The Initiation - Baptism or Bowel Gas?

In March 1993, Angelique, a golden-eyed she-wolf who lives at a small wolf preserve in Wisconsin, kissed me. Because of that kiss, I left the hospital social work job I'd had for twenty years to answer the call of Wolf Spirit.

On a fine September morning, six months after Angelique kissed me, I arrived at the preserve to find three of my favorite wolves, Bravo, Peter and Waterlou, together in the same pen. (Peter was usually separated from his litter mates because of problems with his brother Alpha, the alpha, or dominant, male of their family.)

I had been volunteering at the preserve almost every weekend during that six months, so the wolves were used to seeing me. But that morning there was a feeling of special joyousness in the air, and the wolves' tails were wagging like metronomes as they watched me approach. As I knelt down outside their pen to exchange greetings and kisses through the fence, I cried, "You guys! You're all together!" While I was kneeling there, I felt someone slap me on the back and call, "Anne!" I whirled around to find no one there, and realized that what I had felt was a slap of sound from the wolves on the other side of the enclosure. The wolves were howling, and they were howling to me. I felt as if I was being held in an embrace created by the energy of the sound of their howls as it was directed to me. I had heard the wolves howl close to a hundred times before that day, and I have heard them howl hundreds of times since. Never before that day and never after that day, but that day I felt enveloped in an energy of love so profound that tears came to my eyes. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or howl with joy myself, so I simply stood up and let myself be held in the vibration of their love.

Angelique, who lives in the pen next to the one Bravo, Peter and Waterlou were occupying, saved me the trouble of deciding what to do next by sitting in the corner of her pen and giving me "the eye." I lurched over to her, unsteady on my feet. I felt enormous joy radiating from her. I knew she wanted me to pet her, so I started caressing her through the fence and murmuring endearments. She stood up, perpendicular to me, her head in front of me and her tail to my left. Her tail came up and forward, and I felt a light mist cover my face, hair, and shoulders. I thought, "Oh, my God, this is an initiation." Then, immediately, I looked up to see if a bird overhead had dropped something on me. There was no bird. I looked to see if a sprinkler was on or if it was raining. There was no sprinkler, and no rain. I went into the house and said to the man who owns the wolves, "Angelique misted me. What does that mean?" He said, "I don't know. I've never been misted," and then he asked me if a bird might have dropped something on me. "No," I replied. "I looked."

When I tell this story, I am always surprised at how quickly my logical mind took over and tried to discount or to reduce to its own terms what was essentially a non-logical, non-linear experience. I wasn't willing to trust my body and the body's feelings of joy and love; I wanted to know, as if knowing at this level can be separated from the body.

When I got home that night I looked in my wolf books to see if I could learn anything about the precaudal gland. I knew that wolves have a precaudal gland, sometimes referred to as a scent gland, about three inches from the root of their tails, on the top. When Angelique raised her tail to mist me, I assumed that the spray emanated from that gland, but I couldn't find anything in my books to explain its function. I was operating from a part of myself I call Miss Pickle Pruneface -- she's the part of me that's like a schoolmarm; she is rigid in her viewpoints and sees everything in black and white terms. She wants to know. She also has a bulldog's tenacity. On Monday I called both Chicago zoos to find out what the people working there could tell me about the precaudal gland and its function.

Not wishing to strain their credulity and realizing that I might sound like a crazy person if I explained that wolves actually howled to me (I wanted information, not a psychiatric referral!), I spoke only about the misting. The howling could be considered a matter of interpretation, but the misting was objectively real: it was wet, smelled wolfy, and sent my dogs into a frenzy of excited sniffing when they saw me for the first time after it happened. The woman I talked to at the first zoo, who worked with large mammals, told me that although she didn't have much experience with wolves, she thought the misting was a sign of deep acceptance of me by the wolves. Miss Pickle Pruneface, not content with this response -- after all, the woman said she didn't have much experience with wolves -- called the other zoo, where she met her match.

When I told the story of the misting to the woman at the second zoo, she exclaimed, "That's impossible!" I was so shocked I sputtered, "B-but it happened!" and asked her about the function of the precaudal gland. She never answered my question -- I realize now that she didn't know, but she became so fixated on the impossibility of my being misted that she never got around to telling me that -- and we went around and around, our tones getting less polite and more heated until she finally burst out, "Well, it must have been bowel gas!"

