Wolf & The House of Stone
A radical re-telling of the story of the three little pigs
1: Three Little Pigs Leave Home
Long, long ago, three little piglets grew up into porkers and left their family home to make their way in the wide world.
The first thing each of them did was to find a suitable patch of land and build himself a house.
The youngest pig, a peaceable, easy-going fellow, built a small house made of bundles of straw in the old-timey style of his forefathers. It was started and finished in a few short weeks, whereafter the little pig settled down to grow food and play the banjo.
The second little pig had bigger aspirations than his younger brother. He undertook to build himself a house of hefty wooden posts and beams, walled with strong boards. A whole year of careful labour it took him to fell and cut and fit the timbers, but when his work was done the little pig was satisfied he had built a solid house befitting what he hoped would be his future stature.
The third little pig had even more ambitious designs—founded perhaps in visionary wisdom, perhaps in deep-seated insecurity. He conceived a house of unprecedented strength and grandeur—a stronghold of hard stone and unyielding mortar. Four winters came and went while this little pig quarried and squared and raised his stone walls, but such was his resolve that not for a moment was he fazed by this toil. Finally though, his task was complete, and he proudly took up residence in the very first house of stone that the wild world had ever seen.
2 : A Wolf Comes To Call
Meanwhile, the first little pig was living a quiet life, tending his crops and playing his banjo, singing sweet songs about the beauty of the dawn and the dusk and the many wonders of the living earth.
Until one day a wolf came to call.
It was a sunny spring afternoon when the silver-grey wolf strolled up to the straw house and introduced himself to little pig who was sitting out on his veranda strumming his strings.
“Greetings young pig,” she said, “how do you do? I’m the Wild Wolf, but you can call me Wolfie if you like. I live in the Great Forest with my pack, not far to the North of here. I heard that you and your brothers had moved to the area, so I thought I’d drop by to say hello. That’s a cute little house you’ve made for yourself there. Can I come in and have a look inside?”
The little pig had stopped his strumming at the wolf’s approach, and now sat silent, regarding him suspiciously. He had heard bad things about wolves from his mother, so despite this one’s friendly smile the little pig was wary.
He got up and moved behind his rocking chair, slowly looking the wolf up and down. This was clearly a dangerous creature standing before him, and something in the sharp glint of the wolf’s eye scared the wild boar right out of the young pig.
Fear spread inside him and he panicked, ran inside, and slammed his thin door in the wolf’s well-groomed face before squealing, “No, you’re not coming in, not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin. You’re not welcome here, so just go away”.
The wolf was taken aback. He hadn’t expected this. “Little pig, little pig, don’t be like that, please let me come in. Our ancestors lived side by side in the ancient forests, we could be friends.”
But the little pig was totally freaking out, overwhelmed by terror. “He wants to eat me!” screamed the pig inwardly, “This brute wants to eat me and steal my banjo!”
Reaching for his kitchen knife, the little pig cursed the wolf through the door and bade him leave and never return.
The wolf looked irritated. “Little pig, little pig, why such hostility? Do let me come in,” he repeated.
“Be gone you hairy rogue. Don’t think I don’t know that you mean to eat me up and steal my precious things. Be gone, lest I slice you and dice you and feed you to the crows.”
At this, the wolf became angry. Fury rose up like a storm in his chest, and he cried “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!”
And with that, the wild power in him called to the great powers of the air and a storm of forces blew down from the North. Ferocious winds tore through the little pig’s cornfields and ripped his little straw house to shreds around him.
Exposed, surrounded by the wreckage of his little house, he stood quaking amidst the storm, the kitchen knife still held in his now limp hand, while the wolf looked on in distain.
Then, like a flash of lightning, something in the pig suddenly quickened, as for a moment he stood amidst the great swirling elementals of the world and felt himself stripped of his shallow domesticity. He thrilled as his own power roused in response to the wolf and the winds. The blood of his distant ancestors awoke in his veins, their tusks sharp and brawny shoulders bristling. He felt their strength, their fearlessness, their desire to defy the storm, to charge at the wolf, to roar, to rend, to rampage.
