Folk Tales of the Wolf E-Book

Chris Salisbury

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 174

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'What a wonderful book. Wolves through a prism of love, understanding and fascination.' – Derek Gow, author and ecologist Wolves have been hunted to extinction in many countries, clung on in isolated populations near human communities and thrived in remote wilderness: theirs is a story of adaption and survival that is not yet finished. Once prevalent in Britain, the wolf has been much maligned and persecuted, but it has also been missed, and the 'return of the wolf' in this compendium of tales mirrors the aspiration to reintroduce this ancient species to Britain's recovering wild places. The wolf has wended its way into our collective imagination through traditional narratives around the world. Known as shapeshifter, this animal has weaved itself into our folklore for centuries; from the compelling protagonist and agent of change to the wily trickster and persecutor, and today as a totem of hope for the rewilding movement. Storyteller and outdoorsman Chris Salisbury ensures the legacy of this beloved creature lives on in an unforgettable collection of wolfish tales to tell out loud.

Leseprobe

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Chris Salisbury, 2025

Illustrations © Bea Baranowska, 2025

The right of Chris Salisbury to be identified as the Authorof this work has been asserted in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any informationstorage or retrieval system, without the permission in writingfrom the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 982 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

The History Press proudly supports

www.treesforlife.org.uk

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe

Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia

[email protected]

DEDICATION

To Keziah and Hyoka, Safia and Wilf,my much cherished ‘wolf pups’.

May you serve your family and thewild in equal measure.

GRATITUDE

To all the storytellers who fed the wolvesin these stories for thousands of years, andto all those working on the front line ofwolf conservation around the world.

Praise for Folk Tales of the Wolf

‘What a wonderful book. Wolves through a prism of love, understanding and fascination. A vision of a creature we have always understood to be elemental and self-willed that reinforces this understanding rather than donning the dim blinkers of manufactured and inaccurate fear. We have known the wolf for so long, their presence was never far from ours. This refreshing work reignites an intrigue we should never have lost.’

Derek Gow, author, reintroduction specialist and ecologist.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Bill Plotkin

Introduction

Prologue: Four Wolves – A Ho-Chunk Tale(Native Canadian/American)

1. Blue Wolf – Wolf as Creator, Wolf as Trickster, Wolf as Fool

The Spirit Friends – An Anishinaabeg Tale(Native Canadian/American)

Wolf the Creator – A Northern Paiute Tale(Native American)

Two Tails – A Scottish Tale

Señor Lobo – A Mexican Tale

Wolf Brother, Wolf Sister – A Norse Tale(Scandinavian)

The Wolf and the Toad – A Salish Tale(Native Canadian/American)

2. Black Wolf – Wolf as Shadow, Wolf as Beast, Wolf as Monster

Salu’ah, the She-Wolf of Arabia – A Bedouin Tale

The Enchanted Chain – A Norse Tale(Scandinavian)

Little Red-cap – A German Tale(and everywhere else, too!)

Tentelina – A Macedonian Tale

The Wolf-Bride – A Persian Tale

3. White Wolf – Wolf as Shapeshifter

The She-Wolf Within – A Mexican Tale

The Enchanted Mill – A Croatian Tale

The White Wolf – A Flemish Tale

The Wolf Child – A Portuguese Tale

Wolf Mother, Wolf Daughter – A KoryakTale (Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia)

The Wolf Daughters of Airitech – An Irish Tale

4. Grey Wolf – Wolf as Ally, Wolf as Helper

Medicine Wolves and Coyotes – A Pawnee Tale (Native American)

Mouse Learns to Fly – An AthabascanTale (Alaskan)

The Old Mother of the Wolves – An Itelmen Tale (Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia)

The Wolf Man – A Blackfoot Tale(Native Canadian/American)

Secrets and Songs – A Nowhere Tale(Contemporary)

The Firebird and the Grey Wolf –A Russian Tale

The Wolf’s Eyelash – A Japanese Tale

5. Opaque Wolf – Wolf as Other

Two Hungry Wolves – A Cherokee Tale(Native American)

The Wild Rose and the Wolf Man –A Ho-Chunk Tale (Native American)

The Sea Wolves – A Haida Tale(Native Canadian)

