ABSTRACT
On a Saturday night in January 2004, I encountered a wolf. Over the previous year and a half, I had been searching for and studying visual images of wolves. I had seen wolves depicted in a wide range of media and in various states of wolfishness. There were folktale, fable, and storybook wolves. There were wolves in sheep's clothing, mobcaps, top hats, and overalls. Some were thinly disguised humans; others were thinly disguised wolves. Most played the roles assigned to them by the tales, whereas a few rebelled and insisted on telling their own side of the story. And some were recognizable as wolves only because of the accompanying text. But my momentary encounter with the wolf at a wolf park transformed even the most realistic of these images into mere shadows of their real-world counterparts. The difference between the visual representations and the actual animal took on a new clarity and raised the question: What is a wolf?
