Willa's wolves

It's not hard to see how a kid like Willa Cather, 150 years ago, could have seen this painting--Sleigh with Trailing Wolves by Paul Powes--and have it and its story stick with her all the way into adulthood, especially if you know the story.  The story shows up in My Antonia, somewhat uncomfortably since the story it tells is Russian in origin and has little to do, most believe, with the story of a childhood friend of Cather's out there in the tough sod of southwest Nebraska.

Visit her hometown sometime--Red Cloud, Nebraska--and you'll find that painting in all its gory darkness hanging in the Cather museum. It's scary. It features a pack of hungry wolves soon to devour just about all of a wedding party, a legend worth retelling, maybe, on snowy nights before a roaring fire.

Two slashes rip through the old painting from sheer old age. The canvas grew so taut it pulled itself apart. But those rips don't blunt the horror of the story and the danger in the scene, even if you find it difficult, like I did, to imagine a pack of man-eating wolves devouring bride and groom and a few others.

I have no idea of the size of the Russian wolfpack, whether or not, as they did here,  the sheer number of animals nearly fell off a cliff decades ago. They did here--wolves, like bison, went nearly extinct until aggressive wildlife management pulled off the kind of magic that replenished the bald eagle. 

While I haven't forgotten the Powes painting nor Willa Cather's storytelling, that painting never kept me up at night like it must have her because I've never been any where near a pack of wolves, never heard their snarls. My Wisconsin boyhood barely mentioned them. What few there was of them were in residence a civilization away, "up north." It's likely, however, they weren't strangers around Red Cloud. Willa knew.

A little history here. The horse was introduced to America's First Nations in the 17th century, and like the Apple computer and indoor plumbing, a horse changed everything, made Indians better hunters, and increased their standard of living making trade easier and making things like pans and guns and liquor lots cheaper. 

Horses made hunting easier, a slam dunk in fact. Europe's rich and famous signed up for wagon trains or railroad trips into buffalo country. Think of it--old country gentlemen blasting away at bison while sitting in fancy English saddles or in plush passenger car luxury, never even getting their hands dirty.

Those millions of buffalo changed the way of life among wolves like those lusty killers in the Red Cloud painting. For years, white big-game hunters and Native entrepreneurs went hunting, if you call that hunting: shooting bison by the dozens then leaving meaty carcasses in the sun all over the Great Plains. Wolves went plum loco over the mountains of spoils left there to rot. Imagine, all of a sudden, filthy rich wolfpacks, fat and silly.

"Yep, Junior, those were the days," some wolf historians might tell the youngins', "--gold necklaces and dream cars, vacation homes on the Missouri, and universal health care. We had it made."

But when the buffalo went the way of the do-do bird, the good life for the American wolf went south so fast that whole packs suddenly went hungry enough to try to knock off wedding parties as if it were snowy northern Russia. 

It didn't happen, not out there in western Nebraska at least, but it could have  because out there on the Republican River, sometime earlier lived the biggest bison herds in the west. Who knows how scary those fat and ugly wolves might have grown?--and all of it, right about the time Willa Cather was a girl on the plains. 

All of that makes the story even scarier.