Wolves

Wolves occupy a shifting place in the novel’s animal imagery: they are both a remembered danger on the landscape and a pack imagined in pursuit of a hunted speaker. Their appearances do not resolve into a single naturalistic portrait. Instead, the recurring wolf marks the unstable border between animal, human, memory, and myth.

The Wolves of Fochlut

A speaker recalls the “wolves of Fochlut” in connection with a childhood landscape in or around Mayo. He remembers going to his grandmother’s place on the fourth day, while dogs gave tongue and coursed along the marches, straining at their leash. The recollection joins wolves to a local geography of shore, hunting, and remembered wealth, giving the phrase the force of an inherited rural legend as well as an animal threat.

The invocation returns as a warning not to provoke or fling oneself toward the wolves. Its repeated, distorted naming makes the danger feel less like a zoological report than an oral formula: the wolves are summoned through sound, fear, and the teller’s shifting recollection. The scene offers no account of an attack or its outcome; its emphasis is on the charged presence of the pack and the speaker’s familiarity with the place.

Pursuit and Transformation

Elsewhere, wolf imagery turns inward. A speaker reads the scene as a child’s dread of a dragon-like stepfather and suggests that the child learned to howl like a wolf. The image places the animal not only outside the human world as a predator but also within a child’s acquired language of fear: becoming wolfwise is presented as a response to a threatening relation, not as a literal transformation.

The pursuit then takes a more immediate, comic-grotesque form. The speaker describes himself as “dob dob dobbling” while the cubs come after him, calling them a whole totem pack and voicing their repeated howls. He cries for the harriers and imagines dying of “the milkman’s lupus.” The scene shifts from remembered childhood to a pressured present-tense chase, but its language keeps the action unstable, mixing animal pursuit with illness, sound-play, and the speaker’s own wolfish associations.

A Recurring Animal Vocabulary

Wolves belong to a wider field of animal and folk material rather than appearing in isolation. A catalogue of games includes “Battle of Waterloo” and “Telling your Dreams,” placing play, history, and dream among the circulating forms of communal memory. In another passage, the account of old landscapes and burial imagines animals and birds as guides to the disposition of remains; the natural world becomes part of a vocabulary for reading the buried past. These contexts do not identify the wolves with any one human figure, but they help explain how animal images in the book can carry memory, threat, and cultural transmission at once.

The novel’s language repeatedly turns names and sounds into unstable compounds. Wolves move through that same verbal process: a remembered pack becomes a shouted warning, then a pursuing totem group, while the boundary between the child and the animal is voiced as learning to howl. The wolves’ significance lies in this recurrence and transformation, not in a single settled role: they are at once figures of external danger, fear made audible, and the dream narrative’s capacity to let human and animal identities overlap.