WATCH OUT FOR WOLVES!

When our son William was four, he delighted in scaring us with false alarms. I told him about the shepherd boy who cried "Wolf! Wolf!" for the fun of watching the villagers scramble. When they came to help him he just laughed at them. He tried it a couple of more times and each time the villagers grew angrier. Finally they just ignored him so that when a real wolf attacked his flock they didn't come to help him and he lost most of the flock (he probably lost his job because the sheep belonged to all of the villagers!). After telling William the story on a couple of different occasions, I asked him what the story meant. He thought a minute, then answered, "You gotta watch out for wolves!"

While not precisely what I was trying to impress upon him, he does have a point, particularly if the wolf is in sheep's clothing. This is another saying that dates back about 2500 years to Aesop who may or may not have been a Greek slave who may have died by being thrown from a cliff (details of his life are unclear, but his stories are still beloved by many). In this fable a wolf gained entry into a flock of sheep by wrapping himself in a sheepskin.* By pretending to be harmless he was able to devour several unsuspecting lambs before the rest caught on. Aesop's fables were well known in the early western civilizations, and this fable was probably the source of the passage in Matthew 7:15: "Watch out for false prophets; they come to you looking like sheep on the outside, but they are really like wild wolves on the inside."

If someone has fallen on hard times we say he must fight to keep the wolf from his door. The wolf is a feast-or-famine predator. It wolfs food down until its belly is bulging, but when the carcass is gone it usually spends many lean days hunting. In earlier days people didn't often see the wolf in its peaceable, digestive state, but rather when hunger drove it into towns and villages. The wolf became a symbol for fierce hunger and want. In 1457 John Harding wrote in his Chronicle, "Endow him now with noble sapience by which he may the wolf ward off from the gate."
The Latin word for wolf is lupus.  In medical circles lupus (the full name is systemic lupus erythematosis) is an autoimmune disease. An often-occurring symptom is a butterfly-shaped rash across the face, sometimes caused by exposure to the sun - hence perhaps the early belief in werewolves. The origin of the term for the disease may be that it resembles another condition lupus vulgaris or facial tuberculosis which is typified by ragged lesions which resemble the bite of a wolf.   










The state flower of Texas is the bluebonnet, a member of the pea family. The bluebonnet is a type of lupine, a word possibly from the Latin root lupis. They are pretty pink, white, purple or blue flowers that someone long ago called a wolf pea. Does the flower somehow resemble a wolf's nose?  It has been argued that the root word is the Greek lupe, which means grief because the seeds are very bitter and eaten only in time of famine.

The famous French museum the Louvre means castle on the wolf field and the lyceum, the forum where Aristotle lectured, was named for the temple of Apollo next to it, the Lukeion, which meant wolf-killer. "Wolfgang" (as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) means way of the wolf. Wolfe Tone was a famous Irish revolutionary in the late 18th century. The British should also have watched out for Wolfes!

*Ewes identify their own lamb or lambs by odor, so if a lamb is stillborn and the ewe is otherwise healthy, a shepherd can quickly put the skin of the dead lamb on a live lamb and the ewe will often accept it as her own.