Wolf Moon

Some I love who are dead were watchers of the moon and knew its lore

Colorado ranchers fear decimation as wolves roam Western Slope

- Denver Gazette, 1/20/24

Wolves Could Stress Ranchers to Point of Suicide, Colorado Lawmaker Says

- Cowboy State Daily, 1/24/24

The Usual Suspects: In Colorado, Wolves Blamed For Losses They Didn't Cause

- Mountain Journal, 3/13/23

Killing Wolves Actually Leads to More Livestock Deaths

- Smithsonian Magazine, 12/12/14

Wyoming ranchers will shoot on sight if Colorado wolves stray into Cowboy state

- FOX News, 12/30/23

I am constantly trying to express something inexpressible. The gaping horror at the ways in which wasting lives means wasting the gift of death, the way its certainty is what grants our existence any meaning whatsoever. No one and nothing is allowed to die with dignity anymore in the charnel house of a world that we have been forced into.

I think often of wolves, and how much they represent about our culture. Cheap, I know, to reduce such ethereal and majestic creatures to allegory, especially since it’s our allegories that got them into trouble in the first place. Cheap, too, to comment at this point that despite our obsessions with guns and bravado, masculinity and the God-given right to rule, what defines Americans more than anything else is our abiding fear of every single thing on earth. Animals with teeth and addicts without them. Tents along the highway and every other driver upon it. Palestinians. Mexicans. People from everywhere else we can’t find on a map. But these allegories and the fears they engender have had very real consequences, for the wolves and everyone else.

Alabama becomes first state to carry out execution by nitrogen gas

- NPR, 1/25/24

Four minutes of convulsions: Kenneth Smith executed by nitrogen gas

- Montgomery Advisor, 1/25/24

Alabama condemned for nitrogen gas execution: ‘They intended to torture him’

- The Guardian, 1/26/24

Every day I go out into the park across from my house and I walk my dog. We sniff around the trees and the playground, wander over to the baseball diamond and football field, drift up into the neighborhood and explore the streets. Sometimes we go to the community garden, where in the colder months we are always alone, and I close the gate and let her off the leash to go roam between the beds as she pleases. Later, at home, if she wants comfort she’ll come and stick her little head between my legs, or more often turn and lean against me so that I can scratch her back and hindquarters all at once. As I’ve detailed extensively in this newsletter I love her so much that a few times a day it really feels like my heart might burst.

Last spring I went out to Montana and stayed a few nights at a wolf sanctuary outside of Bozeman. As I roamed the perimeter of the rescued wolves’ enclosure, the two yearling males in particular paid me close attention. They trotted alongside me, nothing but chainlink between us, and when I stopped walking and crouched before them, one walked away, and the other did what I at once never and always expected him to do: stuck his butt into the fence and looked pitifully back at me for a scratch. You’re not supposed to touch them but I—perhaps stupidly—felt no fear sticking my fingers through to abide. He was so like Orla, my dog, that in that moment I realized I loved him, too. (Really, she was so like him, I had to remind myself. The dog I could see inside the wolf is actually the wolf I see inside my dog.) In my dreams sometimes I still see his piercing eye. Feel the tangled wires of his fur beneath my fingers. Hear nothing of his great paws padding in impossible silence through the forested world.

Protest Convoy Heading to Border is Calling Itself ‘An Army of God’

- VICE, 1/26/24

Fight over border intensifies as Texas governor pledges more razor wire

- The Guardian, 1/26/24

Seeking medical care, one family races anticipated US border restrictions

- Al Jazeera, 1/25/24

We have accepted the dog into our homes, and in a world that’s impossibly expensive and hostile to children, replaced the spaces for our own offspring with ones for our pet surrogates. Breweries, coffeeshops, grocery stores: you can take your dog basically anywhere. (Good luck paying for childcare, though.) And despite our complete surrender to the dog, we have hung every other sin on the wolf. Well, maybe not “despite.” Perhaps it’s because of this surrender that we must target the wolf, must ascribe to it crimes it has never committed, must pretend no knowledge of our own violent complicity in the problems of our society, must ignore its keystone role in what remains of a decimated ecosystem. We have built borders around our world and found only one way to deal with the wolf, which in its wildness, its otherness, does not and can not fit neatly within those borders: it must be slaughtered.

Last night was the Wolf Moon, the January full moon, a moon for reflecting on what must be left behind, for reflecting on the loneliness of the heart. I am lonely in my own heart because I believe that all men are brothers, and yet each day anew I am greeted by headlines of wanton death and destruction, the annihilations fast and slow of the most sacred bonds a species can hold.

I want, instead, for each day to feel like walking out into a snowstorm, when the world is quiet and the concept of “enemy” vanishes into the great blankness of the covered earth. I want this so much it hurts.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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Robert Hayden