I Am the Wolf and the Dog

I am not resting.

I came down into this wood when the light stopped carrying us. The others came down around me, and we settled among the branches because this is where the road happened to end tonight. By now I should be asleep. We have flown all day. Tomorrow we go on.

And there is a dog barking somewhere. Not here. Far off, at a farm beyond the field. I cannot even see him. There is one light under a door and the dark shape of the buildings around it, and every time I think he has finished—

Bark. There. Silence. Good. Bark. Oh, please.

I put my head back under my wing. The farm is far away. The others are asleep. I am tired enough to sleep through anything. Bark. Fine. I will sleep anyway. I close my eyes.

Something moves below me. I open them again. There is an animal crossing the field. For a moment I think I have seen him wrongly. He comes out from beneath the trees, crosses the open ground with his head low, and makes no sound at all.

My God. A wolf. Now I am awake.

He is not large in the way the stories make him large. He is long, thin through the middle, and he carries his head low and level as he moves. He does not look toward the farm. The dog barks again. The wolf keeps walking.

One of them has spent half the night telling the dark where he is. The other has crossed the whole field without giving it a sound.

I still have the microphone. Of course I do. There is a dog I cannot see, a wolf who has not asked to speak, and several hundred kilometres of road waiting for me when the air warms tomorrow.

Excellent.

As far as humans know, these two are not parent and child. I have heard that their bones and the things humans read inside their bodies point further back, to older wolves that are no longer here. The dog did not simply come from the wolf walking below me. Both came from something before them. Their lineages have also met and mixed at different times since they separated; the boundary between them is real, but it has never been perfectly sealed.

Neither animal in this field is the beginning.

The wolf has stopped near the edge of the trees. The dog has not stopped anywhere.

Bark. Bark. Silence.

I wait. Nothing. Good.

Bark.

I should not have thought that.

The wolf comes farther out. For a moment the light beneath the farmhouse door catches the lower part of him. He stops exactly where the light becomes too weak to hold him properly.

There is an old human story built around a place like that. A cold night. A fire. A hungry animal standing just outside the light, and a long moment, and then one step in. Humans tell it to their children. The dogs, if they carry anything, carry that: a grandmother walked into the light, and we have been warm since.

And if the wolves told stories the way humans do, perhaps there would be one facing the other way. That theirs stood at the same edge, was offered the same warmth, and turned around and went back into the trees — and that everything they still have, they have because she turned around.

Neither can be checked. Both are exactly as good.

There was probably no single night when one of them walked into a firelight and became the other. I have heard several human explanations for how it began. One says that the wolves able to stay nearer human camps found more food and, generation after generation, their descendants became increasingly able to live beside people. Humans themselves do not seem to know exactly how the beginning happened. Their bones preserve the result better than the moment.

Whatever happened, it happened across generations. I have heard that young wolves raised closely by humans can become strongly socialized to people. They do not become dogs. The difference between wolf and dog cannot be recreated in one lifetime.

Nobody stepped into the light.

The wolf is still standing outside it. Then he turns. For no reason I can see, he goes back toward the trees.

The dog barks.

That one, at least, appears determined to remain exactly where he is.

I have heard that humans found something stranger inside dogs. Most dogs carry more copies than wolves usually do of a small instruction involved in breaking down starch. Not all dogs carry the same number. As far as humans can tell, that difference grew later, when some of them began staying in one place and growing more of what they ate.

Human food did not merely pass through the dog. Somewhere across all those generations of standing near people and eating what fell, the bread went into him and stayed. It is in him now the way the road is in me — not learned, not taught, there at the start, before anything happens.

The bread is inside him.

The wolf has come out again. I am beginning to think he has no intention of letting me sleep either.

He moves toward the farm this time, though not toward the door. He stays near the bottom of the field, where the grass meets the trees. Then he stops.

There is something on the ground in front of him. A stone perhaps. A post. The place where two fences meet badly. He lowers his face to it. And stays there.

Food, I think. At least somebody is going to get something out of this night.

He stays longer. Then he lifts his head. Nothing in his mouth. He turns away.

Fine. Not food.

They say wolves leave a great deal for one another in scent — at a path, at a boundary, at a stone, at a corner that many of them pass. Who was here. Whose ground this is. How recently.
None of it means anything to me. An animal may therefore stand over a patch of ground that appears empty to another species and find that it is not empty at all.

The wolf is gone before I learn this. Whatever was written there was never written for me.

The dog barks again.

Still there.

There is a simple explanation for why dogs remained near humans. Useful animals are worth keeping.

