Our Friends : The Wolves

Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:15 pm    

Werewolves, lycanthropes that one kid in boy scouts who was overly hirsuite and had pointy ears; since the beginning of time, folks have been afraid of the beast. It was De Fakto's task to get to know the beast a little better...and to truly howl at the moon with the finest, the wolf pack of Wolf Park in rustic Battleground, Indiana.

Over the river and through the woods awaited a den of fearful creatures ready to bare fang and rend the flesh from young children's bones, or so we thought. What we actually beheld was a healthy pack of young, full-on carnivores given free roam of a fenced area replete with a pond, fresh food and adoring specialists.

Paying the seven dollars and surveying the smaller fox den, we made our way to the larger wolf area and had a seat on the baseball-style, metal bleachers. The setup is casual, a speaker comes out, introduces the wolves and the pack heirarchy, the kids scream, the older folks squint, then everybody howls. In this case, the kids did the majority of the howling, the babies mewled in the background, some loopy rugrat banged incessantly in the back row and the galvanized child-bearers did very little to quell the distraction. 'Cause this is about the kids, right?

Wrong. You'd think it would be easy to keep the kids at bay, to tell them to "Sit! Stay!" or to threaten to "throw them to the wolves" for misbehaving, but what in eventuality became abundantly apparent is how poorly behaved kids are nowadays.

But back to the canines. The wolves pacing behind the chainlink fence, the cloying smell of decaying flesh and the sight of freshly ravaged deer carcasses (courtesy of recent Sunday-driving collisions) can be a little menacing at first, but once your senses adjust to the atmosphere of the wild you realize that this is how carnivorous packs operate. And when the wolves begin to howl, we realize how insignificant we are as a species to the rest of the creatures with whom we share this rock. The effect is supernatural and eerily inspiring.

Without subjecting readers to the science of pack mentality and the psychology of the wolf mind, watching and howling with the wolves was a pleasure. Think primal scream therapy meets baseball and you're there. And although the kids were annoying as hell, in a tribal society, they would have been eaten long ago for attracting roving packs of hungry canines. That's what we prefer to think. The wolf pacing back and forth by the little girl with the fuzzy stuffed animal in the front row only serves to confirm this suspicion.

So, go check it out if you get a Friday open and the weather is nice. It will change you. To all the modern parents who don't whip your kids, leave your babies at home. They'd make a nice course for the beasts.

Howl at the moon!



If you listen, you can hear the coyotes howling in the background.

And here, the wolf gets the lion's share.



Note: The video's shady because it's a crap digital camera. We can't afford your high tech HD shits, fool.