“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither wolf nor mountain agreed with such a view” (130). Walking along in Farmington it is hard to imagine wolves. It is hard to feel how powerful and awesome they really are. When I was a kid I spent some time fascinated by them. By dad and my grandmother live on Verona Island here in Maine and I spent every weekend visiting. It was normal for us to walk along a small wood trail between the two homes but not at night. At night the woods were still fairly wild and belonged to bears, coyotes and wolves. It was dangerous to walk through them then.
I remember one evening when my grandmother walked through the woods to see my dad. It was evening and the sun was almost down. That was when we saw what we at first thought was a dog. It was big and furry and black. Too big to be a dog but it had ears and four paws and looked like a dog. It was a wolf stalking around our house. It ambled on along into the woods just as my grandmother reached the house. Needless to say she did not go back through the woods.
I can understand that people fear what they don’t understand and they certainly don’t understand wolves. Maybe that is why they have been hunted to near extinction. But when I see one it doesn’t even cross my mind that we should shoot it. As scary as they can be, especially when they howl, they are also beautiful and loyal. They hunt in packs and mate for life. They play games with their pups for food. And they grieve when their pack members die. In some ways they are more like us than we realize. I can forgive Leopold for his folly in killing this wolf but I don’t think I can forgive the rest of the world for nearly destroying something so amazing.
Wolves will almost never attack a human unless provoked, the pack shares responsibility for the pups, only the alpha male and female of the pack have pups, when a whole pack works together they can easily take down a large animal such as a moose and they have a clear hierarchical social order that they live by but most packs are made of one family.
Maybe I don’t understand the accord that the mountain and woods have that Leopold describes in his passage but like the mountain I certainly know that they are important. I think Leopold takes full advantage of this story in this essay. I liked how he should that nature sometimes knows things we don’t but saying that the mountain did not agree with his take on fewer wolves. That statement worked well because in the end it was the mountain that suffered first from the loss of the wolves. The mountain was destroyed by the number of deer trying to eat the vegetation and wearing trails all over the place. Then the destruction continued as the deer died out from hunger because there were so many of them and no predators to keep their numbers low. Leopold does an excellent job of showing people that even animals we don’t fully understand and may be afraid of are helpful to the environment and to humans as well. Nature is in complete balance until we interfere too far. In this case the loss of the wolves destroyed mountains and deer. Who knows what other harm could have been caused by the loss of this one predator?
Yeah great post! I also loved this part in the book because of the statement he is trying to convey: the cycle of life, also requires death. More specifically though it seems like he's saying that only certain things have the right to kill certain other things in order to maintain the proper, cyclical balance.
ReplyDeleteA little before the passage you talk about, there is another that really struck a cord with me. It's the part where Leopold and company initially, encounter the wolf pups playing by the rock basin (I hugely apologize for not having the book with me, but I will make sure to bring it to class for further investigation). He essentially describes the wolves at play and the sudden exuberance that the hunters are overcome with as they "pump lead" into them. To me, this passage speaks a lot about the initial, carnal desire to fight and kill the unknown as you pointed out Danirella, but also because of the interruption aspects of it.
Just like in the other nature writings that we've read (including Leopold), there is a pervasive emphasis on nature and being interrupted by the tools and progressions of mankind. In the moment I described above, this interruption seems to hit harder than all the other moments in the book, because Leopold first hand is able to compare and contrast himself from how he views nature then to now. This in turn allows him to know of the ramifications of his past, instead of merely speculating about it.
At least for me, this was one of the most emotional moments I have read in a nature write-up, which was something I was anticipating.
This passage was very moving, and it's no surprise that it has become one of Leopold's more famous essays. He seems to give little thought to what the wolves mean to anything but him, which strikes me as a pretty unique way to portray the act in your own book, particularly for a conservationist like Leopold. I think that it is the way he remarks, almost as an aside, "In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf" (130) that makes his retelling of this even so peculiar. Any other author in his position might have made some statements about how it was wrong to do what he did, or at least try and appeal to the sadness that his readers are bound to experience, but I think it is important for Leopold's intent for him to not explain his motives any more than he needs to. It is part of the moral of the story, I think, that we recognize how selfish human beings can be from time to time, and also how we all are young and rash at some point in our lives. The most important part of the passage, I thought, was at the end when Leopold sees the green fire in the wolf's eyes and he says "I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes" (130). It seems that this is Leopold getting a dose of maturity, finally realizing that there is a connection in nature bigger than him, that exists beyond the realm of what he wants, or deems as necessary.
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