Stephanie Rutherford

Stephanie Rutherford Ph.D, is a professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University who thinks and writes about animal studies and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Governing the Wild and of Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada, (2022).

Wolves and Wildness

The howl of a wolf is often thought of as the quintessential sound of wilderness, even more now that it’s seldom heard outside a movie theater. Echoing through a forest or reverberating off a mountain, it’s a sound that ripples outward in an unfathomable language found only in the last wild places. While we colloquially speak of it in the singular, howls exist in polyvocalities. For instance, the howl we carry around in our heads is the long and mournful cry of Call of the Wild or, more nefariously, The Grey—the ahhhhwoooooooo in the long dark. Reminiscent of the timbre of a cello, this sound is powerful and solemn, seemingly thick with meaning (and maybe menace). But this is just one version of wolf talk. Howls are just as often lusty or warm, higher pitched, nasal, and even somewhat strangled. They do tend to lilt downward but in different tones and even localized accents, that remind us that each wolf is an individual, like each one of us. Pack choruses sing with different voices, each overlaying in a cacophonous and impossible harmony. In the summer months, the howls of adults are joined by their pups—squeaking, yipping, and whimpering in ways that are familiar to those of us who are parents. While some hear these communications as eerie and unearthly, for me at least, they are staggeringly beautiful, rendering audible the sound of our connection and responsibility to the earth and all its creatures. It seems I am not alone. People describe their experience of hearing wolves howl as one that enlivens the senses, reaching into a deep well of emotions that can generate a kind of affective overload. It’s a complicated jangle of feelings that includes awe, delight, and trepidation. And it’s felt as well as heard; hearts quicken, spines tingle, goosebumps rise, some are brought to tears. It’s a sound that leaves no listener untouched.

Perhaps because of its impact, the wolf’s sonorousness is often ideologically freighted with all sorts of lessons. For some, the howl says something about the insignificance of the human species in the face of the grandeur of nature. Others suggest the howl is evidence of the urgent need for wilderness protection so that the naturalness exemplified by such sounds remains. Indeed, the howl serves as a kind of sonic synecdoche, an aural short-hand that insists that not everything has been touched by humans. Either way it becomes the soundscape of wilderness.

But wilderness is a relative thing, even if we assume a shared meaning when we use the term. It has never been an innocent descriptor for a natural state of being, but instead is a way of seeing the world that doesn’t leave the land untouched. As William Cronon has now so famously remarked, the idea of wilderness (rather than the biophysical reality of wildness) is what he calls “a profoundly human creation,” with a historicity and contingency which is worth unpacking. While the definition of wilderness has shifted and changed through time, it has always been inflected with power. It has also justified all manner of exclusions, including the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands, so they could be rendered into empty spaces of wilderness, to visit but not to stay. Indeed, settler colonialism and ideas of wilderness have been tightly tethered in places like national parks and, only now, through the leadership of Indigenous peoples, are they starting to unfurl. So, until recently, to be entangled with wilderness—as the howl is—offered a complicated and often dangerous situation for the wolves who were the authors of these sonic landscapes. Such an ideological alignment rendered wolves killable, justified by the settler notion that wilderness needed to be eliminated for a new nation to be born.

For instance, since the mid to late-1880s, it is a sound that’s been mostly absent from the Northeast. That’s no accident; wolves were systemically slaughtered in this part of the world, beginning as early as the 1600s. Part of the project of colonialism was to subdue what settlers thought of as desolation of wilderness, a state of nature they conceived of as both wicked and improvident. The goal was to remake complex socio-ecological systems—ones that have thrived since time immemorial with the Indigenous nations who still call Turtle Island home—into landscapes which could be settled and cultivated, filled with animals that, unlike wolves, they could (mostly) control. Wilderness, then, was impermissible—a contagion that if left alone would infect and spread. The sonorousness of wolves, their insistence on being heard but not often seen, generated anxiety in settlers and for them was the surest sign the colonial project remained incomplete. And so, as Peter Coates has noted, “The silencing of the wolf epitomized the taming of the frontier.” Billy-Ray Belcourt has powerfully traced how the ambitions and violences of colonial power, agrarianism, and notions of human exceptionalism were sutured together. The howl of the wolf threatened this vision; extinguishing it from the landscape was a form of colonial nation-building which functioned through erasure and slaughter. As a result, wolves are gone from most of their historic range that once spanned almost all of North America.

If we are lucky enough to listen to wolves howl today some of us still hear wilderness. But the emotions such sounds generate have changed, especially—though not exclusively—for environmentally-minded folks. Now when we hear wolves howl, we are likely to feel the pin-prick of loss; wolf howling is read through the lens of elegy, a nostalgic lament for the last of a remaining nature in this time many call the Anthropocene. If we get to hear their voices today, it is usually because we have actively sought their company through visiting places where they are still found in some densities, in large swathes of Canada and smaller pockets in the U.S. In an interesting historical shift we seek out rather than silence their voices. Their rarity, generated through the violence of the bounty and predator control programs, has made them newly desirable as a wilderness ambassador.

Of course, wolves don’t howl to threaten our ideas about the world or to make us feel wonder and grief. They don’t howl for us at all. It may be that wolf communication seems to embody wilderness because it is both captivating and incomprehensible to human ears, understood as resolutely part of nature rather than culture. But, in fact, howling is entirely social. While we can’t precisely decipher their language, wolf biologists think that howling serves many aims: it is likely how wolves build bonds and smooth over disagreements, find mates and lost kin, establish territory and set boundaries, express joy in reunion or to warn intruders that they’ve strayed too close. Howls are rich with meaning, but it is of animal rather than human culture. In this way, it is both confounding and enigmatic for people who want to understand it—much like the wild itself.

What might it mean for wolf song to be heard again in the Northeast? Likely it would mean starting with the Adirondacks, another place in which the violence of settler ideas of wilderness scarred the land, people, and animals. There have been exciting conversations happening for a while now around an Algonquin to Adirondacks corridor that ignores imposed colonial borders and instead thinks in terms of bioregions. In finding a way for wildness to thrive, we would need to abandon the idea of wilderness as sites separate from cultures that shape them. To reintroduce wolves to the Northeast, we would need to be profoundly intentional, engaging in practices of restoration and repair that acknowledge how settler colonialism indelibly reshaped socio-ecological relations in this part of Turtle Island. If we seek justice on these lands, the wolf may be our guide. If we embrace the conviviality the howl implies, we might then focus on connection rather than separation. For me, instead of wilderness, the howl is a sound of hope. Its renewed presence could mark new and better ways of not only interacting with wolves, but with one another, too.