That struck me so funny -- besides being physically impossible, since I was at Angelique's head when she misted me and any gas would have been expelled in the opposite direction -- that it broke Miss Pickle Pruneface's hold on my psyche and allowed me to see what I had been doing.

In my desire to have an external authority confirm my understanding of the misting ("Yes, Anne, the wolves did initiate you into the pack"), I was willing to reject the evidence of my body's senses and my own inner knowing and, instead, to allow a putative wolf authority to become an Anne authority, to tell me the meaning of what I had experienced. I was ready to let someone else create my reality, be the authority on my life.

I still don't know, from a scientific point of view, the function of the precaudal gland and, from what I've read, the wolf biologists don't either. Even as recent and comprehensive a book as Robert H. Busch's The Wolf Almanac, published in 1995, describes the precaudal gland as "a gland on the dorsal surface of a wolf's tail, function unknown" (italics mine). In fact, unless you were in a relationship with a wolf, I don't see how you could even know about the fact of misting, since the spray is much too fine to be seen at the distances from which most wolf biologists study wolves. However, although I don't know the function of the precaudal gland in the lives of wolves, I do know its function in my life; and after I decided to accept that this experience was an initiation into the pack, I learned of two similar experiences: one in which a wolf hybrid, in his excitement at seeing his human companion after a long absence, misted him; and another in a children's novel, Julie of the Wolves, by Elizabeth Craighead George, in which a young Inuit girl is misted by an alpha male as a sign of his accepting her into his pack.

But the heart of this experience is the lesson I learned about honoring my inner knowings and standing to my own truth.

We begin the process of denial of our own reality, of self-betrayal, at an early age. The first time we walk into a room after our parents or any adults we know have had a fight, we say, "Did you have a fight?" or "Are you mad at each other?" The adults assure us that they have not been fighting, but we can feel the tension in the air -- we experience it in our bodies. Because when we are young we assume that adults are always right and know everything, we believe what they say. To harbor the suspicion that they are lying would cause too much internal conflict, would cast doubt on the solidity of our world's foundations, so we mistrust our own knowings, doubt the veracity of the body's responses, deny our feelings, and gradually come to mistrust the body's instinctual wisdom and accept any external authority figure as having greater knowledge than we do.

Usually we give away our power to authority figures because we want to be part of the group; we want to belong. When I was four years old, not yet in kindergarten, I lived in a neighborhood where all the children were older than I, and went to school. I looked up to them and wanted desperately to belong. One afternoon after school they told me I could play with them if I would drink the "cocoa" they were going to make. This was their way of initiating me into their clique. They told me to stand in front of one of the neighbors' garages while they went around the back to prepare my drink. I knew they were up to something, so I sneaked around the side of the garage and heard them giggling as they filled an empty Nestle's cocoa tin fetched from someone's kitchen for the sake of appearances, with dirt and moss. When they proffered me the cup of "cocoa" made from the contents of the tin mixed with some water, I drank it, even though I knew it was dirt. My desire for acceptance was that strong. And, of course, my self-betrayal didn't lead to acceptance at all; the other kids just mocked my gullibility and laughed derisively when I protested that I had, in fact, known exactly what I was drinking.

It is one thing to betray oneself at the age of four, but quite another as adults to deny our own experiences in order to fit in, to be accepted. We can be vouchsafed the most magical, most wondrous, most life-changing of experiences, but in order to make them real in our lives we have to claim them. Claiming doesn't have to do with convincing anyone else what happened or even telling anyone else. In fact, one of my favorite cartoons shows a yogi sitting in a tree in a meditative pose and a man in a strait-jacket, obviously some kind of psychiatric patient, sitting on the ground at the foot of the tree, and the yogi is saying, "The difference between you and me is that I know who to talk to and you don't."

Claiming our experiences means knowing in our bones that we can have baptism or we can have bowel gas -- the choice is ours.

Anne Firestone met Wolf for the first time in a dream she had almost twenty years ago, then again in a shamanic journey in 1992. When she was kissed by a golden-eyed she-wolf on March 22, 1993, her inner and outer worlds came together. She left her social work job to answer the call of Wolf spirit, gives workshops and does Wolf spirit tarot readings by telephone. She has produced an audio tape, The InnerWolf: Immune System of the Soul, does pet consultations, and also teaches in area colleges. Anne is working on a book about her adventure with Wolf spirit, from which the above article is excerpted. For further information, call (773) 929-1245.