ben
tapeworm’s
almanac

November 2021 (i)

to be done with the wolves

Wolf number 1155, which had lived in Yellowstone National Park for about seven years and had been banded by biologists in 2018, wandered out of the Park this past April. He was trapped and shot by the governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, who would later receive a written warning for declining to attend a mandatory training session prior to his hunt. In 2016, Gianforte had crowed that “the effort to stop trapping in Montana is an attack on our heritage.”

Last week, I saw The Mountain Goats at a small concert venue in Bushwick. Before playing “Wolf Count,” frontman John Darnielle explained that the song was inspired by a Borges poem he’d read many years ago. “The king wanted to ‘acabar con los lobos,’ to be done with the wolves,” Darnielle said as he sat at the electric keyboard. “I finally decided to stop crying about it and write a song.”

Borges’s poem concerns “el último lobo de Inglaterra”—the last wolf in England. (Humans drove English wolves to extinction by the beginning of the 16th century.) It is an ineluctable elegy for the last, doomed wolf: “Ya forjado / ha sido el fuerte hierro de tu muerte”—“the fierce blade of your death has already been forged.”1

From the early 20th century until 1995, there were no gray wolves in Yellowstone at all. Wolves were hunted to local extinction in the contiguous US, and were only reintroduced from Canada in the 1990s. They currently occupy only about 20 percent of their former range. Last year, the US Fish and Wildlife Department removed them from the list of endangered species.

Shortly after wolf number 1155 was shot, Montana and Idaho increased their annual quotas for wolf hunts and allowed more controversial methods of trapping, such as neck snares. In Montana, a State Fish and Wildlife Commissioner who voted in vain against the changes, said that “My largest concern is that we are selling our souls and our fair chase in order to provide methods that are unnecessary and more likely to have repercussions.”

The end of the Borges poem goes:

Mil años pasarán y un hombre viejo
te soñará en América. De nada
puede servirte ese futuro sueño.
Hoy te cercan los hombres que siguieron
por la selva los rastros que dejaste,
furtivo y gris en la penumbra última.

A thousand years will go by and an old man
will dream you in America. It will not
be of any use to you, that future dream.
Today they surround you, the men who followed
through the wilderness the traces you left,
furtive and grey in the final twilight.

ben tapeworm

ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.

To get new entries in your email inbox, please email bentapeworm@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.