Wolfish, page 27
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Life at the cooking school was how I imagined life on a small ship. We padded around one another like dogs, often affectionate, occasionally snarling.
Paul came in January, during the height of our off-season, when I was still mourning the departure of his predecessor, an English horticulturalist with a love for Cuban dance music. She and I had shared a room, giggling into the evenings as we pressed flowers into notebooks, giddy as young sisters. What Paul liked to do more than giggle was work out and talk about it afterward. He was German, in his midtwenties, older than me, with sinewy limbs and thin glasses. Even after a day bent over in the garden, he preached the gospel of fitness, stretching on a latticed wood bench in the courtyard, arms raised with one of those foam-studded elastic bands. He knew I ran too, but I ran to be alone, away from the constant banter of the estate. Lacking the ability to tell him this directly, I dodged his offers of companionship with excuses, then darted out in the wet dawn.
I knew he was sweet and just wanted friendship, and I appreciated that he killed a slow-dying, window-smacked bird with the bottom of a garden shovel, but he leaned in too close when we talked. They don’t make them like you back home, he said once, kneading his fingers into my shoulder after lugging his plant classification binders to where I was typing in the library. I didn’t know what that meant, and if I did, I didn’t believe him. But we were bored. Some days we flirted at dinner, and I suspected I was being insouciant, but it also felt like playing Ping-Pong, and what was the harm in hitting a ball already coming toward me in the air?
Other days I hoped Paul would stay in the garden and give me space. Some days I could almost throttle him, I wrote in my journal, the print so small it was like the path of a sneaking mouse. I know that is wrong.
Around the time Paul arrived, a jack-of-all-trades photographer, artist, and chef from Toronto came to spearhead a graphic design project. Kiley was also a few years older than me, tiny with spiraling coils of brown hair, quiet on first impression around guests and then quick to call the bullshit later, jabbing her pencil while talking theatrically over a glass of red wine around our “intern kitchen” table. I liked her immediately. Everything she cooked was gold.
Winter in Sicily had looked like spring since December, ever since the dirt between the vines exploded green with clover and favas, their blossoms the silky yellow and white of fresh eggs. In February, when “the marchesa” flew off for a cooking tour in Australia—loading us with to-do lists and making us promise, with a laugh, not to get too lonely for the three weeks she was gone—the three of us stood outside the blue gate and waved until the sound of her silver car faded away and we heard only the leaves of the eucalyptus trees rattling in the breath of an oncoming squall.
For weeks we had been eating piles of tender, thin-leafed wild greens that the gardener harvested from the hills around the school. It was a favorite “relax food” when no guests were around, boiled and drenched in lemon juice with a teacup of warm chicken broth, a respite from the breaded meat and lemon custard puddings we had grown used to. One day the gardener let Kiley and me accompany him foraging, and we wandered the roadside, filling plastic grocery sacks with wild fennel fronds. He taught us to thumb off the chewy outer layers of the stalk so only the bright anise-smelling inner strips remained. The ground beyond the road was pure mud, dark peanut butter on the rubber boots we had borrowed, but everywhere twiggy green shoots stretched upward, transforming hills that had baked all summer then been burned by farmers in the fall, the land tattooed with black streaks of ash.
That night, after Kiley sautéed a handful of chopped fennel greens into spaghetti with sautéed onions and currants, I closed my eyes to chew. There was a thrill in eating something totally undomesticated, a plant that could thrive without our intervention, indifferent to our care. A joy in having intersected its wild journey. Maybe this was why people liked hunting. You respected the animal as you ate it, but in the end, the creature you were most proud of was yourself.
