Primal Howls -- Wolves, Wild Women And Wild Men -- If That Wild Animal Dies Out, So Will The Wild In Humans

THIS Christmas my family will eat caribou. My father shot the huge reindeer-kin buck on a recent Alaskan hunting trip, which was a reunion with his brother - hunting buddy from way back.

On a quick lunch stop in Seattle on his way home, my father proudly showed me the photographs: he and Uncle Bob gutting their caribou, careful to honor each kill with a bouquet-like bunch of tundra grass in the caribou's mouth; this was food for the animal's journey to the spirit world. My father and uncle are following the tribal hunting traditions of their half-breed childhood when they were taught hunting rituals without reason, without reference to exactly which tribe they had come from. After all, they were white boys now and needed to forget their ancestors and assimilate.

They did. But every now and then I am reminded of their roots, these slender tendrils that go back to some full-blooded relative who still runs in my blood. It used to be on Christmas Eve my father would help us children make moccasins out of whatever he'd hunted that season. We assumed, living as we did high on a Sierra Nevada forest look-out station, that everyone made moccasins.

Only when we came down out of the mountains for the wilds of Boston and my father's Harvard education, did we realize it was odd to eat nothing but wild game and stitch deer or elk hide together on Christmas Eve instead of cranberries and popcorn. This is the way the traditions survive - unspoken, unclaimed, but memorized with the authority of unconscious kinship.

So when I sat that day gazing at my father's hunting photos, I was both proud and dismayed by the prospect of my family's Christmas caribou in Virginia. Proud because this is my tradition, however slenderly we know it ourselves; and dismayed because I had just read about the Alaska Game Board's plan to begin killing at least 300 gray wolves a year in order to swell the caribou and moose game herds to attract tourists and hunters, drawn as the New York Times describes it, to an "Alaskan Serengeti."

This plan was greeted with so much public outcry that it has been "indefinitely postponed" by Gov. Walter J. Hickel. In its place, Hickel has called an Alaskan Wolf Summit in January in Fairbanks, inviting worldwide wildlife and conservation groups to participate. It occurs to me, living as I do in the Northwest where wolves have at last returned to the Cascade Mountains in fragile, but fierce numbers, that there are others who should be invited to this important summit.

First, a member of the wolf clan itself might begin the council with those haunting, primal howls to remind us all of the forest we first came from. Such calls and haunting responses echo our ancestors' communion when we sat in tight circles listening to other voices, other stories alongside our own.

There is a biologist with the National Wildlife Federation, Pat Tucker, educating Western audiences about wolves accompanied by a live wolf who, according to The Seattle Times, continually "upstages her." She then plays audio tapes of wolf packs she recorded in the wild.

"I enjoy being out there with other animals that are my equals," Tucker comments about her wilderness nights spent alone, but never lonely in the howling chorus company of the so-called lone wolves.

The lone wolf is a myth based on a misconception that wolves are individual, heroic adventurers, not bound or responsible to any canine community. Scientific studies have proved that the wolf is, in fact, a most pack-centered creature, perhaps more instinctively sociable than our species. Everything is dependent upon the pack and one of the supposed symbols of the lone wolf, his howl, is really a call to community.

Barry Lopez, in his ground-breaking book, "Of Wolves and Men," explains, "Wolves apparently howl to assemble the pack . . . to pass on an alarm, especially at the den site; to locate each other in a storm or in unfamiliar territory; and to communicate across great distances . . . The howl may carry six miles or more in still arctic air." Lopez adds that fellow naturalist Farley Mowat tells of Eskimo hunters who understand the wolf howl as signaling the approach of caribou.

The wolf is anything but lonely as he or she raises a shaggy head to howl; and yet our myths have imprisoned this creature into a symbol of isolation and separation. I suggest that it is we who are lonely, not the wolves - we who have hunted the wolf to extinction so that it is a very rare few of us who have ever even heard the call of the wolf in the wild.

I take heart in the news that here in the Cascades the return of the wild wolf has groups of researchers out in the wilderness howling their heads off by way of counting these other furry heads, these predators who have become precious to us at last. I also take heart that there is another myth gaining great popularity in the recent success of the book, "Women Who Run With the Wolves," by Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola-Estes.

This best-seller is drawing us back to a relationship with a primitive archetype - that part of our souls that while hunted to extinction, yet is still not captured. Calling upon the "Wild Woman" in all of us, male and female, Pinkola-Estes writes, "The word wild here is not used in its modern pejorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means to live a natural life, one in which the criatura, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries."

If we could connect up all the wild women and men who are re-discovering their "innate integrity" and "natural life," if our inner work can reach out and embrace the natural world, what might the next wave of the environmental movement accomplish?

If we reclaim the wild wolf in our own collective psyche without taking action to preserve the wild wolf in our wilderness areas we will have missed an opportunity to be whole, to reconcile the broken treaties between our species.

Imagine this writing as a howl going out of the vast chasm that has kept our species so long divided, a welcome to the return of the wild wolf, a celebration that for the time at least Alaska has acted with the whole of her ecosystem in mind, not just separate interests.

Imagine that this is a howl to call all sisters and brothers who are re-discovering their wild man and their woman who runs with the wolves, to please remember that the archetype is taken from the real, endangered animal. If that wild wolf dies out, so will our wild selves.

So I'm calling all wild women and men to come to Alaska's Wolf Summit to participate in assuring that the wolf survives in nature, as well as in our imaginations. If you can't come in body, in wolf's clothing, send letters, money, and join the conservation projects that are working to reintroduce the wild wolf to its rightful territory - a territory we all must share.

The next time my father and uncle journey to Alaska for caribou, I'd like to imagine that they can camp on that wide tundra, listening for the wolf howls to scout caribou, and learning the lessons the wolf has always taught our kind - integrity, community, and the music of the soul, forever wild.

Brenda Peterson is a Northwest author whose latest book is "Nature and Other Mothers," published by HarperCollins. Her most recent novel, "Duck and Cover," was a New York Times notable book of the year. She lives in Seattle.