A Wolf in Disguise – A Tajikistan Tale

The Wolf Star – A Pawnee Tale(Native American)

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

FOREWORD

BY BILL PLOTKIN

In our post-modern, fragmented, unravelling world, where the wild and the primal are relegated to a few remaining remote regions and to distant districts of memory, Chris Salisbury’s Folk Tales of the Wolf offers us a rare and compelling invitation to remember. To remember not only the wolf as a creature of myth and folklore but also as a guide to the hidden, untamed precincts of our own psyches, realms that wolves might fathom better than we do. Through these age-old and time-honoured tales – woven with elements of shapeshifting, shadow, and trickster wisdom – we awaken to something feral and unbroken, something essential to our very being.

Wolves have long inhabited the realm of the mythopoetic imagination, and their stories resonate far beyond the merely symbolic. As Chris reflects, these apex predators are not merely wild animals in the forest; they are also shapeshifters, boundary-crossers, creatures that dwell in the liminal spaces between light and dark, known and unknown. The wolf’s howl is a call to those who still listen – to those who still feel the pull toward the wilderness within and without. And it is a call not only to our own mystery journeys but also to our unremembered obligation to sing the wolves back home to their native lands so that the more-than-human community may be blessed again by their life-enhancing presence.

This is not just an anthology of folk tales but a reclamation of the soul’s deep roots. Each story invites us into a world of mystery and initiation, where encounters with wolves, and the otherworldly landscapes they inhabit, mirror the journeys we ourselves must undergo if we are to be reunited with our own wildness – and to be devoured by it. Through these stories we come face to face with the Trickster, Magician, Green Man, Wild Woman, and Wanderer – the parts of ourselves we tend to avoid, the shadows we try to tame, the forces that challenge our civilised sense of order. Like brother and sister wolf themselves, these tales enable us to remember that true initiation requires us to embrace the unknown, to dance with the dark.

This collection of yarns also reminds us of the bedrock importance of story in the journey of soul initiation. In my own work, I am repeatedly wonderstruck by the pivotal role of myth and imagination in the process of individuation, the journey to wholeness. The stories gathered here are not just entertaining; they are trails to transformation. Gather round this uncanny campfire with consummate storyteller Chris Salisbury and descend into the mythic layers of your life, where the wild terrain of your inner landscape affords the opportunity for death and rebirth.

In these tales, we may stumble upon our forgotten yearning for freedom, our innate fear of the shadow, our dark desire for the untamed truths of chthonic terror. Within the wildness of the wolf, we find a mirror of our deepest longings as well as an ally on our journey of return, coming home to the animate world.

May we read these tales with the open hearts of those who know the journey is not just through the world but into its depths. May the wolf’s howl lead us back to our place in the greater web of life. If we can sing the wolves home, perhaps one day we can sing ourselves home, too.

Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft, Nature and theHuman Soul and The Journey of Soul Initiation

INTRODUCTION

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realised then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

ALDO LEOPOLD

Curiously, this very morning, I planned to write the introduction to this book, and on waking I switched on BBC Radio 4 and for once, there was a news item that gave me goosebumps, even a shiver of excitement. My constitution was unexpectedly stirred, and an unusual sense of hope flared up briefly. Rather than the usual heart-sinking geopolitics unfolding with terrible consequences for people and planet, for once there was something uplifting, some investment of hope that might even turn into a possibility. The newsreader broadcast that a team of university researchers from Leeds had concluded that a population of up to 170 wolves could feasibly be reintroduced to Scotland. The one rationalisation given was as a mitigation against climate change. With wolves predating on the overabundance of red deer, the trees would be spared from grazing and would be an effective carbon storage scheme – equivalent to any large-scale tree planting campaign. Did I really just hear that on the mainstream news? I must confess, I reeled, and paused to gaze out of my window, a steaming hot cup of tea in my hand. I indulged myself with a bit of daydreaming about the prospect of wolves returning to Britain.