The next day, Kiley and I went out again. Paul was in the garden, working late as usual. Walking the one-lane road beneath the cooking school toward the giant scabby palms that arched above the official entrance to the family’s winery, we filled wicker baskets with the curl-edged green leaves that splotched the slopes above the roadside. This time we were after chard. We had often seen locals stop their cars to gather it. “In Sicily chard grows everywhere. It is a great joy for everybody when they appear,” wrote my boss’s mother, founder of the cooking school, in her 1999 cookbook Herbs and Wild Greens from the Sicilian Countryside. “Country people, worried about the state of their digestive systems, think the greens have arrived just in time to cure, in a natural way, all their ailments.”
It had rained all day, sky matte as a gray stone, but now a rainbow appeared, spilling pink like someone had taken a knife to the bruised clouds. We recognized a few people—workers, or distant relatives involved with managing the winery—and all of them stopped to wave and ask if we wanted a ride. The Sicilians were often confused by our voluntary strolling and jogging. Now we pointed to our baskets of shaggy green and gave the universal thumbs-up: We’re doing this for fun. We flashed our little North American smiles and waved them on.
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Is there any truth behind that canon of fantastical werewolf stories? I have heard some Victorian ghost encounters can be chalked up to hallucinations stemming from carbon monoxide poisonings. People were indeed hearing voices; they just misidentified why. Inherited stories about werewolves might similarly be held to the light, not only as transmissions of cultural mores but, in some cases, as explanations for otherwise inexplicable real-life encounters. Though most Indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest have positive associations with wolves, the Chilcotin of what is now British Columbia have reportedly feared them, believing contact with the animal could lead to nervous illness and possibly death, writes David Moskowitz in his book Wolves in the Land of Salmon. Could rabies be one explanation for such a set of symptoms? For as long as humans have been recording history, the virus has thrived beside us, existing on every continent except Antarctica. “Hominids likely would have had a tradition of fearing, avoiding, and killing wolves for that reason alone,” wrote Mech. What he overlooks, though—and what Pierotti and Fogg subsequently point out through their lens of Indigenous history and evolutionary biology—is that before the arrival of the first Europeans, the rabies virus was likely present only in bats and skunks, with canine rabies rare or absent in the dog breeds of Native Americans. The specter of the rabid wolf is itself a vector of colonialism.
One might fear the wolf without knowing that fear stemmed from settler invasion, which had sickened not only so many Indigenous people but the animals around them. In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez recounts a Blackfoot story where a man bitten by a rabid wolf was bound with ropes and rolled in a green buffalo hide, a fire stoked on and around him until the hide began to burn, an attempt to draw the disease out through his sweat. The Blackfoot refer to their own ancestors as “the wolf people,” and the tribe has a long history of existing symbiotically beside wolves, helping to protect them while learning from their behavior, likely taking hunting cues for how to ambush prey and drive bison off cliffs. What did they make of it when rabies first arrived? When an animal so long familiar turned suddenly aggressive, jaw frothing? Though a tracker might be able to identify rabies in the swerve of a wolf’s footprints, I can imagine how easy it would be not to distinguish the two at all: you fear rabies, but what you say you fear is wolf.
How many of our stories about the perceived bloodlust of wolves and werewolves are really stories about rabies? Especially those from before 1885, when Louis Pasteur’s vaccine de-escalated the disease in much of the developed world from the death sentence it had once been. “Many human victims of rabies are reported to rage in delirium, howl like wolves in their agony, go into violent frenzies and attack and bite those around them,” wrote Matthew Beresford in The White Devil, citing the disease in his history of European werewolf legends. A rabies-infected animal will likely not see symptoms for a few weeks, or months, or, in rare cases, years. As the wound heals, the body seems to forget. But the virus is a stowaway in the blood, and by the time it reaches the brain, the wound reemerges, “as if by magic, with some odd sensation occurring at the site,” write Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy in Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. At the site of the bite, a tremor, maybe coldness, maybe heat, a stabbing pain. Pupils dilate and fevers rise. Sometimes appetite departs; a fear of water arrives. Saliva streams from the mouth and tears from the eyes. The world can fog with hallucination. Some male patients report perpetual erections, even orgasms. I cannot help thinking of werewolf-Jack-Nicholson, whose wolf bite transforms him from a tired middle-aged man into one with glinting eyes and a new sexual appetite.
