The speaker reflects on the profound moment of walking with a rescued dog in the woods, feeling a deep sense of freedom and ancient connection. This experience led to a transcendent moment, with a mutual understanding and opened up a new territory for the speaker. Furthermore, the speaker emphasizes the profound attention to sensory detail when being around small children and animals, altering their experience of being a body in the world. Finally, the speaker discusses the value of writing about animals as an exercise to understand the world from their perspective, citing the example of observing wolves and the olfactory breadcrumbs they leave behind.
The wolf carries an almost unbearable amount of symbolism in western culture, encapsulating the predatory, the carnal, the supernatural and the ravenous. But in her book Wolfish, Erica Berry suggests that it’s time to understand wolves differently: as tender, as hunted, as guardians of the landscape.
What’s more, those evil qualities may be better attributed to ourselves than to wolves. Berry weaves memoir with natural history, cultural critique, folklore and conservation to show that wolves have too often been a cypher for all our fears, and that this has left them under threat of extinction.
In this fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, recorded as part of Katherine’s True Stories Book Club, Erica discusses her experiences with wolves real and imagined.
Katherine's new book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
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