This is an excerpt from Chapter One of The Wolves Speak

Chapter One
The Wolf Speaks

Winter, 1998

In the short, dark season of winter, the spirit wolf came. I saw his blue, glowing eyes from the window. My heart pounded—this was no ordinary creature. It was a huge, white wolf. He came from the Spirit World and he came for me. I would not allow this. I was overwhelmed by fear, and I fled.

I ran through the house, locking the doors, fleeing upstairs. His deep, throaty howls filled the frozen landscape, the trees shook like brittle sticks. The world was silent, without movement, but for the sound of the howl that rattled the trees and pierced my body. This wolf had come to find me. He knew me, and his voice and presence shook my soul.

He disappeared a few moments before my husband and children returned. I ran down the stairs to open the door, and my entire body was shaking. I was so glad to see them. I played with my children, put them to bed. I didn’t even mention the wolf. I did tell them I had had the feeling something large had been in the yard; it was probably a bear moving through the area. I was so exhausted, mostly from fright, and I felt silly having wasted my time alone. I was relieved to go upstairs to sleep and fall into oblivion.

During the night, the sycamore brushed her white limbs at my window. I looked at the clock, and it was 3:00 am. The full moon gleamed on the sycamore, turning the bark silver so that it seemed to shine in the darkness. The landscape was filled with a vast pale and frozen light. It held a terrible and eerie silence. Again, I felt the presence of the white wolf.

Native American legend holds that between the hours of 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM, you can ‘walk between the worlds’. This is the hour that we walk in the spirit world, when dreams are real. This is when the wolf returned to me. I heard the deep growls in the yard, followed by a strange, low whining. The spirit wolf sat beneath my window, and he howled so loudly that it shook the house. The sound vibrated throughout my body, and it rocked my spine with kundalini-like waves.

I awakened my husband, but he remained in a strange stupor. I begged Michael to look at the window and see what was there. He woke up so that he could look sleepily through the window, but he couldn’t see anything. He asked, “What was it?” “A wolf, a big dog, something,” I whispered, pulling as far as I could from the window.

Then the low pitched growl followed. “Why aren’t the dogs barking? Silence answered him. The waves of sound assaulted the house, again. “What kind of God-awful creature can make that sound — it has to be a wolf. Even a wolf can’t be that awful!” He pulled the covers over his head to stop the sound. “God help the dogs,” he said. “It’s something huge. I hope it hasn’t killed them.” He fell back to sleep, and I couldn’t wake him.

Again, silence came. As soon as the house was sleeping, the howls came. No one heard them but me. Even though my eyes were closed, I could still see the spirit wolf. He was white and huge with fiery blue eyes. His long white teeth glimmered in the moonlight. The moment he was aware that I saw him, his howl changed. It passed deeply through my body as though he was calling a part of me into him. I tried to run away, to hide, but a part of me must have answered — the part of me that is wolf. Perhaps, I, too, howled within my soul, finding the sound too irresistible, as irresistible as running through the woods on the night of a full moon.

The next day everything seemed to be as it had been. I spoke with Michael about it, and he recounted a camping adventure on the top of Wauka Mountain. When he had been nine or ten years old, he had camped out on the mountain with a friend of about the same age. Late in the night, they were still sitting around the fire when a white wolf appeared with shining eyes.

They hurried into the small tent by the fire. It was only a pup tent, and the flap wouldn’t close properly. The wolf sat outside, looked at them and howled at the full moon for what seemed to be forever. Then he trotted down the mountain as though they no longer interested him.

I was secretly terrified of wolves. My dreams had been inhabited by wolves since my earliest childhood. They never harmed me, but I was always sick with fear when I awakened and usually couldn’t return to sleep. Later, I would find out we are all either secretly terrified or drawn to our totems. Totem animals bring power that elicits a strong, passionate reaction, not necessarily a positive one. A totem offers protection, but it also draws our awareness to our shadow and sleeping gifts of power.

I tried to forget about the wolf, particularly in view of the synchronicity with my husband’s experience. However a million thoughts and questions swirled around in my mind, along with a heavy dose of terror and a strange restlessness. Was it a spirit wolf? Why had it come to me, and why was I the only one in the household to experience it?

After the wolf came, howled and disappeared into the night, nothing unusual or extraordinary happened at first. It seemed that I was in a void, that life waited to weave a tapestry made possible by that entire surreal visit.

The moon is sacred to the wolf, and it was exactly one moon cycle when the wolves came again. But this time they were real wolves with sharp fangs, shiny coats, and mask-like faces.

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