Dreams Made Real and the Wild Canid Center, Eureka Missouri

When one of my famous author friends asks me if I'd like to come to an event she's holding at a wolf sanctuary, essentially to sing alone and with the wolves themselves, I say yes. This occurred back in June of this year, and it was truly magical.
(Thanks again, Laurell.)

The Wild Canid Survival and Research Center near Eureka, MO is an amazing place, though the chiggers are fierce. It's also just a couple of exits down from my favorite place to get BBQ on earth, though the center is relocating to a larger facility soon. I spent an afternoon and an evening there on the summer solstice this year, watching wolves walk and hearing them howl.

I saw one of my dreams living, breathing, eating, and walking there. So it is, in effect, a place where dreams come true.

Back-tracking a little bit. Last summer, June 2007. I am getting my album Blessings printed, touring as usual, on a really funky sleep schedule, driving back and forth from the CD replication office in Memphis TN to my friend Flame's house in Jackson TN. My love and I spend an afternoon sacked out in her guest room, during which I had one of Those dreams. The kind which you suspect is actually a visit, rather than a dream. I will have one of these once a year or so, at least. I dream vividly on a regular basis, but the clarity varies. Often, when crystal-clear dreams which seem more like visits come along, I dream of animals or animal spirits. That day, I dreamt of a trio of giant foxes who walked on deer legs. Their ears were massive, and their eyes glowed in the dark forest, seemingly with a light internal, not external. I was terrified of attracting their attention, but I already had.

They LOOKED at me with a gaze so piercing and true, it gave me the willies right into near-consciousness.
Half asleep, I wouldn't get out of bed to go and pee, because I knew, if I opened the bedroom door, they would be there, and they would LOOK at me.

This was a big deal. Lots of fox medicine was coming my way last spring and summer, and I still may not have it figured out. I was seeing foxes everywhere, where I had never seen them before. My mother's driveway, for instance. Having a staring contest with me. Also, I kept receiving gifts of fox jewelry, fox toys--and yes, my beanie baby fox practice poi, which many of you have seen.

Like many other spirit animal guides I've had come into my life, I wasn't sure what to make of fox. And now this crazy dream.

By the end of June, I was comfortable with all the foxiness going on (not least because my oft-mentioned fiddle player Alec and I had had a good conversation about animal spirit guides while hanging out at an event in Ohio--I reassured him about having guides outside the typical totem norm, and he reassured me about the fox business), and I thought I had an idea what they were trying to tell me. I filed the information away, happy to have been pleasantly surprised by a new awareness of fox as a messenger and a teacher.

Fast forward again, to my visit to the wolf sanctuary. Just about exactly one year from my dream of the giant foxes.
That afternoon, I and three friends were given a tour of the sanctuary by staff member Pam, who's just the queen of cool (she let me set up my sound gear after taking us around to visit all the canids, and I had thought I wouldn't be able to do that until after 6pm that night). She brought us to visit swift foxes (too swift for photos, but I did get to see them for a split second), Mexican gray wolves (they howl in baritone, did you know?), red wolves (the only wolf native to my own home territory, and seriously endangered--they didn't come out to see us), African wild dogs (litter mates who we couldn't see at all in the grass until they lifted their lazy heads)...and maned wolves. Which are not true wolves. Nor are they foxes. They are a single genus in a single species, native to South America.

They look exactly like giant foxes on deer legs.

I did not come undone right there in the sanctuary, but I could have.
It was a very strong epiphany that hit me, as I watched a female maned wolf walk slowly through her large enclosure, her massive ears turning, her beautiful black legs moving in deliberate dance steps--they walk with both legs on one side in tandem, not opposite. She was gorgeous, and she was straight out of my dream a year ago, the memory of which hit me in a rush.

My photos from that day are disappointing, as I was still depending on my old camera (no zoom whatsoever), and every shot had to be taken through two layers of fence--these were to keep us out, not to keep the wolves in. Most of what I have are 'find the wolf' shots, and you had to have been there with me in order to be able to spot them in my pictures at all. Other photographers have had better luck, and so if you do a Google image search for Maned Wolf, you get decent results.

I haven't been able to track down much folklore and such about maned wolves, though I haven't given up. They are endangered, nocturnal, and a bit hard to document, apparently. I have found one creepy tidbit--the one about people keeping their eyes as good luck charms--especially in light of how their eyes affected me in my dream. If any of you find anything further on maned wolves and folklore, please share it with me. Maned wolves are very special to me now, needless to say, though it's hard to devote time to solving the mystery of what I should learn from them when I can't find much for research.

Perhaps I'll go to South America some day, and seek out clues in person.