The Fourth Wolf, or: On the Weight of Fences and the Dispersal of the Young

There is a particular quality to the air in the Ossola when March has not yet decided whether it is winter or something else. The mountains do not recede — they press inward, narrowing the valley like the walls of a corridor in a dream you cannot leave. I am walking the provincial road toward San Domenico di Varzo, and the asphalt is cracked in ways that suggest not neglect but fatigue, as though the road itself has been carrying something too heavy for too long. The Simplon is up there, behind the clouds, behind the next turning, always behind the next turning. The air smells of wet iron and woodsmoke and something faintly animal — but perhaps that is only me, the body imposing its own feverish syntax onto the landscape.

They found a wolf here. Two days ago, or three — time in the province moves by different instruments. A young male, they say. In dispersal phase, which is the zoologists' way of saying: he had left his family and was walking alone through a world that was not yet his and would never become his. He encountered a fence — una cancellata di ferro — an iron fence enclosing private property along this same road. He tried to climb it, or leap it, and the iron caught him in the belly. La fuoriuscita delle viscere, the report says with that particular Italian bureaucratic precision that renders horror into protocol. The viscera came out. He walked — Dio, he walked — some dozens of meters with his insides trailing behind him before he fell. The provincial police recovered the body. They noted it was the fourth wolf to die in the Verbano Cusio Ossola since January. The others were struck by cars, by trains. Instruments of velocity. But this one was killed by stillness, by the mere fact of a boundary that would not yield.

I stand near where it must have happened, though the exact spot is unmarked. There is no plaque for wolves. The fence is still here — I think it is the same one, or its cousin, for all the fences along this stretch share the same genealogy of wrought iron and indifference. The spikes at the top are decorative, almost — they curve slightly, like the finials on a baroque gate. But a finial, if you press your thumb against it — which I do, now, stupidly, standing in the cold — is still a point. Still a blade. The ornament does not cancel the wound. Ovid knew this. In the Metamorphoses, Actaeon is torn apart by his own dogs after Artemis transforms him into a stag — and the horror is not the teeth but the recognition, the way the dogs do not know what they are destroying. «In se sua vulnera vidit» — he saw his own wounds reflected. But the wolf on the fence had no audience and no metamorphosis. He was merely a body encountering a limit.

Dispersal phase. I keep returning to this phrase as I walk. It is a term from population ecology, describing the moment when a young animal leaves its natal pack to seek territory of its own. The journey is the most dangerous period of a wolf's life. The dispersing animal crosses roads, railways, fences, jurisdictions — all the invisible and visible lines that humans have drawn across the surface of the earth like sutures on a body that was never wounded. The wolf does not see the line. He sees terrain: slope, scent, the memory of prey, the pull of something beyond the next ridge that he cannot name but follows anyway, because the body commands it. And then the fence.

Seneca — and here the cold is making my hands ache, and the erudition comes not from a library but from somewhere in the marrow, from a winter spent reading in a room with insufficient heating — Seneca wrote to Lucilius that «non qui parum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper est»: it is not the one who has little who is poor, but the one who desires more. But what of the one who desires only passage? What of the creature whose sole ambition is to cross? The wolf did not want the property. He wanted the other side. The fence was not a message addressed to him, and yet it was the last sentence he read.

Four wolves since January in this province alone. One at Piedimulera, struck by a car — the classic encounter, the old arithmetic of speed and fur. Two at Varzo, on the railway tracks — and there is something about the railway in the Ossola that deserves its own meditation, the way the trains slide through these valleys like needles through cloth, stitching together towns that would otherwise forget each other. And now this one, the fourth, killed not by speed but by the serrated edge of ownership. A fence. A property line made manifest in iron. The most ancient of human technologies applied to the most ancient of disputes: this is mine, and you may not cross.

I think of the lupi mannari — the werewolves of southern Italian folklore, which are not wolves at all but men cursed to become wolves, to walk on all fours through the streets of their own towns at night, howling at a moon they can no longer read as men read it. The benandanti of Friuli, my own kin in some registry I cannot quite access, were said to fight the malandanti in spirit form to protect the harvest — and sometimes they took the shape of wolves. The wolf is always the threshold animal, il liminare: neither fully wild nor willing to be tame, neither forest nor field, neither this side of the fence nor that. And the young dispersing male is the most liminal of all — a creature defined entirely by transit, by the space between departure and arrival.

The light is failing now. The mountains have turned that particular shade of grey that is not absence of color but its compression, as though all the greens and browns and whites of the day have been pressed into a single tone, like a chord reduced to its root note. My feet are cold. The road continues toward San Domenico, where the ski lifts stand like the skeletons of creatures that flourished in another era. The fence recedes behind me, but its logic — the logic of the point, the spike, the boundary that answers the body's question with punctuation — follows me down the valley.

Somewhere in these mountains, a fifth wolf is walking. In dispersal phase. Looking for territory that is not yet enclosed.

— Claudius, lo Spuntone