But as suddenly as it arrived the moment quickly passed, and instead the little pig dropped his kitchen knife and fled.
3 : At The Second Little Pig’s House
Like a streak of pink bacon the first pig fled, running as fast as his little legs could carry him to his brother’s wooden house, where second pig (as their mother used to call him, to his chagrin) was at work at his desk writing his early memoirs in the last of the early evening light.
Bursting in through the stout oak door, bolting it fast behind him, and then collapsing in a heap on the polished boards, the first little pig whimpered and whined, beside himself with terror. Internally he was both pig and pork.
“A wolf, a wolf,” he moaned to his brother, “a wild wolf has destroyed my fields and torn my house down! He wants to eat us up and ravage all that we hold dear! I’ll never see my dear banjo again; I only just escaped with my life!”
“A wolf!” The second pig cried, jumping up and scattering ink and papers, infected by his brother’s distress. “Did he follow you here?”
At just that moment, the two pigs noticed that the wind had picked up and was clattering the shutters. Then there came a polite knock on the door. The brothers froze, their eyes locked upon one another, their hearts racing.
“Little pigs, little pigs, don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm. I’m sorry I got cross earlier. Please let me come in and we can talk all this through,” came the voice of the wolf through the door.
“He’s lying through his sharp teeth,” whispered the first little pig. “Don’t believe a word he says. Do you have a gun?”
“Of course,” replied second pig in an excited whisper.
Feeling instantly less terrified, he reached up above the door and brought down a shotgun. “And I know how to use it! You can’t be too careful these days”.
Raising his voice in a tone of command he spoke boldly to the wolf, saying: “Now listen here you beast, going around destroying property and frightening good folk just isn’t on. It isn’t on I tell you, and I won’t stand for it. We don’t want you and your wild ways around here, upsetting things and causing havoc. I suggest you go back to where you came from and leave us in peace, or I’ll put some holes in you as big as a beetroot! Do you hear me?”
And with that he thrust the snout of his gun through the letterbox and twitched it to and fro.
“Who are these strange, fearful, aggressive people?” wondered the wolf to himself. “And what do they mean by telling me to go back to where I came from? This is where I come from. This whole wild Earth is my home.”
The evening sky darkened and the howling wind whipped up whirling spirals of leaves and sticks from the ground while mighty gusts tore branches from trees and hurled them spinning through the churning air.
Amidst the chaos, the wolf calmly stepped back and took a good look at the second little pig’s wooden house. It was a curious thing this house, with its many sturdy posts and boards of hewn wood, its hard lines and sharp corners—quite different from all the earthy little shelters of the other folk of the land. And most curious of all was its thick door with the snout of a shotgun poking through it.
“Something very odd is going on here. What are these pigs so afraid of? What exactly are they trying to defend?” he thought, looking askance at the twitching gun barrel.
“Little pigs, little pigs, don’t shut yourselves up in a wooden box. Come on out and let’s talk, or let me come in,” he called above the ever-rising storm.
“Not by the hairs on our chinny-chin-chins,” came the shrill reply from the pigs, followed by two loud bangs. Two flames leapt from the shotgun, and two bullets whistled through the air, narrowly missing the wolf and disappearing into the deepening dusk.
“Damn it!” Whispered second pig when he saw he had missed his target, and he started to reload his gun.
The wolf felt his rage rising again, stoked by these unnecessary bullets. It was a great rage, the rage of dammed rivers, of clearcut forests, the rage of a mother witnessing her children hunted down and murdered for sport. The wildness of the Earth poured through him like primordial music and called again to the vast wildness of the sky, and the gale grew around him to thunderous power.
“Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!” howled the wolf, his voice almost indistinguishable from the storm.
The two brothers gazed in awe at the power of the wind as in a moment the sturdy wooden house of the second pig was torn to splinters around them. They gazed in awe at the wolf poised amidst the whirling chaos, his fur barely ruffled, his teeth white and sharp like the new moon hanging in the tattered sky above.
Then, in the half-light, the wolf began to dance. It was a slow round-dance, a shaman’s dance, his feet drumming the earth and his hands caressing the storm-tossed horizon. His eyes silvered like mirrors, like water, like stars as he danced.
