Lucy Hears the Wolf
Lucy demonstrated her memory of the wolf the other day.
Lucy came to us from the pound - unwanted, betrayed, beaten-down, disrespected, unloved. She was a tightly wound ball of nervous. She looks like a black fox, except that her tail curls over her back. Wiry and muscular, timid, and very bright, she had a look in her eyes that spoke volumes to me. If Lucy didn't represent PTSD, nothing ever would.
When she was on the leash she walked like a lady. When we got her home, though, it took mere seconds for her to escape the fence. For the first weeks we had to tie a long string to her collar in order to catch her to come back in the house. She eventually figured out that I had no intention of eating her, and would cower in the corner of the yard until I could slip a collar and leash over her head. Once the collar was on, she was under my control, and acted appropriately.
In the house, she made a den under our bed. It took a couple of months for her to become comfortable enough to dart past me as I held open the back door.
Lucy eventually came to believe that she is a member of our pack. Her PTSD remained quite evident, though. A non-pack member in the house would send her into hiding. Any abrupt movement or noise sent her into high alert. After a while, though, high alert meant that, instead of going to her den, she would take her position under the dining room table where she could observe.
Over the past 2 years Lucy has allowed herself to become a full-fledged member of our pack. She has a beautiful smile, a sense of fun, and is more than willing to sound the alarm in case of potential danger.
The other day she was completely relaxed out on the deck. She lay in her favorite spot, watching over her territory, eyes half closed, when an ambulance went past, siren wailing. She closed her eyes, put her nose in the sky, and returned the call. No alarm, no fear, only the hunger that drove her progenitors to cut the lonesome with their song of comradeship and brotherhood.
Men have gone to war as long as there have been men. Men who have gone to war realize that it is the most abhorrent, base endevour of man. They also realize that it is, at the same time, the ultimate endeavor. Only at war can men experience the ultimate in love and hate, cowardice and courage, medical arts and morticians arts. In "Call of the Wild", Jack London wrote:
There is an ecstasy which marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each seperate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not Death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
It is the nature of men to seek. The most, the best, the end, the next, the ultimate. Men who understand the ecstasy, the forgetfulness of living, the womb of Time, also understand another passage by Jack London:
Life is a strange thing. Much have I thought on it, and pondered long, yet daily the strangeness of it grows not less, but more. Why this longing for Life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard, and to suffer sore, till Old Age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of troubles and sorrows; yet he goes down to the open arms of Death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And Death is kind. It is only Life and the things of Life that hurt. Yet we love Life, and we hate Death. It is very strange.
I don't know why we love Life and fear Death. I don't know why Lucy remembers the womb of Time. I don't know why men go to war.
I do know that when Lucy accepted the call from her sisters from across the ages, she was at peace. Maybe her sisters told her of an age-old secret. Maybe they told her that she is a citizen of an age-old pack, and as such, she is bound by nature to follow the rules of the pack. Maybe they told her that the pack must be defended, at any cost, from the enemies of the pack. Maybe they told her she was hard wired in the womb of Time to fulfill her obligation to the pack, and to the laws which must be obeyed by everything that is not Death.
And maybe, just maybe, she explained it to me.
Mike Smith Served Active Duty 1969-1972.