Wolf encounter

There is something on my mind for the past week or so. Wolves! There are a few reasons why I think so much of a particular wolf.  I have never researched animal totems before, but now that I think about wolves so much I think I ought to. I have had an encounter with a wolf when I was a little girl. Since then I feel strongly attracted to wolves. This encounter I had must have been strongly guided by a spiritual connection, or astral or whatever you call these kinds of connections. The Dutch news was all about a peculiar finding for Dutch standards. Last week a dead wolf was found on the highway somewhere in the eastern part of Holland. Wolves have not been found in Holland for decades. They don’t know why the wolf was there and if that means wolves are back in Holland.

To me it feels I keep getting ‘wolf’ signs from everywhere around me. And that makes me want to explore the symbolic nature of wolves and also I feel a strong urge to share my wolf encounter and finally write it down. I have not told this to many people in my life, but this encounter has always been a big part of me.  I am now ready to find out what ‘wolf-energy’ tries to tell me.

I think I was about 7 years old, it was stone cold outside and everything was covered in snow. We, my parents, my sister and myself were visiting my family in eastern Europe. Both my parents come from Slovakia, in the most eastern part of it, near the border with Ukraine.  Wolves live there in the mountains and occasionally there have been seen some hungry wolves during wintertime. They had come looking for food. Killing the chickens and other small farm animals did not make them very popular with humans over there.  And according to my aunt who one morning told us a fascinating wolf story, there hadn’t been seen any in or around the village for almost two decades. I somehow was so very fascinated by this story that something in me got incredibly determined to find a wolf  THAT morning. I told every grown up in that room I was going to go outside with my 7 year old buddy to find a wolf. Everyone laughed at me and waved their hand and said, oh yes you little silly girl, go and find that wolf honey.  I summoned (literally) my friend (a little boy) to come with me to help me find it. We went on our way, up the street, to the ‘last’ cemetery of the village. After that cemetery the village stopped and the mountains started. My aunt had told me that’s where they come from when they are hungry so  it seemed like the best place to look.  Soon after we walked up, I spotted a tail, behind some low bushes in front of us, I thought to myself it probably a dog, but thought let’s scare the boy who was with me. So I screamed, there a WOLF, a WOLF! He almost got so scared he pissed his pants and wanted to run away. So I quickly changed my story and said it was a joke, that it must be only a dog. But as we did not get to see more of her then her tail, I wasn’t completely sure it was a dog. But I kept silent to keep my mate with me. 

My heart was wildly jumping in my chest from that moment on, but the search was ON. So we bravely walked up to the cemetery at the foot of the mountain.  White snow was everywhere like some fairytale land, and there at the entrance of the cemetery we found blood, and not just a little bit but a whole trail of them. Well how scary can it get for two 7 year olds? By that time we felt like we must be staring in a movie. Our search had become a sacred quest for a wolf. Frightened as we were we decided to go on and follow the blood trail. It took us to a high point on the cemetery, from there it went down the hills.  We could overlook the valley where the farmhouses were.  We could hear the farm animals make extreme noises, it sounded like they were panicking . We spotted the blood trail went down the hill. 

We went downhill with it and arrived in a forest area. Suddenly two skiing individuals approached from the other side, the side to where the drops were leading. The two people looked a bit wondered finding two little kids in the woods by themselves, but left us going our way.  I thought the wolf, who we thought we had seen while standing up that hill looking at the farmhouses, can’t have gone along this way or it had to meet with these skiing folks. They did not seem like having an encounter with a wolf, so I thought I must had been wrong and it must had been a dog after all. But as the blood trail went our way to the village we kept on following it just in case. Suddenly we came to a small open space in the woods, and there she was....our wolf! She was lying in a pool of red blood.....asleep or dead we couldn’t tell. 

We were exhilarated...ran back to the village and alarmed everyone. But no one seemed to care...they did not believe two 7 year old kids who went on a wolf search that morning only to come back after actually finding one.  We kept on shouting on the top of our lungs that we REALLY had found a wolf!!! And that she appeared wounded and maybe dead. Finally some adults decided to come with us to check out our story.  We took them to the place where we found her, and when we arrived she had really died...Apparently she was shot by a hunter in the mountains, and she walked down to the village looking for a quiet place to die. As I touched her dead body she was so incredibly powerful and beautiful... I never forgot her.