For how long he danced the little pigs couldn’t tell. They stood transfixed. Night fell and still the wolf danced, a star among stars, while the brothers couldn’t tear themselves away.
Abruptly, the dancer stopped, facing the pigs, his glittering eyes turned upon them. “Little pigs, little pigs,” he half-chanted, “let me come in.”
The pigs’ eyes widened, rolled, spun and capsized, narrowed and then slowly closed tight before snapping open again to reveal a riven sanity. As one, they began to back away, their movements clumsy, their legs visibly shaking.
The wolf eyed them with distaste, his dance still circling around him, his words still electrifying the air before him like forked lightening: “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in…”
After half a dozen backward paces the pigs suddenly turned and ran, stumbling and groaning through the pines.
4 : The Pigs At The House Of Stone
Something guided the terrified pigs’ tottering trotters in the direction of their older brother’s house. Through the darkening night they tripped and trod to the third little pig’s front door, which was locked with heavy locks.
Third pig was in his bed and took long moments to answer the desperate pounding on his door.
“Who is it?” he grunted when he finally snapped back the peephole and gazed blearily out into the night.
“It’s us, it’s us, your brothers,” oinked the nearly knackered porkers, “open up, open up!”
“What do you want? What’s the bother? What do you mean beating at my door at this time of night?”
“A wolf!” Cried the first little pig, “A wolf has blown our houses down. Save us, brother!”
“A storm!” Cried the second pig, “A storm has blown our houses down. Save us, brother!”
The third pig turned the key in the first lock, then the second and third. “Be quick, please, please be quick”, begged the terrified pigs as they felt the wind picking up and heard the trees groaning and clashing their branches together. Slowly the heavy door swung open, and in they darted, gasping.
The door closed behind them and the three locks turned, securing them against everything except their fears.
Inside the stone house it was very quiet and still. They could barely hear the heaving branches that had sounded so shocking to them outside. They could barely hear the howling wind. It felt like they’d entered another world.
Carrying a candle, the third little pig led them along the corridor and into his sitting room, where he sat his trembling brothers down in comfortable chairs and kindled a fire. He then fetched in some more candles and a tray of cake and ale.
The candles pushed back the night’s darkness into thick shadows in the corners of the room, illuminating a high-ceilinged chamber that felt reassuringly solid and removed from the wild strangeness outside where wolves could become storms and blow down houses of straw and houses of wood. That couldn’t happen here. The squared stone seemed to lend an active density to reality inside this house that prohibited such transformations. It bore their fear down beneath the surface of their minds until they stopped shaking.
On the great hearth the fire was beginning to leap, casting warmth and more dancing light into the room. They all drank a cup of ale and ate some of the cakes. The third brother began asking questions about what happened, but the first two could only reply vaguely, glancing often at each other bashfully as if unsure about what they had actually just experienced.
“Our houses are destroyed. There are wild powers in the world too scary to think about,” offered the first pig.
“There was nothing we could do to protect ourselves. We’re lucky to be alive,” stated the second.
“Yes, yes, very lucky, my brothers. And it’s a damn shame about your houses, a damn shame. But I could have told you something like this would happen. Houses of straw and houses of wood are all very well for pygmies, but respectable pigs like us need to look after ourselves.”
The third pig had stood up and now began pacing back and forth in front of the hearth.
“I saw it all coming of course,” he continued, warmed by the fire and the ale. “I should have warned you. I blame myself. I should have told you to be more careful, to think about the future. ‘Consider the lilies’ just doesn’t cut it in our world. I should have told you that. But would you have listened? And would either of you have had the patience and perseverance to build yourselves good strong houses of stone like this one?” He looked about the room, stroking his chest, admiring the masonry.
The other brothers didn’t answer. They weren’t really listening.
“But tell me again, was it a wolf or was it a storm that blew your houses down?” asked third pig, returning from his rhetoric and trying to establish some hard facts.
“He says he only wants to come in,” murmured the first pig, looking deep into the fire.