Imagine … just for a few moments … twenty to thirty wolf packs roaming the wild vastness of remote Scotland, putting the long-lost wild back into place. Let’s briefly set aside the complexity of this, and the inevitable pockets of resistance, e.g. from those that steward the land with livestock … and just lean into the dream. If the Yellowstone Park model is anything to go by (not a simple story, rather fraught with nuance and complexity), there has been a well-documented uplift in biodiversity in the region, thanks to the trophic cascade effect of reintroducing the wolf to the eco-system as an apex predator. Well, the UK certainly needs an uplift in this regard. In terms of its wildlife, I was heartbroken to learn that it’s one of the most denuded countries in the world, the legacy of the long and bitter enmity between farmers and wild animals.

A reintroduction of our lost keystone species, of which there are at least a dozen mammals – wild boar, lynx, golden eagle, beaver and grey whales to name a few – would transform our own ecosystems and bring life back to the land. Of course, there are obstacles, particularly when it comes to the predators that would likely prey on livestock. Conservationists have worked hard to present a plausible case for many reintroductions to the benefit of all, including the humans that push back hard against it. It’s a wider debate than I have scope to present here, but given that we are entering the territory of the ‘dreamtime’ in a book of stories, I think we can indulge ourselves a little.

Wolves in Britain. It’s quite an idea, and it’s gaining traction, as the news report suggests. For those who immediately baulk at the prospect, let’s remind ourselves of two things: one, they were here amongst us for a long time before a systematic extermination programme saw them eradicated by the eighteenth century. (A long time before that in England). And two, there have been remarkably few incidences of wolves attacking humans, making them a lot less dangerous than is generally presumed. In fact, they have been endlessly fascinating to the human cultures living in proximity. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes observes:

Wolves … are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. [They] have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors.

The real issue, of course, was their propensity for easy pickings, preying on the sheep flocks that flooded England’s green and pleasant land in a new system of livestock husbandry that was soon to generate the wealth that helped lift Britain out of the Dark Ages. Before this, the wolf, like the bear and the lynx, coexisted in relative harmony with the human communities, performing their essential eco-system balancing act that played a key role in Britain’s abundant nature. I can sometimes allow myself to imagine Britain in these times, before agriculture had really taken a bite out of biodiversity. An Eden of sorts, which Benedict MacDonald describes so evocatively in the first chapter of his marvellous book, Rebirding. Can you visualise an intact, wild Britain, complete with the mosaic of rich habitats, from marshland and moorland to wood pastures and wildwoods and much, much more? Imagine the soundtrack that this teeming profusion of life would have afforded. And, controversially perhaps, let’s not forget to embed ourselves into these bucolic landscapes. I firmly believe that our species was, originally at least, a critical piece in the whole puzzle, though not in the way that humanity now occupies and colonises territory – living instead in a much more sympathetic and empathetic way, interacting and intervening with the biota of the earth to sustain ourselves physically, but also, and most significantly, culturally. Surely it was part of the equilibrium of the eco-systems to have us there, fulfilling our ecological niche as an apex predator. In an evolutionary context, we have to be counted in the original ‘design concept’ as a climax species, and our capacity to understand our world, and our place within it, distinguishes us clearly from other sentient beings. It’s a perspective on human potential of course, rather than the damning report we generally tend to give ourselves.

I’ve been fortunate to spend time in the Kalahari Desert with the San Bushmen, specifically the Ju/’Hansi people who still practise their traditional lifeways, clinging on to their culture in the face of historical and contemporary oppression and exploitation. An extraordinary project supports them to continue traditional methods of tracking, hunting and gathering in a way that was beautiful to behold. I witnessed for the first time how people could belong to the Earth community, in the deepest kinship and reciprocity with the life-forms that dwell there. It’s an inspiring example from what is surely the oldest, continuous, intact human culture on the planet. I wish I could tell you more, but please visit the website www.trackingthekalahari.org to find out more about the project.

It’s the cultural aspect of our ecological niche that is underestimated, and this is where the stories serve to remind us. Our innate capacity, unique amongst creatures, to imagine and envision what doesn’t exist plays a key part in living in an ‘enchanted’ world. Our ancestors in Britain were no different from any other indigenous people in animating the world around them. We can see in the residues of traditional cultures that they characterised the landscape and its inhabitants with stories, making possible a wholly different acquaintance and sense of belonging than we experience today. One well-known example of this would be the Dreamtime stories of Aboriginal Australia, so beautifully presented by some of their elders in the wondrous exhibition that toured the world recently, called Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters.

