The Dire Wolf is my inspiration this week. I kept running into images of them. The Shifters of Lowell Island are the last remnant of the Dire Wolf in the world. Click here to see picture of what Dire Wolves might have looked like.

The Secret History of Lowell Island

There was an ancient painting in a cave on Lowell Island, the paintings were ancient when the first of the Algonquin peoples settled the islands of Long Island Sound. 

The cave drawings seem to show a changing of the guard after the last ice age. The time of the mega-fauna had come to an end and most of the larger carnivores died off when the last of their prey animals went extinct. This die-off included the Dire wolves. That’s the temporal explanation of the scenes depicted in the cave. 

There is another story depicted in the cave paintings that predates human habitation of North America. The paintings depict battles between wolves huge, short-faced Dire Wolves and smaller more nimble modern wolves. As the pictures progress, the Dire Wolves seem to lose territory until they were pushed right off the North American mainland, and the final picture is of three Dire Wolves on an island. 

In a universe where matter can’t be created or destroyed, it seems that the energy of the wolves may have remained behind on Lowell Island after the death of the last pack.

Shapeshifter v. Werewolf

I have a little bit of a pet peeve about the blurring of the lines between werewolves and shapeshifters, just because a shifter takes the shape of a wolf that doesn’t mean he or she is a werewolf.

Let’s look at werewolves first. Werewolves are cursed creatures. They’re people who, under the influence of a curse, are forced into the shape of a wolf during the full moon. They don’t have any control over the change or over their actions while in wolf form. Finally, the “curse” can be transmitted through blood or body fluid contact.

A lot of the werewolves we see in fiction now are not, at least by that definition, werewolves. They are shapeshifters who take the form of a wolf. For the most part, they seem to retain their human intelligence and personality while in wolf form. Therefore, if the person is a killer the wolf will also kill humans. If the person is not a killer then the wolf is, for the most part, not a danger to humans.

I read a lot of paranormal romance and that issue bugs me. The werewolf is the hero so he can’t be entirely a werewolf otherwise it’s tough to make him sympathetic. So most of them are shapeshifters with werewolfy tendencies. They shift usually around the full moon, but they can shift at other times. Their shifting seems more connected to their emotional state than to the phase of the moon.

When I imagined the wolves of Lowell island, I called them werewoves at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that they weren’t really werewolves. They maintain human intelligence, they shift at will, they don’t stress about their loss of humanity. The shapeshifters of Lowell island, don’t consider themselves human at all. They don’t do  it often, but they are not averse to eating humans.

Oops, I almost called them werewolves again, the shapeshifters, or the changing kind of Lowell Island featured in my short story Spirit Wolf, are neither wolf nor man they are another species  that happens to share the world with humans. Usually, we put ourselves at the top of the food chain, but what if that’s an illusion. We look into the night and see only the lights and sounds of the city. What if there are things walking in the darkness, just beyond our sight, that watch and wait for  one of us to stray from path.  I think that is the ingredient I’ve been missing that I want in my own work. I want to take that journey into the shadows.