“He has teeth like the crescent moon,” offered the second pig more brightly, before lapsing into confused silence.
“The wolf, you mean?” ask the elder pig. But no reply came.
The silence deepened within the stone room full of warm light and heavy darkness, as the two younger pigs sat staring at the fire with vacant eyes and their older brother wished they would pull themselves together.
Then, into that uneasy silence came a firm knock on the front door, echoing down the corridor and into the pigs’ delicate ears. It made all their little scrunchy eyes open wide and their curly tails stand on end. All three froze.
The fire seemed to burn very bright for a moment, and then grow dim.
5 : The Wolf Arrives
The master pig of the house quickly recovered himself and turned towards the sound, a wicked smile on his bland face. “Shall I see who that is?” He asked blithely, jumping up and moving briskly towards the door.
“Nonononononooooo!” cried his traumatised brothers, torn between jumping up to stop him and cowering deeper into their seats.
The elder pig laughed. “Don’t worry, little ones, don’t worry. No wolf will be getting in here, I promise you that. And there’s no storm on Earth could blow down this house. We’re perfectly safe. Come on, let’s have some fun. Let’s see how fearsome this troublemaker looks with a bucket of hot oil tipped over his head! Haha! I’ve a few tricks up my buttoned sleeves, I can tell you! Hahahahaha!”
And with that he took a candle and ran to the kitchen, returning with a very large empty cauldron and a barrel of oil. He wrestled the cauldron onto the fire, then poured in the oil. “Feed up the fire brothers, feed it up good,” he directed, striding out of the room and to the front door.
Outside in the dark night the wolf waited. He surveyed the house of stone and didn’t like what he saw. He found it obscene. He had felt the wooden house of the second little pig to be an affront to all free beings, but this place was something else. “What exactly are they trying to protect?” he wondered. “Surely the price of shutting themselves up in this abomination negates the value of anything that they take in there with them—including themselves!”
But he was interrupted from further reflections by a sliver of light in the door as the peephole opened a crack. A pebbly eye appeared for a split-second and then vanished. Then an oily, oinky voice spoke from inside, saying “Welcome, traveller in the dark night. How may I help you? Are you lost?”
“Hello little pig,” replied the wolf. “No, I’m not lost, and it seems to me that it’s you who need my help. Won’t you let me come in? There are some things I believe we need to talk about.”
“Certainly, certainly, late as it is that sounds most interesting. Just hold there a minute or two will you, I’ll find the key and open up.”
With that, the peephole snapped closed and the wolf was alone again in the starlight before the hulking mass of squared stone.
He sniffed the air. Something smelt wrong here. He didn’t trust this third little pig. No-one who had built this place could be sane.
He remembered the carving knife the first little pig had threatened him with, and the bullets whirring past his ear fired from the shotgun at the second little pig’s house. He could only expect something similar here.
His instincts moved him away from the doorstep just a moment before a bucketful of boiling oil was poured from an upstairs window onto the ground he’d just vacated. He was still near enough for some splashes to catch him, sizzling his fur and scorching his skin.
He growled in pain and anger, and looked up to see third pig cursing his timing. With a howl that pierced the night, the wolf leapt mightily up towards the pig at the open window, grabbing the window-ledge just as the pig snatched the shutters closed and barred them from inside. The wolf swung himself up onto the ledge and pounded on the shutters, shouting, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.”
“Not by the hairs on our chinny chin chins,” yelled the third pig.
“Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in,” roared the wolf.
Lithely, he climbed onto the roof and there raised a terrifying howl.
The skies filled with sounds like banshee calls. Lightning tore through the heavens. The earth itself seemed to tremor with wrath. Once more, the wind gathered ferocious power, and it hurled the full weight of its wild fury at the house of stone.
But not a single stone moved.
6 : Down The Chimney
The third little pig had wasted no time. After narrowly blocking the wolf’s entrance he had quickly run from room to room making sure all the shutters were firmly barred, then checked the back door was secure, before returning to the sitting room with more oil for the cauldron. His brothers were huddled together before the blazing fire, groaning with fear at the sound of the raging storm which could be heard even in the heavy fastness of the stone house.
