When I was a young boy I had some stuffed animals that must have been produced as an early sort of marketing tie-in to the 1933 Disney film The Three Little Pigs. I’m not quite that old, but maybe the stuffed animals were. I actually don’t remember the pigs, but I certainly do remember the wolf. He had white teeth that I could see in the dark from my bed at night and I remember asking my parents to take him off the shelf because I couldn’t sleep with him there. It must have really bothered me for me to remember it so clearly all these decades later.

I guess wolves have always bothered people. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a tale traditionally ascribed to Aesop who was Greek and lived more than 2500 years ago.

Our word for these animals goes back as far as we can trace words. Wolf itself appeared in English as wulf beside the Latin lupus in a gloss back before the year 725. So of course that makes it solidly Old English and points unequivocally to Germanic sources for the word. Sure enough Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch, Old High German, Middle High German, Old Norse, Gothic and Old Teutonic all have a similar word.

But even more than that my dictionaries tell me that Latin lupus is related as well as are a whole other bag of words in other languages that descended from Indo-European.

Just as my memory is firmly imprinted with what my young mind though was important, the tracks of this word through the millennia show that men and women for most of our history have had an edgy sort of feeling about these beautiful creatures.

Things are different now of course. We mostly live in cities far from wolves and so they have become romantic symbols of nature. I have a picture of one on my credit card for heaven’s sake; I get complements on it from store clerks all the time.

In Algonquin Park, a huge area of wilderness in Ontario, the wolf howl has become a real tourist draw. Park rangers guide hundreds of people by night out into a part of the park where wolves are expected to be and for hours the people make wolf-like howls into the darkness and thrill at the replies sent back by the real live wolves.

I’m sure the hair on many people’s necks stands up, but there’s really no danger. They can always just go hop back in the car.

It’s nice to know they’re out there; until you can’t hop back in the car.

One summer about 10 years ago I went canoe camping with another family in Quebec. They brought along their son who was only about a year old. One year old babies are often unable to sleep through the night and just as often complain loudly at their insomnia. As I lay there in my thin nylon tent surrounded my young family I listened to baby Warren fill the night with his howls. And as he paused to draw breath there came answering howls. I was glad that they sounded fairly distant but I didn’t sleep all that well after that.

I’m sure lots of sleepless nights reinforced this word’s antiquity.