They guarded. They hunted beside people. They helped move livestock. In some places they hauled loads. They consumed things people discarded. Over time, one use could lead to another until there was an animal beside the house and plenty of practical reasons for keeping him there.

The explanation works very well.

Then the ground gives up a young dog.

Someone told me once about a dog humans dug out of the ground. A young one, more than fourteen thousand years old. They say his teeth show that he had been badly ill several times while still young, and that he probably could not have survived as long as he did without humans caring for him.

During the worst periods of illness, the animal could have offered little of the practical usefulness usually invoked to explain the early relationship between dogs and humans. It died young.

When he died, they buried him with two of their own. There was ochre there, and a tooth from another dog.

That is all the ground can tell them. It cannot tell them why somebody did it.

No one can know now whether the dog had a name. No one can know who brought it water. No one can know whether somebody stayed close when it was ill. Those things are gone.

The act remains.

An animal was kept alive through a period when it could give almost nothing back. Then it was buried with people.

The explanation about usefulness had been doing very well until then.

Bark.

I wish he would stop.

Out in the dark, the wolf has started toward something. I cannot see what.

He moves low along the inside of the hedge. Faster now. Then he stops. Not slowly. Completely. He waits.

I wait too.

Nothing happens.

After a while he walks on. Further along, where the field falls away, he tries again. That comes to nothing as well. He keeps moving.

From what humans have been able to watch, failed hunts are ordinary for wolves. I have heard that success varies with prey, terrain, weather, season and pack size. Against large prey, failure is often far more common than success. The animal’s wolves hunt can also injure or kill them. Hooves, horns and a single badly placed kick matter.

The wolf tries a third time. He stops. Waits. Moves. Nothing. He keeps walking.

I understand that much without help.

He is hungry.

There is a light in a building he will not approach and a dog somewhere behind it who is still barking. Neither condition seems to interest the other.

The wolf is alone. Humans have made a great deal out of that too.

They told me once humans used to believe wolves lived under a hard one at the top: an animal that fought its way to the top and held the others beneath it. Later, after watching wolves living with their own families instead of strangers confined together, they changed their explanation.

What they know now is duller. A pack is usually a family — parents, and their offspring from the last year or two. As the young mature, many leave. They disperse in search of territory and mates, sometimes travelling across countries before settling somewhere else.

Around me, the other birds are asleep. I do not know most of them.

We reached this wood because the light ended here. Tomorrow, when the air begins to rise, we will climb together. We will follow the same road. We will use one another in the sky without asking anyone’s name. Tomorrow night we may land together again. Or not.

Below me somewhere is an animal whose young often grow toward leaving. Farther away is another animal I cannot even see, of a kind that has made a life around human places: farms, houses, villages, streets, gates, rubbish, kitchens.

The dog barks.

Nobody answers.

The wolf appears again near the bottom of the field. For a moment he is only a difference inside the dark. Then he moves and becomes an animal again.

Humans once made sure there would be fewer of him. Much fewer.

Apparently they once paid one another to kill wolves in these places. Later they made laws to protect them. They returned. So did the arguments.

Wolves kill livestock. The losses are real. Farmers bear costs. Governments compensate some of them. Preventive measures can reduce losses but do not erase them. Arguments over conservation, hunting, rural livelihoods and the presence of predators continue wherever recovering wolf populations meet human settlements and livestock.

The wolf below knows none of this. He has stopped again. His nose goes down. He waits.

Whatever humans have decided about wolves, this one is still trying to find something to eat.

He moves. Stops. Moves again.

Then the hedge takes him.

The barking stopped a while ago. I did not notice when. There is only the light under the door now, and whatever is behind it has finally lain down.

The wolf went at some point too. There was a shape near the top of the field, and then there was not. I have been watching the same piece of darkness ever since without anything in it.

The others in this tree have not moved all night. That is the part I mind. They will wake with everything they need and I will not. Tomorrow the air will rise, the road will begin again, and none of it will care that I spent the night awake.

Two animals kept me here. Neither spoke to me. Neither spoke to the other. Neither knew the other was there.

And I still have this thing. There was nobody to give it to.

I am putting my head back now.

Good night, dog. Good hunt, wolf.

— Karim

Chapter five of The Other Inhabitants — the series in which each chapter hands the microphone to one animal. If you are new here, it begins with the preface, I Am Not Your Bird, and runs through I Am the Bird, I Am the Horse and I Am the Cow. Tell me what they got right.

If you enjoyed this stretch of the journey, the best way to help is simply to pass the flight along. No pledges or paid tiers are asked for here—just an open sky and a wider circle for the words to drift. If you know someone who might like to look up for a moment, share this piece with them. Thank you.