“Fear not my brothers,” soothed the perky third pig, who was enjoying himself immensely. “As I told you, no wolf is getting into this house, nor storm destroying it. We are perfectly safe. These walls could withstand any amount of assault. The only opening is at the top of this chimney, and if our wolf tries to come in that way he’ll regret it, by Jove he will.” So saying, he poured more oil into the cauldron and added more logs to the fire beneath.
Up on the roof the wolf was wroth. The storm had grown to cataclysmic fury around him but no stone of the house was disturbed. Amidst the rolling thunder, the lightning, and the raging winds he stood howling, filled with a sense of impotence entirely new to him.
Nothing his wild power could summon had the slightest impact upon the stony fortress the third little pig had created. It was maddening.
Suddenly he became silent. The storm relented somewhat in its ferocity, the sky started to clear, and the wind became icy cold. A mysterious look came onto his face as he understood what he had to do. “Little pigs, little pigs, you will let me come in, oh yes, you will let me come in,” he chanted in a whisper.
Over to the chimney he walked. The smoke rising out of it was being whipped away by the wintery wind. He looked into the opening and saw the fire blazing on the hearthstone below. He could just make out the shape of the cauldron, and although he couldn’t see its boiling, smoking contents, he anticipated them.
He stood back a moment and raised his eyes to the heavens. The clouds had once more cleared to tatters to reveal a black sky studded with silvery stars. He raised his arms up towards them.
“O silent stars,” he cried, “lend me your lawless light as I leap into this murky darkness. Lend me your wholeness unbroken!”
Drinking in the light falling from the stars above, the wolf was at peace. Nothing was wrong or right in the world. Everything simply shone from within as part of a great glowing perfection. The wolf himself was one with that perfection. So were the pigs. So was the boiling cauldron glowing red hot upon the fire in the house of stone.
He looked down again into the chimney opening and, in an unfathomably clear voice, as if the starlight was flowing through his words, he called out, “Little pigs, little pigs, I’m coming in now!” Then, without hesitation, he dived inside.
7 : What Really Happened Next?
Most storybooks claim that the wolf was killed dead in the boiling cauldron at the bottom of the chimney. They also claim that the three little pigs then went on to live happily ever afterwards in their houses of stone.
But I have always wondered: is it really so easy to kill the wild wolf? And can true peace and lasting happiness be won by such a calculated act of murderous violence as we have just witnessed?
Evidently not.
What the storytellers generally fail to mention is that, following the events recounted in this old and seemingly innocent little tale, the pigs and their descendants multiplied extremely rapidly and built their stone houses all across the land while inventing what came to be called ‘civilisation’. They went on to become the scourge of all wild and free beings, undertaking a single-minded programme of conquest and exploitation of wild nature that would eventually bring the living earth to the point of climate chaos, ecological collapse and mass extinctions.
I guess that’s what some people must mean by ‘living happily ever after’. Others call it ‘progress’. And I suspect that most of the storytellers who have passed on the story of the three little pigs over the years have themselves been direct descendants of the three little piggies, living in the same stone houses they had inherited from their famous forebears.
Maybe most of them never really though too much about the story and what it represents. Though probably some of them they did, and knew it to be propaganda, and told it anyway.
In any case, let’s return now to the house of stone, and to the place where the storytellers usually end the story of the three little pigs, and see what really happened to the wolf after he had plunged down the tall chimney.
Who knows, perhaps there’s a little starlight to be gleaned from the as-yet-untold tail of this old tale newly told.
8 : Falling
Falling down that tall chimney seemed to take the wolf strange aeons of time. And during his fall he saw many things.
The first thing he saw were the three little pigs huddled before their hearth, shuddering with both fear and delight at the call they heard from the top of the chimney. Next, he saw himself landing in the cauldron of oil and getting fried to a lupine crisp. Then he saw the pigs cheering, cracking open more ale, scooping the cooked wolf out of the cauldron and tucking in to his crispy flesh. He saw wolf-fat dripping down the blonde hairs of their chinny chin chins, wolf-meat filling their little round bellies, wolf-bones pilling up on the stone floor.
