potential wildness away. Even the ever-amazing C.J. Cherryh falls into cliché in Chernevog (Del Rey, 1990) with the traditional Russian fable of wolves at the door, which has never been backed up by science, though, is prevalent in the Russian folktales from which Cherryh draws.

One noteworthy positive exception exists in how wolves get represented in story, both orally and textually: indigenous writers. James Welch’s Fools Crow (Bison Books, 1994) portrays wolves as they might exist in a natural setting, fictional or not. The lone wolf attack in the book comes from a rabid wolf, which is consistent with the scientific literature. Welch’s other wolf scenes feature Canis lupus as it lives. Unlike the feral attackers in James Fenimore Cooper (see The Oak Openings) and Jack London (take your pick) or Nicholas Evans’ facile The Loop (Delacorte Press, 1998), wolves do not like being around human beings very much and will avoid us if possible. Welch establishes this fact perfectly.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the indigenous people group the Anishinaabe, aptly portrays wolves in her Turtle Mountain cycle of novels, perhaps nowhere better than The Painted Drum (Harper, 2005) where an Anishinaabe elder actually hears a nearby wolf speaking to him and converses with it, though “not in words.” The connection of wolf and elder is defined through shared trauma, and the wolf’s “response” gives the elder a reason to continue living. Erdrich’s wolves also play with ravens, a connection seen throughout nature but rarely on the pages of fiction involving wolves.

Writers of non-indigenous descent can learn a great deal from indigenous writers, not only in matters of technique but also in perceiving the world in a way to make not only a story but connecting other nonhuman sentient beings realistically into a story. Perhaps this is because of John Wayne-style Western films or the 1990 film Dances With Wolves—the indigenous peoples of our planet know what it is like to be misrepresented in literature and cinema.

There are examples of wolves well done outside indigenous literatures, but they are few and far between. Mostly this issue evolved from culture: Euro-Americans were not taught to respect the wolf and its role in nature as were indigenous peoples. The wolf was seen as either a harbinger of doom, a wild beast possessed of supernatural powers, or simply a pest that stole and killed stock. Many even today envision wolves as sharks with four legs, continuously eating. In reality, wolves often go days without food. “Being a predator is only one aspect of being a wolf. While eating is essential, predation is but a method.”² So it is that writers like Rick Bass (Where the Sea Used to Be [Houghton Mifflin, 1998]), Renee Askins (Shadow Mountain [Doubleday, 2002]), Seth Kantner (Ordinary Wolves [Milkweed Editions, 2004]), and Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing [Alfred A. Knopf, 1994]) and others have a lot more work to do to balance out negative portrayals of wolves. Yet there may be some hope: BK Loren’s debut novel Theft (Counterpoint, 2012) realistically extrapolates the character of a wild wolf and may be a harbinger of better things to come.

Authors, especially in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, where some writers literally inhabit and recreate the minds of alien beings, including nonhuman animals, can and should do better. If one can write about aliens, one should be able to write about the other intelligences with which we share our own planet. Wolves predate humans by millions of years and have just as much right to be here as we do. In a world where science—especially wildlife biology and the emerging field of ethology—has shown us the ecological importance of wolves in properly managed wilderness systems (think of Yellowstone National Park since the reintroduction of wolves there in 1994, how the renewed presence of wolves brought a cascade effect of health, including the revitalization of the Park’s forests), one would think that science would translate into better writing and storytelling.

Wolves deserve better, both on the ground and on the page. Writers, it’s time to be honest and tell stories that are not only good but true to the nonhuman characters on the page, as well. As the wolf makes a comeback across its historic range, reviving itself and the landscapes that absolutely had to miss it, stories matter. If we are to reverse the destruction and mismanagement the human occupation of the planet has caused, rewriting our stories with respect to science and the rights of nonhuman animals would not be the worst place to start. In a world of ever-diminishing biodiversity, we need to recognize the power of our words: otiose writing, flawed legends, and no science took wolves to the brink of extinction; good writing and good science could keep them where they belong, right here, with us, on the page and in person.

Neither in our actions nor our literatures have we been responsible to the wolf. It is high time we should be.

1 Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature, 11, (University of Nevada Press, 2009)

2 Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature, 94