Queen of Swords

While I feel spiritual resonance with certain animals (bear, panther, hawk, owl) I can't say that I'm intimately acquainted with any of them in the spirit realm. This is in distinct contrast to uncrowned_king who had -- and has -- two sets of very specific allies. One of these is a pair of wolves.

Early in our relationship, while we were still living hundreds of miles away from each other, we had allowed a phone conversation to go later than it should have, given my get-up-for-work time. I wanted to stay on the phone, but Lohain very firmly said that no matter how much we both wanted to keep talking, I needed to go to bed. In fact, he was about to end the call, and he was instructing me to go to bed immediately afterward. (He didn't technically have the authority to do that, but that didn't always stop him from giving orders.)

We said goodbye, but instead of getting up to go to bed immediately, I continued to recline on the comfy couch, savoring the memory of the conversation (which had been extremly hot and sensuous). I really didn't want to get up and go to bed.

Suddenly I had the distinct perception of a large wolf standing next to the couch looking at me expectantly. I blinked. He was still there. Then I 'heard' him say: The Boss said you were supposed to go to bed.

I stared.
I am not being told to go to bed by my lover's spirit wolf.
Am I?

The wolf remained stubbornly within my perceptions. Next thing I knew, he had taken my hand in his mouth and was tugging it. The Boss said you were supposed to go to bed, he repeated, more firmly.

I was both amused and a trifle miffed that the wolf's tone clearly indicated that in his mind I was equally subject to the authority of "The Boss" and there was no question in his mind that I would obey "our" alpha, just as he was.

It was with a distinct sense of unreality that I got off the couch and went into the bedroom, the wolf keeping my hand in his mouth until he was certain I was going to do as I'd been told. He stuck around until I was actually in bed, then disappeared.

The thought I was just put to bed by Lohain's wolf kept me awake for quite a while after that.


It was only this evening that I made the connection between the wolf's use of the term "The Boss" and the way Cronopio's Riley refers to her. I don't know if her posts influenced the way I heard the wolf, or if "alpha" just naturally translates into English as "boss" in some circumstances.

Only a few folks are going to understand the significance of this, but it's important enough to me to capture here.

In the course of sorting through my files this afternoon, I found a paper I'd written for my Advanced Biology class during my senior year of high school. It was a major research paper (or what passed for one at that time) on wolves.

Why wolves? I can't remember now. Maybe we were supposed to do a paper on some kind of animal. Maybe the topic was open and this is what I chose. (Maybe Mr. T had suggested it?) I know that I didn't have any particular interest in wolves at that time.

The paper consists of 21 hand-written pages (plus illustrations and a small bibliography) still held firmly in a plastic binder. I paged through it, shaking my head slightly at the painstaking handwriting, the earnest juvenile scholarship. I didn't read much, but I did scan the last page. To my surprise, I found a description of a unique connection between wolves and ravens. I included a substantial quote from Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men:

The wolf apparently takes great pleasure in the company of ravens. The raven. . . commonly follows hunting wolves to feed on the remains of a kill. In winter, when tracks are visible from the air, ravens will follow the trail of a wolf pack in hopes of finding a carcass. They roost in neighboring trees or hop about eating bloody snow while the wolves eat, approaching the carcass when the wolves have finished. But the relationship between the two is deeper than this, as is revealed in the following incident. A travelling pack had stopped to rest and four or five ravens who were tagging along began to pester them. As Mech writes in The Wolf:

"The birds would dive at a wolf's head or tail and the wolf would duck and then leap at them. Sometimes the ravens chased the wolves, flying just above their heads, and once, a raven waddled to a resting wolf, pecked at its tail, and jumped aside as the wolf snapped at it. When the wolf retaliated by stalking the raven, the bird allowed it within a foot before arising. Then it landed a few feet beyond the wolf and repeated the prank.

"It appears that the wolf and the raven have reached an adjustment in their relationships such that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other, and each is fully aware of the other's capabilities. Both species are extremely social, so they must possess the psychological mechanisms necessary for forming social attachments. Perhaps in some way individuals of each species have included members of the other in their social group and formed bonds with them.

That was the end of my paper. There was no proper concluding paragraph, just this long quote about the unusal social relationship between wolves and ravens.

For some reason, when I was 18 years old, this caught my attention and merited special mention -- so much so that there didn't seem to be anything else left to say.

I'm reading more now that I'm in this house. The light is much better, for one thing. And my daughter has her own room that she likes to be in, so the noise of her games doesn't interfere. I watched a lot of DVD's over the past few years, but for some reason that has less appeal these days. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's as simple as the TV no longer being the focal point of the living room.

Last night I started reading A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. It's not going to be one of my top-rated books, but it's engrossing enough. The main quibble I have is that the Nordic-flavored names have so many similar-sounding syllables in them that I have a hard time keeping track of which character is a man, which a wolf, and which pairs are bonded.

It wasn't until this morning that I realized the debt these authors owe to Anne McCaffrey's Pern stories. In both mythos there are a group of community halls set apart for those who live with powerful animals. Young humans are taken from the ordinary halls (maybe not in Pern?) to bond with the young beasts at the animal halls, with some being chosen and some rejected. Those who do bond live at the hall and spend much of their time training to battle the danger that threatens their society. In Pern, dragonriders defend against the mysterious thread, which the dragons burn from the sky before it can fall and burn the people and crops below. In the wolf-halls the men and the giant wolves battle trolls and wyvern. And in each society, when the female animals come into season, their bonded partners share the experience of both arousal and battle-passion as the males compete for the right to breed.

( Mating Rituals )

I am reading a book called The Wolf, the Woman, the Wilderness: A True Story of Returning Home. The author, Teresa tsimmu Martino, writes of her experience returning an orphaned wolf to the wild, and in doing so discovering some of her own wildness along with the strength of her mixed Italian-Osage heritage. She is a woman who lived with several wolves and wolf-dog mixes over the years, and knows them well.

She writes vividly and with love -- and one passage today struck me with particular force, for in the imagined voice of one of her wolves she captured the voice of my beloved who had kinship with wolves.

Writing about the futility of trying to force a wolf into a vehicle, she describes the final stage of the conflict. The italics are hers:

"But if I continue, perhaps muttering 'Get up you lazy old dusty thing,' The wolf grabs my arm in his teeth, snarling, as if to say, Look, move me where I don't want to go, and we're going to have problems. Your problems will be bigger than mine. He then looks at me with a frank arresting stare, the strength of the mountain rumbling in his eyes."

Those who knew Lohain will, I think, hear his voice in the italics (shaded with laughter or cold warning, depending on the situation) and remember the mountains in his eyes.