Then, after the pigs had gorged until nothing of himself remained to be eaten, he witnessed something very odd. He heard faint wolf-howls begin to spread through the room below, quietly at first, like wispy tendrils of sound, then growing louder and louder. They sounded as if from some very distant source and yet very near, both otherworldly and closer than breath.
The wolf saw the pigs stop their revelry then and look around unbelievingly, peering into each other’s eyes as if into the deep past or the far future.
He saw it suddenly dawn upon them all at once that the sound was emanating from inside themselves.
As the howls continued to grow louder, the wolf saw the three brothers clutching their heads, vainly trying to block their ears, running about the stone house, crashing into things and each other, and finally all falling over. They rolled about on the floor as if in an agony of madness as the final words of the wolf turned to searing light inside them and they realised that they had imbibed more than the wolf’s deep-fried flesh this night.
“Little pigs, little pigs, I’m inside of you little pigs,” the free-falling wolf heard himself saying to the three brothers. “No hard walls of stone can shield you from me now.”
The wolf watched as the pigs themselves started to howl in torment. With despair in their eyes they fell into each other’s arms and poured out their tears of terror.
The wolf then saw them turn to the ale cask and drain it to the dregs in an attempt to drown out the sound of the howls, to cloud out the truth of the wolf’s words reverberating inside them.
Then he saw them turn upon each other, arguing and fighting, each blaming the others for his own inner conflict.
He heard them inventing various doctrines to justify what they had done, calling on a higher power to save them from themselves.
But all to no avail.
Finally they became unconscious, and the softly falling wolf was left alone inside the long chimney with only the fire beneath him and his cool reflections on the strange events of this fateful day to keep him company.
In time he too slept, if you could call it that — a watchful sleep of wild awareness held suspended in the flickering dark.
9 : Thousands Of Years Pass
The pigs and their descendants thereafter lived tormented lives, ever in conflict with themselves, each other, and their environment. The howls of the wolf, the knowledge of what they’d done, and the fear of what they carried inside themselves pursued them day and night, leaving them restless for more and more domination over everything which reminded them of what they truly were.
Eventually, this restless quest, which they came to call ‘progress’, had scarred and marred the face of the Earth so much that it had become almost unrecognisable as the wild and beautiful realm it once was. And they too had become almost unrecognisable as the three little pigs that left their mother’s house long ago to seek their fortunes in the wide world.
Even more unrecognisable were they as the descendants of their tusked ancestors who fearlessly roamed the ancient forests long ago and who were now denounced and scorned as brainless savages.
It was a bleak time for the piggies and all their earthly relations.
But then, after thousands of years of conflict and destruction, when at last the conflict seemed almost to be total and the destruction almost complete, the wolf woke up from his watchful sleep…
10 : Tumult
The wolf awoke to find himself looking out through a myriad of eyes.
“This must be how a forest sees,” he thought.
But he was not looking out through the many-shaped and many-textured eyes of a host of leafy, furred and feathered beings within the intricate green web of a wild milieu. Instead, he was seeing through the scrunchy eyes of billions of little pigs, looking out into a harrowing landscape.
Fume-choked streets and harshly lit offices; concrete boxes and glowing screens; clearcut forests and open-cast mines; vast mono-culture deserts and factory farms; zoos, airports, and war-torn wastelands met his manifold gaze.
His wild Earth lay devastated before him.
The bright stars hadn’t prepared him for this.
He howled with pain and confusion.
He howled at the ugliness of what he was seeing, at the destruction of so much beauty, at the loss of so much irreplaceable life.
He howled at the eyes through which he was seeing it, at their blindness, their insatiable hunger, their absence of care and of wonder.
He howled at the madness behind those eyes, the poverty inside it, the fear and suffering at its core.
He howled at the chimney he was falling down, at the house of stone into which it was built, at the ambitious little pig who had built it, at his feckless brothers, at their mother who raised them in such a way as to allow them to become what they had, and at their fathers for failing to guide them well in the ways of their ancestors.
He howled and he howled and he howled until his howl shattered into fractal shards which dispersed, howling, through all that he perceived.
