Between dog and wolf

Between dog and wolf is the book’s expression for the dim interval in which the world becomes difficult to classify. It names the twilight when familiar forms lose their certainty, making it especially suited to a work that repeatedly moves between human identity and animal shape, ordinary wolves and imagined werewolves, and material events and supernatural explanations.

Meaning and Twilight Setting

In the account of the Wulfric family, the expression appears alongside another old comparison, “’twixt hawk and buzzard,” to describe the darkening hour between daylight and night. As twilight falls, marsh vapours mingle with the gloom, and will-o’-the-wisps begin to glimmer around the Wulfrics’ isolated hut. The phrase therefore has a concrete temporal meaning: it marks the moment when visibility weakens and the ordinary landscape becomes vulnerable to fearful interpretation.

The expression also carries a social meaning in that scene. The Wulfrics are already treated as a race of werewolves, and their neighbours read the surrounding darkness as confirmation of that belief. Their patriarchal supper, when they had food enough to eat, and their retreat to rest are ordinary domestic actions, but the hour makes them appear ominous to outsiders. Between dog and wolf is thus the threshold at which poverty, isolation, and superstition are converted into signs of diabolical activity.

Wolves, Werewolves, and Misreading

The phrase gains force from the book’s distinction between real wolves and the human monsters imagined or represented as wolves. During severe winters, wolves genuinely emerged from their forest lairs, entered the Ashford churchyard through a breach in its walls, and disinterred corpses because famine drove them to it. A drunken mendicant also fractured his skull against the pointed base of the Wolf’s Cross, staining the stone with blood. Yet these accidents were attributed to the Wulfrics in their supposed werewolf guise.

The same confusion between observable behaviour and supernatural explanation appears in the wider history of the werewolf. Older accounts describe sorcerers who used an enchanted girdle to assume the appearance and nature of wolves, while another tradition explains the wolf’s reputation through its alleged preference for human flesh after tasting it. Between dog and wolf consequently describes more than failing light: it expresses the unstable boundary through which a dangerous animal becomes a demonized human figure, and through which rumor turns coincidence into proof.

Literary and Folkloric Continuities

The expression belongs to the book’s larger history of shapeshifting in literature. Werewolf traditions began in superstition and developed through folklore, legend, poetry, and eventually the nineteenth-century short story. The earliest recorded poetic transformation described clothes becoming wolf hair, arms becoming legs, and the transformed figure wanting to speak but being unable to do so. Such details make the boundary between human and animal bodily rather than merely symbolic.

The medieval and early modern traditions preserve this threshold in different forms. Marie’s “Lai du Bisclavaret” refers to the werewolf, while the traditions of Poictou identify such beings as Wehr-Wolves, Bisclavarets, or Loups Garoux. In the Upper Limousin, they were believed to leave their hills and mountains at midnight, howling through nearby streets and villages. The expression’s twilight ambiguity therefore anticipates the later darkness of full transformation: the uncertain hour becomes a fitting verbal threshold for a legend in which identity itself may change.

Narrative Function and Significance

Between dog and wolf helps organize the book’s recurring uncertainty. A large white wolf can lure a hunter for hours up a mountain toward a place reputed to be inhabited by evil influences; when the hunter finally raises his gun, the animal suddenly disappears. Elsewhere, a rumor claims that Francoise Thilouze changes into a wolf when foresters approach her with Victor de Vardes, while a particularly large real wolf becomes the supposed evidence for that accusation. In both cases, the crucial question is not simply what is seen, but how fear supplies a supernatural meaning for what is seen.

The expression also retains its force when the animal threat is not a werewolf. In the Hartz Mountains, the white wolf’s lure leads to a dangerous open space; in the jungle, an enormous tiger seizes Krantz and carries him away, leaving his clothes and gold behind. These episodes widen the phrase’s reach from a strict wolf image to a general condition of unstable boundaries, where human confidence gives way to animal power and where the difference between pursuit and entrapment, hunter and prey, remains uncertain.

As a literary expression, Between dog and wolf is therefore both setting and method. It identifies the hour in which forms blur, but it also describes the book’s movement between history and legend, evidence and superstition, and human conduct and animal ferocity. Its significance lies in making ambiguity physical: twilight is not merely a backdrop for fear, but the visible shape of a culture unable to decide where the human ends and the wolf begins.