ABSTRACT
The word howl has a particular sensuousness to it. In some ways, it is almost onomatopoeic, invoking particular affective registers in its enunciation. For most of the wolf’s history in post-contact North America, its howl generated a sense of dread. While the Indigenous people in this place that came to be called Canada had a different and more ambivalent relationship to wolves, when settlers heard these vocalizations, they understood them as spectral and unsettling reminders that the wilderness remained unvanquished. Settlers’ fears were often compounded by the elusiveness of wolves in the landscape, heard but not often seen. Received as a mournful lamentation or the epitome of ravening devilry, the wolf’s howl was resolutely understood as a sound out of place, one that needed to be silenced through the civilization of a newly emerging nation. A different way to approach the howl of a wolf is to focus less on the human
apprehension of the sound and more on why the wolves do it in the first place. Wolves howl for a range of reasons, none of which is related to human interpretations of wickedness and depravity. Generally used as a means of communicating over distances, wolf howls can achieve a variety of aims, from chasing away rival packs to locating one another. In the end, the wolf’s howl is a tool for social bonding in a species marked by its capacity to build enduring relationships through time. As such, the howl is a kind of hailing, potentially understood as a gesture of friendship (Mazzini et al. 2013). Instead of giving voice to aggression-as settlers interpreted it-wolves may howl in joy at reunion, or to show love. What are the implications of settlers’ misrecognition? And how has the wolf
howl shaped how Canadians have chosen to encounter wolves? This chapter considers the role of sound as a significant-though little studied-source of environmental history and awareness. Building on the work of environmental historian Peter Coates (2005), I suggest that howling has long been important to how humans understand wolves and their place in nature, particularly in Canada where their numbers remained relatively robust into the twentieth century. What is perhaps most interesting about the howl, however, is its contingent nature: its sonorousness has not been heard the same way through time. Indeed, once heard as a sound in need of erasure, the howling of wolves has now become something of a tourist attraction. This chapter seeks to think with this shift, and
in so doing, provide some reflections on how sound might provide important and relevant insights into the affective dimensions of environmental attunement, something that is difficult to access in a traditional archive.