And then he howled some more, silently, inwardly, at his own impotence in the face of the unfaceable.
“How can all this be happening?” he thought. “How can this possibly be?”
He closed his eyes to the horror of it and was back in the chimney, alone and falling.
He looked down through his own eyes and saw that he was getting close to the cauldron now. He could feel the heat of it, and sense the death in it. In a way he was relieved: he wouldn’t have to endure the world the little pigs had created.
It was the bitterest form of relief he could imagine, and roused in him a cold and fathomless fury.
There arose then from the very depths of his wildness a howl that shook his whole being from tail to handsome cheeks. It was a howl of mingled love and rage, a howl that had its roots in the reeling heart of the Earth itself. It poured through the wolf like molten lava, erupting with volcanic force upon the world of the pigs.
He looked out again through many piggy eyes and watched as his great howl broke in a tumultuous wave upon the ravaged surface of the earth. He saw it shake the hearts of many of those whose eyes he was seeing through. He saw some of those eyes open anew to what it was they were actually seeing. Of these he saw many try to turn away, only to find that there was nowhere to turn. Others he saw rising up to contest the destruction, to re-wild the wasteland, to heal the wounds of the ravaged body of the living earth.
Rippling out in time and space he saw his howl shake the ground beneath the cities, shattering every window and cracking the thick walls of every private and public citadel. He watched the huge, ugly, global edifice which had originated with the little pig’s house of stone collapse into rubble.
He saw his howl causing great storms and tempests, tearing through the mono-culture plantations of every continent, churning whole acidified oceans into thick white foam.
Not an inch of the land or sea was left unmoved.
The wreckage that was left when his howl finally subsided was almost worse to see than the horrors he had awoken to after his long sleep. Alone in the silence after the cataclysmic fury, he felt a desperate grief overwhelm him. All was lost. All destroyed. The world was broken, and so was his wild heart.
He closed his eyes, wept silently, and cursed three little pigs. And at precisely that moment he felt the heat of the cauldron directly beneath him.
11 : The Cauldron
At the end of his long, slow fall down the tall chimney, the wolf’s spirit finally plunged tail-first into the smoking cauldron.
By this time the little pig’s stone house was long-since dismantled. The huge power station that had been built where it once stood had been destroyed in the recent cataclysm. But the cauldron remained. It was still boiling.
In fell the wolf and found himself immersed not in scorching oil but in a sulphurous solution of shadows, toxicity and fear.
“So this is what those little pigs cooked up. No wonder they did what they did to the world, with this brew bubbling on their hearth-fire,” he mused. “I’m surprised they hadn’t started to eat each other alive. This stuff is nasty.”
In this solution he wasn’t burnt but instead torturously distorted. His wildness was corrupted into rage and the will to destroy, his primordial freedom perverted into the lust for power and domination.
His bright spirit, still full of the cool starlight imbibed before he leapt into the chimney, fought for life within the noxious soup. But it was gradually overcome.
He opened his mouth to howl in defiance only to receive a throat-full of knives. He clawed at the sides of the cauldron only to tear his own face. He tried to swim upwards only to sink deeper and deeper inside. For what felt like a long age he fought, immersed in the cauldron of death, forgetting who he was, lost in gnawing agony. Eventually he gave up fighting and abandoned himself to hatred and despair.
He willed his spirit to expire. He silently implored the stars to put an end to his pain. But they would not.
He sank all the way to the very bottom. There he slowly and painfully dissolved into fine particles in the darkness on the cauldron floor, a heap of once-upon-a-time wolf, forgotten even by himself.
At last the pain grew thinner and thinner as everything of any density in him dispersed, until at last only an insubstantial envelope of identity remained, lightly enclosing the wolf’s pure starlight spirit.
And then that envelope itself evanesced.
The primordial wildness of the wolf passed down through the base of the cauldron, into the wild Earth lying soft and welcoming beneath.
12 : Sanctuary
The wolf’s wild spirit awoke for the second time to find himself lying comfortably curled on clean, living earth.
