Tale of Tails

People like to think they understand animals. Parents teach their toddlers to speak by quacking like ducks, oinking like pigs, and mooing like cows, which is, when you consider it, a strange way to learn a language. In classic children’s books, characters team up with critters, usually dogs, but sometimes spiders and pigs, as in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, or beavers and lions, as in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. But what do animals think about when people are not around? And what would they say if they could speak in their own right?

More than other genres, fables take the measure of animal-human relations. In them, critical moral instructions are distilled from the behaviour of animals. Aesop’s clever parables, like “The Tortoise and the Hare,” probably freed him from slavery. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a man, disgusted by his own species, hangs out with a race of superbly intelligent horses. As he realizes, many creatures have different, even better ways of knowing than people do.

Drawing inspiration from the fable tradition, Thomas Wharton’s Wolf, Moon, Dog follows the transformation of wolves into dogs. In the first and third parts, set sometime in the prehistoric past when aurochs and cave bears roamed the earth, Wolf is cut from his pack because there is not enough food to go around. Unable to bring down prey by himself, Wolf hangs around a human settlement. A boy asks the beast why he is on his own. “I’m just doing my own thing for a while,” Wolf says, dipping into 1960s slang. The boy coaxes Wolf to accept a daily bone, on the condition that he stand sentry over their camp every night. At the child’s request, Wolf develops a new sound — more bark than howl, one assumes — to alert those asleep to danger. He starts to feel different and behave differently too, even licking the boy’s face. When Wolf’s pack returns, they notice that his smell has changed. He is becoming domesticated.

The second part, “Dog,” consists of short chapters, each of which finds Wolf reincarnated in a new place and time. He is Cerberus growling at Orpheus in the underworld. He is a pampered pooch in a palace, doted on despite the violent uprising happening beyond the royal compound. Briefly and bizarrely known as Banana, she helps a Zen master resolve the puzzles of existence. As Captain Dash, a spaniel in Regency England, he observes the foolishness of a pair of lovers while secretly longing for the “rough welcome” that Mr. Thornhill’s hounds give him at Whitecroft Hall. They nip his flanks and try to mount him, much to his delight. Dogs will be dogs, but here they also serve as guides, guards, rescuers, truffle sniffers, herders, actors, rat catchers, and astronauts. As Laika, Wolf is sent into orbit alone to test how long she can survive under adverse conditions, as preparation for launching her human counterparts into space.

In the most poignant of this pack of tales, a black and white dog is abandoned at an airport in Colombia. Workers feed her and give her a name: Wandering Cloud. Left in a corner of the concourse, she raises her head in expectation every time the sliding doors swish open. Travellers pet her as they hurry past. No one, however, claims her. She dies of a broken heart. The story concludes with a stinging truth about small acts of cruelty: “how someone so beloved that you would die to lose them could also be so heartless.”

Canine metaphors saturate the English language. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. People work like dogs, but not necessarily during the dog days, those periods of inertia that happen during sultry weather. Places go to the dogs. Couples fight like cats and dogs. It also rains cats and dogs. Folks feel as sick as a dog. There are dog-and-pony shows, top dogs, shaggy-dog stories, and doghouses awaiting those who have fallen out of favour.

Wharton adds twists to some of these expressions. Characters guzzle “the hair of the wolf” as a hangover cure, which sounds much more potent than the hair of the dog. In “Unleashed,” an actor, variously called Charlie, Wolf, and Roscoe, falls from the dizzying heights of stardom because he dares to make a movie that is a “radical departure from convention,” insofar as it is only about dogs. After losing his celebrity status, he ekes out a living by appearing in bran flakes commercials. Torquing a familiar phrase, he complains that no one gets a second chance “in this human-eat-dog town.”

Charlie-Wolf-Roscoe puts his paw on an enduring problem with such stories: their sentimentality. In novels and movies, dogs die as “the catalyst for the human protagonist’s growth.” But their inner lives remain relatively uncharted territory. Wolf, Moon, Dog goes out of its way to show a range of canine perspectives. In “Home,” Wolf has several near-death experiences in one day. A hippie offers him a wad of marijuana, which he swallows in a gulp. High and paranoid, he takes refuge in a junkyard, where a mastiff chases him. Having survived that set‑to, Wolf is then sedated by a taxidermist. Later Wolf is nearly hit by a truck, sluiced into a creek, and finally rescued in extremis by a young girl. When he makes it home, his owner, unaware of all the challenges that he has overcome, chides him for having lost his collar and being such a mess. “You’ve had enough fun for one day,” she says.

Wharton’s writing is consciously literary. “Underdog,” written like a Robert Service poem, is a homage to Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, about class oppression among the sled-pulling set in Alaska and the Yukon. Elsewhere, canines stand on their hind legs, rather like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “Scent” recalls Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Here Wolf lives with a reclusive writer who has a cork-lined room. Something of a connoisseur of narrative, he is determined to become “a character in his own saga.” Like Proust’s narrator dipping a madeleine into tisane, Wolf catches the faint whiff of a secret life, “a hazy vista of vanishing odours, green and warm and summery.” This “phantasmal scent” recalls elusive yet tangible memories. Wolf escapes the apartment and heads south in search of lost time.

If Wolf, Moon, Dog is a fable, Wharton articulates its moral in an afterword: “We turn other animals into people in our stories not because we mistake what they are but because we’re not sure what we are, and we’ve always looked to animals to tell us.” Instead of converting dogs into pets, friends, or surrogate family members, people could learn more from them just as they are. In other words, sometimes the tail should wag the dog.