In 1833, a group of fur traders and their Indigenous guides were camping in what is now Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park, when a mad wolf ran into camp and began biting humans. These trappers had heard rumors of “mad” wolves attacking, and that their victims had “gone mad” too. When the wolves bit a bull, he began to bellow, pawing the ground. A bitten trapper became delirious, refusing to cross small streams, holding back the whole party until they abandoned him. Later they found his strewn clothes ripped from his back. “He had run away quite naked, and never was found,” read one account. As a victim of the virus, the man had become his own monster.
Some decades later, a U.S. Army officer recorded a similar account of a rabid wolf entering an Arkansas River field hospital, “charg[ing] round most furiously” and biting anything it could reach, “mov[ing] with great rapidity … tearing tents, window curtains, bed clothing.” It seems plausible such diseased wolves became not only stand-ins for the animal but doppelgängers for the werewolf. During such an attack, noises could be otherworldly due to the paralysis of a rabid animal’s laryngeal muscles. Like a werewolf, the rabid wolf is a vicious predator, even though to ferry the infection, it has been a victim of a bite too. Once infected, a rabid wolf loses his normal fear of humans. “Sick wolves fly at you just like birds,” wrote eighteenth-century Japanese author Nishimura Hakū. “When they see people they just come at them and bite.”
To aid those soldiers bitten by the rabid wolf in the Arkansas fort, the men’s wounds were cauterized with silver nitrate, a typical treatment at the time. Reading this, I thought of the urban legend stipulating that a “silver bullet” was needed to kill a werewolf, and I wondered. America’s first werewolf film, aptly titled The Werewolf, had been released by Universal Studios in 1913. It was a short silent film, with white actors pretending to be on a New Mexico Navajo reservation, and a woman who could turn into a werewolf trying to avenge her tribe against invading white men while training her daughter to do the same. This film, like many at the time, was shot on two reels of highly flammable silver nitrate film; when a fire swept through the Universal studio just a decade later, all negatives instantly burned. Silver may not destroy the beast, but silver nitrate had destroyed The Werewolf film.
The idea that a silver bullet will stop a werewolf has roots in the legendary Beast of Gévaudan, that mythical wolflike predator alleged to have killed over a hundred victims in the mountains of southern France in the 1760s. Often the victims were young female shepherds; a local newspaper noted the loss of an eighteen-year-old “celebrated for her rare beauty.” The hunt for their killer lasted years, drawing in bounty hunters who chased the 600-livre prize. In the words of one celebrated local wolf-hunter: “Many men with guns have arrived … they beat the woods every day with dragoons at their side. This will only cause more trouble, since we have no command over them.” It is a familiar song: the invasion of men who think they are saviors becomes a new problem. Finally, in 1767, a local farmer killed a wolf, and the carcass was delivered to Versailles. According to legend, La Bête was killed with a silver bullet made from a melted chalice, or the coin of the Virgin Mary. In the centuries since, the silver bullet has become a symbol. Not just a prescription to kill the beast, but a remedy we crave that might not exist at all.
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Toward the end of college, my roommate Eliza and I developed a bit where we asked those we sat with at lunch what they were most afraid of. Usually there would be a pause. You serious? Eventually the cork would pop. One friend spoke at length about imagining his mother dying; another about being buried alive, answering so swiftly it was as if the fear sat always like a pill beneath his tongue. Always we nodded, supportive and curious, treating the question like something between a conversation prompt and anthropological study.
“Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them,” wrote New Age author Marilyn Ferguson in 1980. My interest in how others lived with their fears was selfish. I wanted advice on how to live with my own. All the same, I felt our question was impossible to answer truthfully. Not only to rank one’s fears on a hierarchy—those internal acrobatics of would-you-rather—but to offer them to an audience. My own fears, so often, were selfish and small. Abstractly I feared earthquakes and nuclear bombs and fascism, but at the end of the day this meant I feared pain; a lack of hope or will to live; my own death. Mostly I feared the space before death. The seconds or hours where I would know everything I would never do. I suspect we talked about fears so readily then, at twenty-one, because most of us felt so insulated from their reality. So many of my college friends had parents who were not only breathing, but, at least then, married. Our own health so boring we didn’t even think of it.
I didn’t play the fear game in Sicily because I didn’t think much about dying, my brain too full of everything else. But that night we cooked the greens Kiley and I harvested, I felt particularly buoyant, giddy with the gift of far-flung independence. We were playing some sort of would-you-rather as we cooked, Marvin Gaye on the tinny laptop speaker behind us, Kiley and I flushed and goofy with wine, while Paul, who had never had a sip—he was an athlete, he told us—shook his head at us with a smile. By the time we were at the table, passing around artichokes stewed in wine, oily discs of grilled eggplant, a bowl of leftover lamb stew, and that sautéed pile of our greens, everything seemed so perfect, so how-I-had-imagined-this-year, that I couldn’t help swinging the conversation to mortality.
“Okay, a question. Would you rather know in advance the exact day you were going to die, or would you rather just, you know, drop?”
“What a question, Berry,” said Paul. “Some nerve.” But he was grinning, pouring the lamb broth over the greens and forking a wad of it onto a tear of bread, eyes narrowing with thought.
“Are we talking, like, knowing years in advance, or weeks, or days?” Kiley took a swig of wine, folding her arms over her plate in that let’s-get-down-to-business gesture.
“Either way,” I said. “For the sake of argument: say you have at least a year’s warning.”
We circled the question and heaped our plates, the sky blackening as a breeze rolled in, bringing the eucalyptus trees and orange grove right to our noses, the candle in the center of the table spasming with light. We talked; we ate. Somewhere inside our bellies, unknown for another hour or so, the toxins from the first bites of the greens were working their way into our bloodstreams. Doughing our minds, our eyes, our walk. But that comes later. The poison, at first, was nearly pleasant. Like wine on an empty stomach. The room made silky around the edges.
“I’ll say it: I’d rather just drop dead,” said Kiley eventually, and we all laughed because by that point, it seemed so obvious. Torture was knowing an unwanted change was coming over one’s body and being unable to stop it.
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Slovakians will “merrily term a drunkard a vlkodlak,” writes Baring- Gould, because this word for “werewolf” also implies “he who makes a beast of himself.” Becoming a beast, then, is not always a passive act. You can do it to yourself. In the Serer religion of Senegal, wolves are known as “seers”—transcendent, intelligent creatures capable of knowing in advance who will die. As with many folk beliefs, the legend likely carries shades of truth. Canines have been known to howl and bark before earthquakes. They have also been trained to smell the COVID-19 virus on a body before a person knows they’ve been infected.
When I think back to that evening in the little apartment, I think of all the moments an intervention might have occurred. When that little Aurora, who lived across the villa courtyard, ran up to us, tongue out, eyes wide, barking as always, but barking, maybe, differently?
When Kiley and I waved off the Sicilians who stopped to offer us a ride. When Paul, that trained horticulturalist, walked in from the garden and we showed him what we’d harvested, and he ran a hand through the leaves, smiling absentmindedly. Nice, nice, ladies. When Kiley mentioned the greens tasted bitter, maybe too metallic bitter, and poisonous plants often had this taste? When Paul got up, then, to examine the uncooked leaves, telling us they weren’t all chard, but Maybe dock? Maybe borage? We’re probably fine. That’s when I brought up a conversation I had recently had with our boss about the Italian word amaro, bitter, which was a cherished Italian flavor, like umami, one that us fluorescent-supermarket-eaters rarely appreciated and had to get used to. “We’re honing our palates,” I said tipsily, brattily. “Plus, we’ve never even heard of poisonous plants around here.”
