How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
(A Little Princess)
But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called – called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
~ Jack London
(The Call of the Wild)
There is an ecstasy that 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 in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and 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.
~ Jack London
(The Call of the Wild)
sacred predator
wild spirit, guardian
howling, full wolf moon
~ Barbara Rodgers
(By the Sea)
The gaze of the wolf reaches into our souls.
~ Barry Lopez
(Of Wolves & Men)
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.
~ Aldo Leopold
(Thinking Like a Mountain)