I’m sure that the people of these islands would have also dreamed deeply and projected rich narrative forms onto everything around them. After all, it’s what our species does so uniquely, and so very well. And I have come to believe, regardless of the prism of our contemporary industrialised mindset, it makes for a more meaningful existence to relate to everything as if it’s alive, or belonging to a more-than-human ‘extended family’.

In Britain, every geological feature has been characterised by story, and it does not take too much digging to find out the narratives behind these features – the myths, legends and folktales that brought the land alive to people of the past. You don’t have to look much further than the placename of a village in the UK to know there’s a story lurking, a reason it was named in that way. Placename evidence, for example, lists over 200 places in England named after wolves, including Wolborough (Wolves’ Hill) and Woolacombe (Wolves’ Valley).

So throughout human history, and in every human culture, from all bioregions of the Earth, we were ‘story beings’, and we still are. Writer and activist Geneen Marie Haugen playfully but also seriously suggests that in fact we have been misnamed by the term ‘Homo Sapiens’. A more fitting distinction, she suggests, might be ‘Homo Imaginens’, her own neologism.

In terms of essence, there’s little difference between a traditional tale and a major Hollywood movie, or the plotline of a novel – it’s all rooted in basic storylines, of which there are only a surprising seven categories (according to author Christopher Booker). As a traditional storyteller, practising the craft of telling stories to live audiences, it never fails to impress on me the magic and mystery that a good story offers to diverse audiences, and I include the most so-called ‘sophisticated’ audiences too. I’m not limiting this to children as you might assume these days. The beauty of traditional stories is their ability to reach the hearts, minds and souls of anyone willing to sit and listen. If the tale is timed right, and the teller is skilled, then it’s every bit as satisfying as any movie-theatre experience. I have a firm conviction that we all long for enchantment, even more these days as relief and refuge from an overly rational, mechanistic paradigm we are currently obliged to live in. For many, it’s a lean existence. Simply put, stories help our cultures to flourish.

The wolf has become totemic for the rewilding movement of today. It’s surely one of the most charismatic of all species, and our long history of domesticating wolves into our pet dogs bears testimony to this. Observing wolf behaviour must have been instrumental in the choice of the wolf as companion to humanity. Look how well they adapted to the human village, aiding and abetting our hunting trips in the past, and offering us companionship to enrich our lives. I’m told my little Jack Russell dog, like every dog, is ‘98% wolf’. This refers to his gene profile rather than any resemblance to a wolf, which in Dexter’s case is pretty obvious. Behavioural traits however can be very similar – let’s call it the ‘canine way’.

I found this out when I went to visit Shaun Ellis, who’d written about living in the wilds of Idaho in the USA, as part of a wolf pack. I dismissed the book at first, because it seemed utterly implausible that anyone could survive in this way, embedding themselves completely into a pack, and effectively living the life of a wolf. ‘Too far-fetched’ was my opinion.

When I met him, however, I understood so much more about him and his compelling story, which turned out to be authentic. His experience gave him a unique perspective on wolf behaviour, and he now shares his deep understanding of wolves, and is challenging the prevailing narratives about how they function as a pack.

The reason I went to see Shaun was because he had some captive wolves he was working with, to restore them to a healthy pack. I had visited America, where I’d taken part in some wolf tracking after they had returned to Washington State after many years of absence – the usual story of human persecution. On returning home, I dreamed up a rather fanciful notion of tracking wolves in Britain. Ostensibly I was curating a tracking skills programme that taught the rudiments of wildlife tracking. The spin on the course outline, however, was the rather preposterous notion of ‘Wolf Tracking’, which I thought could serve as a creative stimulus to explore around the campfire our relationship with wolves and what they meant to us and our longing for the wild. Little did I know at this stage what would unfold. Soon after, I came across Shaun, who had recently and conveniently set up in Cornwall, the neighbouring county. I arranged to visit with the tracking group and see some real wolves. The hope was we could also look at some wolf tracks, albeit through their enclosure fence.

Imagine our surprise and delight when Shaun greeted us with an invitation to track a wolf through the woods, where he had earlier taken his lead wolf, Vlad, for a walk.

Within a short time, we were tracking a wolf through the forest. Along the trail, I realised this was probably the first tracking of wolves in Britain for 300 years.