Dear Reader—
The following is a text written in response to Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s The Dream Pool Intervals, currently on show at The Hugh Lane. I was invited to respond to the show by the wonderful Sara Muthi, and was very grateful for the attentive audience that showed up to hear me speak.
The last grey wolf was killed in Ireland in 1786. His death at the edge of a stream in Carlow remains indelibly bound to the arboreal annihilation of Ireland conducted by Elizabeth I and the Norman supplanting of Brehon Law in 1169AD. Written in the vein of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, A Problem Wolf is a new piece of writing detailing the taxonomy and history of the quaestio lupum, a species of wolf that survived the ultimate extinction of Ireland’s grey wolf under Cromwellian Rule. By tracking the rogue, watchful animal as it lopes through deforested terrain, contemporary artworks and historical ruins, A Problem Wolf employs the wolf as a cipher to move through questions of colonial destruction and post-colonial loss.
A Problem Wolf
1786: the last grey wolf in Ireland stands at the edge of a stream in Carlow.
It is morning: still air, gathering birdsong.
Behind the wolf, the woodland sits dark.
The morning sun, she is still low and the trees’ shadows do not know she is come to recess and retreat them and the stream’s water is still cool and the wolf is about to take a drink—but, the bullet: its arc toward a softer space in the wolf’s ribcage and the wolf, thus perforated, blinks at the mist only now breaking in these early stages of dawn.
He takes another step.
His body, its coarse pelt.
His body.
The 42 teeth that sit inside the jaw of any wolf who’s had the time and opportunity to become fully grown.
When he falls, he falls on his side.
He falls not away from, but towards the wound, towards the deft impact that has set his death in motion, and he bleeds deeply into the very water he’d hoped to put his tongue to, the very water he’d hoped would cool his heels while he decided, where next, to go in this woodland which he knows as his own —so much so that the Irish for wolf is mac tíre, meaning son of the country(side), and Ireland itself was once known as talamh mac tíre, Wolf Land.
The wolf and the landscape feel this linguistic gristle twitch between them and this perhaps, is why the wolf’s blood doesn’t lessen in the water, why it gathers a redder hue.
Why it thickens into a carmine ribbon and the ribbon—it unspools.
Upstream, on and on it goes.
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