The Third Day of the Wolf
The Third Day of the Wolf
Lock the gates and man the fences! The lone Canadian timber-wolf has escaped into the thickets, the ditches, the distances! Blow the silver whistles!
The zoo-born sniffs the field mist,
The hedgerow leaves, liberty wind
of a cold February Friday.
Saturday trudging, loping, hungry, free but hunted,
dogs tracking, baying, losing scent, shouts dying,
fields dangerous, hills worse, night welcome, but the hunger
now! And Sunday many miles, risking farms, seen panting,
dodging the droning helicopter shadows,
flashing past gardens, wilder, padding along a highway,
twilight, sleepy birdsong, dark safety – till a car
catches the grey thing in its rushing headlights,
throws it to the verge, stunned, ruptured, living, lying,
fangs dimly scrabbling the roots of Hertfordshire.
The haze lifting, the head rising, the legs limping, the run
beginning again, with torches, whispers, smell of men and guns,
far off warning, nearer, receding, wavering, waiting
for a whimper, a twig crack, a blood spot, finding them
and coming on, coming nearer to the starving meeting-place.
Breaking cover as had to be, on the icy morning of Monday,
Monday suddenly opening all its mouths, gulping
with fury at the weary fragment, farmers, keepers, police,
two planes diving again and again to drive it
in terror towards the guns, and the farm’s pet collie
cornering it at last with the understrapper’s yap.
The empty belly and mad yellow eyes
waiting for man were then shot,
not killed, then bludgeoned,
not killed, then shot,
and killed.
How strong man is
with his helicopters and his planes,
his radios and rifles!
What a god for a collie!
O wild things, wild things
take care, beware of him.
Man mends his fences.
Take care, take strength.
Take care of the warrant
for death. How good
he is at that,
with his dirty sack
ready to lay on you:
it is necessary.
But I have a warrant
to lay this too,
a wreath for wildness,
timber-wolf, timber-wolf.
(c) Edwin Morgan. Poems appear with kind permission of Carcanet Press and Mariscat Press. Images by kind permission of EdwinMorgan.com. With thanks to Edwin and the Scottish Poetry Library.