Reviewed by Jeannine Burgdorf

Erica Berry’s first book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, casts a wide net, examining definitions of nature, the built environment, borders, nations, history and the self within the context of characterizations of wolves. Ambitious in scope and at times dense with references that can seem digressive, the book maintains Berry’s thesis across its more than 400 pages, organized in chapters that reinforce the Girl v. Wolf, Truth v. Wolf, Self v. Wolf. Each fact and fiction she chooses reinforces that humans live with wolves as a construct, within a cultural understanding, not a natural one.

History, ecology, fairy tales (Indigenous and Western), myth, journalism, and Berry’s personal narratives intertwine to shape a complex whole. The wolf is the primary predator in our stories, and as Berry examines her own experiences being preyed upon she holds a mirror to the greatest predator of all, humans. A central throughline of the book charts the history of OR-7, a male gray wolf, the first to return to the US after the species was eradicated by hunters. This gives readers a real wolf with choices and struggles to follow as his movements are mapped out via a GPS tracker over three years. OR-7 follows his own instincts and responds to his environment in a way that cannot fully be understood by scientific analysis. As Berry reports the scientific data, she questions OR-7’s behaviors outside of biological drives and offers narrative complexity that cannot be explained solely through a biological lens. Her reflections on OR-7 as he navigates life and death situations, escaping hunters and farmers trying to protect their livestock, are compelling from the first chapter to the last.  She expresses a deeply considered and felt sense of a creature outside of herself, one that she has not only a fascination with but an affinity. Not only was OR-7 a predator; he was prey.

To determine the wolf’s place in a human-dominated landscape, Berry questions the role the wolf plays in the stories we tell about danger. The wolf is a threat to humans only within our imagination. Few humans are attacked by wolves each year—twelve in the last eighteen years—and rabies has been essentially eradicated in North America and Europe. Wolf attacks on cattle and sheep are much more common than on people, and Berry points out attacks are more about economics and human encroachment as suburbanization spreads than about human safety. That the fear of wolves persists—that their place as a predator in the collective imagination exists—is the result of our use of the wolf as the cultural symbol of the predatory other.

The book’s narrative strengths lie not only in Berry’s wide research of wolves in poetry, history, and scientific study but equally in her first-person narratives. She portrays herself—and more generally girls and women—as prey: “The nature of narrative for at least the last 4,000 years has been about ‘boy packs.’” Berry recounts her own experiences being harassed by a man on an Amtrak train, finding her house broken into by a man who was confused about where he was, being the target of a fraternity hazing incident, and her early romantic relationship with a young man before leaving for college. The story of the girl pack is the story of being followed, being desired, being objectified, being erased as an individual. Berry examines herself and her victimhood. The animal kingdom operates on knowing the difference between self and other for survival. Othering in our stories and myths exemplifies how to identify danger. Berry’s personal accounts add depth and relatability to her thesis that the relationship between wolves and humans is more than just surviving hostile landscapes together. Danger for women and girls is real, as is our requisite fear.  To manage a world full of threats, Berry suggests, “we need a spoonful of empathy, a spoonful of curiosity, a spoonful of healthy fear.” If the work is to write our way to understanding what healthy fear is for ourselves, Berry offers her own stories of surviving and reflecting on dangerous situations as illuminating examples.

Near the end of Wolfish, Berry references an interview with ecofeminist scholar, Donna Haraway: “To be any kind of animal at all is to be within obligate mutualisms with a whole range of other plants, animals and microbes.” The phrase obligate mutualism might sound like scientific jargon, but it expresses a pronounced poetry. The individual in the wild is a concept, but it is not a reality. All life depends on connection. While working with wolves in the UK for two weeks, Berry witnessed firsthand the myth of the lone wolf. In reality, often due to hunters and developments, they live in “complex families,” which are packs that have a fluid rearing structure. When a wolf is ousted from her pack, referred to as “immigrant wolves,” she has to find another to adopt her in order to survive. Our stories about wolves, repeated over generations, have shaped and informed human action, often in unintended and devastating ways. The eradication of wolf populations in the US arose simultaneously as agribusiness and suburban sprawl began to dominate the landscape. Even with the populations’ slow reintroduction, the destructive forces of the built environment continue to threaten them, demonstrating how human and wolf fates are inextricably bound.

Given the current state of ecological destruction, there is urgency in asking what part human actions play, specifically scrutinizing our relationship with animals, in actuality and in our narratives. Examining the stories of how we construct the natural world, as Berry has expertly done in Wolfish, and challenging why those narratives persist is a critical aspect of the much larger and necessary task of creating an inhabitable future for all life.

Jeannine Burgdorf is a writer and storyteller on stage in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Signal House Edition, New Reader Magazine, Orange Quarterly, and the anthology Writer Shed Stories, Volume 2. Her nonfiction has appeared in Quail Bell, The Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Masters Review, and Necessary Fiction.