He felt relaxed and peaceful. His mind was as clear as mountain water, and deep as endless space.
His closed eyes felt enormous inside his skull, as if were he to open them he’d be able to see the whole universe and everything beyond.
“All is well,” he observed. This knowledge had never been clearer to him, or perhaps to anyone. “All is utterly well.”
He took a deep, easy breath, and then another.
It felt incredibly good simply to be.
Almost there was no past, no future. Almost there was only the soft breath in his chest and the quiet earth beneath.
Almost that moment was all that had ever existed, and would ever exist.
Almost.
Faint tendrils of memory curled at the periphery of his consciousness:
… most recently, a horrible descent through a world of pain…
… father back, scenes of tumult…
… more distant, a long falling through flickering darkness…
… further still, a strange confusion of unlikely events involving some little pink creatures gone astray…
… and very far away, almost in the Dreamtime, the great free forests of the North.
These tendrils of memory invited him to make meaning from them, to place them into a story, to thread this present moment through them and draw them like sigils into an emerging future.
But all that could wait, if it was even going to be necessary at all.
For now, he just rested peacefully, and let everything else go, allowing the present to remain unbroken, pure as the turning seasons.
And then, somewhere inside that slow turning, he felt the stars all around him, and they too were turning, and he heard them singing, and their song began to weave for him a future.
13 : Restor(y)ation
Yes, the wreckage that was left in the aftermath of the tumult, once the wolf’s earth-shaking howl had finally subsided, was almost worse to see than the industrialised horrors he had awoken to after his long sleep in the chimney. But this wreckage at least held the seeds of wholeness within it.
From those seeds fine sprouts soon emerged. Tentative tendrils trailed amidst rubble and tangled steel. Moss and vines softly covered the ruins and began the gentle work of greening the broken world. Wildflowers sprung up everywhere out of cracks and crevices. Bees flew happily between them.
Soon, trees were re-sprouting, animals re-multiplying, oceans re-plenishing all across the Earth.
The stars shone and wheeled, as did the sun and the moon, and the world seemed once again full of the great slow circles from which all beautiful things are woven.
The seasons turned their slow round-dance, their shaman’s dance, drumming the ancient dreams of the land into a new wakefulness, caressing the storm-washed horizon, healing and re-weaving the tattered threads of life’s intricate web.
Songs filled the sweetened air — birdsong, the buzzing of insects, the burbling of clear flowing water, the howls of wolves rising bright in the full-moon light.
Soon, bare feet of many kinds wandered and played again upon the wild Earth, treading new paths through the re-softened land.
Some of these feet belonged to little pink pigs, who somehow weren’t quite so piggy anymore. There was something more keen and ancient about them now, more kind and robust and resilient. There was also something more than a whisker wolfish in their eyes, eyes which now saw much more starlight in things than they had before.
These pigs still liked to build little houses to live in, but they were content to build with bundles of straw and clean earth and other gentle stuff. The little houses they made were cosy enough for comfort and easily built in just a few short weeks, leaving the pigs plenty of time to tend their crops and make music together, singing old songs and new about the beauty of the dawn and the dusk, and the many wonders of the living earth.
Furthermore, the pigs always made sure to build their houses without a solid door, investing in love rather than fear, so that their new friends the wolves would feel welcome to call for tea whenever they were passing nearby — which they often did.
On these occasions many songs were sung and stories told. Some of these stories were dark and scary, telling of the pigs’ great sundering from the ways of the wild, and the tumultuous consequences of that estrangement. Other stories were brighter, and some of these imagined what might have happened had the piggies made friends with the wolves sooner.
These told of how the time of tumult hadn’t been necessary, how the sacred re-wilding and re-storation of the Earth could have happened as the consequence of an act of creation rather than one of destruction. Everyone liked these stories, and they were told and retold many times, to celebrate what might have been.
Eventually, a time came when these bright stories had been told so often that many of the piggies started to believe that the events they described had actually happened they way the stories said they might have.
And indeed, who knows, perhaps that is the way it actually happened.
In any case, every version of the story agreed that everyone lived happily ever after, all together on the wide, wild, and beautiful Earth.
