Bog Myrtle & Peat

He’s grey and brief and wholly empty. I wish I could say that he means something to me; I wish I could tell you that we share some connection. But I see nothing at all. He is blank as a tribal mask; blank as a vee sign or a sheet of bare stone. Forty yards of leafmould stand between us; forty yards of numbly swelling air.

Then he turns and reveals a second wolf behind him. They run together, and that’s when I come round because they’re big; bigger than the grandest dog you ever saw. And they run as if they’ve been running all their lives; a steady, knowing bound which could last forever. They grasp the land and throw it inexhaustibly behind them.

As they run, the floodgates open – a rising shriek of fear in my skull. I didn’t recognise the puzzled face, but My God I know this movement. Trees begin to flicker around their bodies like cracks in a magic lantern. All of my childhood nightmares flash into me; tales of a Cossack sleigh stuck bellied in the snow and the ponies rolling their eyes at the rising howl; the brassy sneer of Prokofiev’s Wolf on a crackling LP; the lusty bound of Tolstoy’s borzois  – all of this in shallow proxy for the terrible, awesome reality.

Four days have passed. I close my eyes and all I can see is the way they ran. I see the joint between leg and spine and tail on the leading wolf. That movement, so familiar as to be stomach-turning writ large in pale and thickened fur. That’s how dogs move, and yet no dog in the world has ever moved like that.

—

I wrote this wolf-sketch four years ago in the aftermath of a trip to Poland’s Białowieża forest. It’s clumsy and it isn’t how I’d write it now, but parts of that account were torn off this blog and used for other things. The words became a feature for a magazine, and a number of small quotes later blew away and were seeded elsewhere in other articles. But the wolf remains, and now there are refinements to the fascination which grows and falls backs upon itself like blobs of lava in a lamp. 

At the time, I was fascinated by Eastern wolves and the darkness of a snow-bound night. It’s why I went to Poland, but there are wolves in France too, and the modern resurgence of lupine prosperity belies a recent disappearance. Wolves were gone, and now they’re back. And during the period of that absence, the memory of dark shapes in the forest remained deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. 

When I reach for the varied texture of Welsh and Irish voices, I generally do so from within the context of a common language. France is harder to handle, but I do speak and read a reasonable kind of French – and I realise that there’s more than decoding at work in the jump between two languages. Even when I’m able to penetrate French texts and convert them into something I recognise, I fall short on the specifics of texture and perception. It becomes clear that French literature offers a subtly different perspective on the world, and the literal conversion of words is only half the game. Mervyn Peake springs to mind here; Peake, whose books are continually leaning towards a sense of fantasy. But there’s nothing in Gormenghast which could not actually be true – there are no dragons or fairies in those books. The atmosphere depends upon a careful sense of distortion, and the final approach towards caricature which falls millimetres of short of parody. Peake lays out a strange and queasy world, but that strangeness and queasiness is simply a matter of perspective, like looking through a pane of coloured or misshapen glass. His world might seem outlandish, but it’s all possible.

I find this same effect in French literature; the viewpoint is never what I expect, and the chords contain additional notes which jar and tend towards fantasy – but without ever making that specific leap. So I think of Guy de Maupassant, Jules Laforgue and Henri Alain Fournier’s flickering pierrot who is seen but could be mistaken. Or the strange, glassy-fragility of Antoine de Saint Exupery, or the rowdy, subversive modern-day illustrations of Nicolas de Crecy. There are no great departures from sense or reason in these works – but the perameters of reality are set in fluid and confusing places. It’s not just because these voices are not what I’m used to – they reflect a different ability to describe and articulate the kaleidoscopic experience of dreaminess and confusion. It’s no great leap to think of these artists within the context of a uniquely French imagination, and I spring towards that idea with delight.

But when you combine that imagination with stories of wolves, the ground begins to shiver. Wolves are thrilling, heady animals, and the French are wonderfully able to articulate this experience of headiness – it’s the perfect combination of subject matter and narrative tone to elevate both to new and thrilling ends. From the grimly symbolic experience of wolf-hunting as a courtly tradition to strange tales of the werewolf “loup-garou”, wolves move in and out of focus in French culture; they’re more than merely animals. People make sense of wolves in different ways, and this is not to underplay the mad excitement of wolfishness in Slovakia, Croatia or Germany. I’m finding it damn hard to keep the Spanish lobo in the peripheries, because I know he will eat me alive – for the sake of this specific line of enquiry, I have to stay focussed. 

The French have an old expression to describe the moment when light has almost completely faded, but night has not yet arrived. It’s a blue, mysterious time in the day when things are no longer what they seem. Place yourself in the pitch of that dusk, and imagine that an animal has appeared before you on the darkening road. In some ways it’s familiar, but there’s a sense of unease in the lack of certainty. Because this encounter could either be of no importance – or it could be of every importance. The French call this time of day “entre loup et chien”; between wolf and dog – and the chilling moment when you’re no longer able to tell them apart. It’s perfect, and now I’m ploughing through old stories and tingling at what can be found in the twilight on the edge of the wild French wood.

Picture: detail from “Hallali de Loup” ou “La Chasse au Loup”, by François Desportes (1725), photographed in La Musée de Beaux Artes de Rennes.