Autumn is coyote season.
In truth, every season here is coyote season, but fall is when they emerge in packs, driven by their internal clocks that tell them, reliably, that winter is on the way and food is about to become much more scarce. They live here year-round, of course, but we don’t tend to see much of them most of the time. We hear them, though, especially at night and especially now, and on recent nights, they have been driving the dogs to our distraction [and, perhaps more accurately, my added sleeplessness].
We don’t see wolves much here, although they do inhabit these lands. They are more wary than their trickster cousins, and rightly so: They know all too well the damage humans can do, and here, humans continue to encroach upon their habitat at an alarmingly destructive rate. Once, nearly a decade ago, we were visited by giant canine-like creatures that we believed to be wolves; they were too fast for me to get more than a glancing snapshot as they streaked through the sage, but size and shape indicated at least some wolf in their genetic make-up. Around here, both coydogs and wolf hybrids have become, if not exactly commonplace, not remotely unknown, either.
Both are beautiful beings. Both are also relatively mellow, left to their own devices. Both can also be extremely dangerous if disturbed or harassed, a lesson that colonial America never seems to learn; one need only read of each summer’s incident[s] of tourists being gored or thrown by the buffalo they’re endangering to know the truth of that. Like the buffalo, and bears, and raptors, and the elk, we appreciate their beauty and are grateful for their presence, but we also have enough respect for their needs and their power to do that appreciating and being grateful from a safe distance. The exceptions have been few and far between: a rescue of an injured skunk seventeen years ago next month, quilled by a porcupine and turned over to the wildlife rehab center south of here; a decade ago now, when the horses alerted us to a seemingly abandoned baby elk that seemed injured, only to find that it was okay and leaving it to meet back up with its herd; and last winter, a young elk that had gotten separated from the herd by failing to make the leap over a barbed-wire fence, getting tangled to a degree that would have proved fatal had I not heard its cries and Wings not cut it free.
Those are by far the exceptions. In each instance, we did not touch any of the animals; we only ensured their safety from whatever distance we could manage. But now that fall is fully here [just ask the aspens and the maples if you don’t believe me, and the tiny young woodpecker that flew in just this morning], it’s time for us all to increase our awareness of what climate collapse and the colonial overdevelopment driving it may have in turn driven to us in search of sustenance, sanctuary, survival. Our obligation is to aid in those without also adding disruption, to ensure their surviving and thriving over our own convenience. Far too many species have gone extinct in our lifetimes already, far too many more in the process of going extinct even now.
It is one of those extinct species that is manifest in this week’s #TBT featured work, a throwback to early 2012 and a very special commission by someone very dear to us. It’s the embodiment both of autumn’s wild spirits and of a relative long since gone extinct, wrought to certain specifications for a very particular purpose. It’s a direwolf, wrought in a design that folks familiar with a certain medieval fantasy book series, and with the television adaptation that takes the book series’ first title, will recognize immediately. This version was created with the design owner’s permission and explicit instruction.
The direwolf was an actual being, one that apparently went extinct some 9,500 years ago. Their fossilized remains have been found in various habitats across this land mass the world now calls North America,” as well as in parts of South America. It was what we today would regard as a giant form of wolf, related directly to that known in colonial Latin taxonomies as Canis lupus. And while none of the wolves [mostly so-called Mexican gray wolves] that are indigenous to this area are anywhere nearly as large, we have a good, healthy respect for their power anyway.
But back to today’s #ThrowbackThusrday featured work. Someone very dear to us, intimately involved with the series in all its forms, was traveling to filming locations in early 2012, and wished to take specific gifts for some of the actors in the series. To that end, she commissioned Wings to create three pins: each in the book series’ original direwolf design, but with Wings’s particular Indigenous twist. Two would be set with amethyst; the third with moonstone. We’ve already featured the moonstone iteration here, and the first of the amethyst here, but there is one amethyst version remaining, the one shown in the image above.
Our friend’s specifications were few but significant: the stones to be used; the desire for them to be created in the manner of the original sigils’ design; a wish for the wolves to be running, rather than merely the wolf’s head; and, of course, the infusion of his own Indigenous sensibility into each. Wings reviewed the designs used in the original sigils with close attention, then set about drawing out a version that would be able to meet them all. It took several drafts for him to create a running direwolf in this style to his satisfaction, but eventually, he was happy with a result that remained true to all of our friend’s wishes. All three were drafted in the same general design and shape, but in keeping with his insistence that every person who wears his work be entitled to their own unique form of it, he varied the angles of stance and motion ever so slightly between the three. All the saw-work was executed freehand, using a jeweler’s saw with a filament-thin blade, and that, too, results in unique variation for each.
He also stamped them all freehand, keeping the stampwork simple. Most of it was managed using a single small triangular point, open at the base: This he incised into each wolf’s hackles and bushy tail, then scattered in a not-quite-random pattern across neck ruff, body, and flanks. It did a good joob of evoking the brushy nature of the animal’s coat, but it also adhered to the original design form which he was asked to work.
The extension of the hip at the hindquarters he accomplished with a single slender arc, a plain crescent-shaped line. The shorter fur on the legs he brought into view using repeated lines of tiny crescent moon shapes. Beyond that, he added only a single other motif, one formed of one tiny hoop surrounded by four equally tiny pointed spokes, places just below the point where the extended foreleg meets the body.
It’s a North Star.
Yes.
For the royal house of the North.
Once the stampwork and saw-work were complete, he turned it over to add his hallmark, then domed it slightly before adding the pin assembly on the reverse. Then he turned it outer side up again, and fashioned a tiny round scalloped bezel to hold the stone, which would serve as the eye. Then he oxidized all of the stampwork and buffed the piece to medium polish just the smallest bit brighter than Florentine: enough to imply the richness of age, while still glowing new and bright. Once that was complete, he set the stone, a tiny round highly-domed amethyst in the deep purple of a boreal autumn twilight, blessed it and its companion pieces, and handed them over to me to pack up for delivery.
Every now and again I run across the photos of this special trio. I did so a few days ago, while searching for something else; it’s what prompted me, given this week’s themes, to feature it here today. After multiple nights of interruptions from the dogs, reminding us that fall and the winter to come can be feral seasons, it seemed like a good reminder of our own obligations now.
We owe it to autumn’s wild spirits to ensure their survival . . . and by doing so, we also help to ensure our own.
~ Aji
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