FANGS IN WEST L.A.

for Sir Walter Disney

“Give me a home

Get me that land you owe me so I can roam”

– Nas

When the wolves first came to town, there was – you can imagine – something of a ruckus in the streets and in the soul of Los Angeles. Previously, only a couple of zombie-drifters and an off-duty plane-watcher had observed the white-blue Arctic coat (and tail) of a Siberian husky swashaying through the city, like the cool tourist who got off the bus. 

White pelts and palm trees do not a naturalist picture make. Regardless, it had happened once or twice before, or so they say. This was a silvery anecdote, an urban legend. A wilderness fluke. – More likely, it was animal traffickers moving canine freight for big bucks, big buyers down Mexico Way.

Whatever. The facts slide; the legend remains. The reality is, one day a pack of Aleutian fangbangers showed up in the sunny City of Los Angeles. And when it happened, for real, you can bet your bottom dollar the newspapers went full focal. They puffed it up as an environmental meta-meme, blowing up a sensation across news waves everywhere for days and days. 

The end of the world is nigh! Surely, it must be, Shirley? Must be so, if you’re jogging with sled dogs on the Venice boardwalk? – They ain’t dogs, after all. They be wolves.

They were wolves indeed. And the wolves, they came from the True North. So what’s up now? How come this alopecia pack’s down here on the Santa Monica Pier, roving like 2Pac in a full pack and making life difficult for the amusement park operators? 

What’s going on? Something must have happened? Is there something wrong with the natural order of things? Did anyone hear the gong gong?

It’s not a migration you see every day. It’s nothing like a ZoomAlong. It’s as analogue as a mail-order catalogue. These mushees, they’ve come a long, long way. They’re down from Alaska. Past Fairbanks, past Denali - further south than any nordic hounds had ever strayed. 

These dogs, they live for ice. They go for snow. They pull sleds like there are no stop signs in the Arctic equivalent of the iglu ghetto. True enough, wolves are made of strong stuff. Then climate change got them on the sneak. The pace of change was something new. The pace was something they had to get down with; then it was something they had to jet south with. Flying SouthWest wasn’t an option, at least not for landing in Burbank without a bulletproof vest on.

Leave the tundra. Goodbye to glacial ice. Caps be melting, like Kraft on a tuna cheese melt. Accelerating faster than a microwave nuking base on a repeat episode of Miami Vice. 

For white bears, especially, it wasn’t so nice. Imagine if you had nowhere left to go. No still floes. No more deep-frozen islands moving like slow boats. Meltwater is the sound of a sorry, one-way trickle. It’s a CLOSING DOWN sale in iceberg country. Seems as if things are getting real struggly. The struggle is real. 

As the times change, there’s a chance some sentient beings may miss their respective exit ramps and interchanges. I’m sure y’all will get lucky: just don’t get stranded on a sheet of permafreeze with no windsurf sail attached to its centre of gravity. Lost and surrounded by endless sea. Cop a lift from a SEAL if you wanna get down with the new navy. Crystals are diminishing and the water is agathering, like every single day. Is it something somebody needs to contemplate?

Plan A? We all get swept away by a giant roller wave. Can be nasty, doggy paddle in a megatsunami. Let’s not worry about the End of Days. Just ensure you don’t float down the wrong river on the wrong day. Try, at least, to levitate. Sometimes – scuba divers, they don’t ascend again.    

Anyway. Back to the Wolf Gang. 

Canis? Te kanis?

Our pack of canes lupus lupus, they just arrived in the City of Angels. West Coast. The Left Coast. Although the axial distinction’s lost on them, handling things - as they do - ambidextrously. It’s a big deal for these heavy-pelted canines from the Circular Arctic. Call it culture shock. What a difference! Talk about a change of scenery. It’s not just the new colors and the subtropical canopy. It’s a whole new way of being, not least a brand new society.

You see, our wolves - back in their native territory - they’d never been threatened. Never had their lives been endangered in any ways. If they needed or wanted something, all they had to do was take whatever it was from their immediate environs, or else take from the keep of other species in their hunting colonies. They rarely, if ever, resorted to making any great efforts in order to obtain coveted feeds. On unique occasions, or when faced with home invasions, they may well have have been forced to apply the skills of intimidation. Whatever object they desired, they were entitled to possess by the local loi de seigneur. That’s how them wolves be wired. Such prey became their property, without contest, without appeasement – without belligerency. It was simply a matter of the keep surrendering to the preestablished hierarchy of that cohabitat. No big deal. 

So. Here they were. The Wolf Pack in L.A. The WolfGang, improvising like a Mozart Amadeus, and I’m not talking about no marzipan barz down here. No North Face neither. Here they were – homeless and displaced.

Where to go? – they asked one another, with little yelps. No phone, no app – no quick solution for these hairy vertebrates. 

Marina del Rey? – Nice vibe; no tundra there. 

Redondo Beach? – Nah. It’s like there’s no tundra anywhere. Not around here.

Then there’s the issue of the local…dogs. Canis familiaris. Like, highly-entitled comfort-beings. Apparently. More like, high-maintenance breeds, or so it seemed to our huskies this week. Pets – is what they call them here. Irritating varieties. Just take for instance those handbag pups. 

Chihuahuas? Rat dogs. Our white-fang posse, they was all agreed on this. Those skanky bitches, they’d make a nice catch. Problem is, they’d taste like cats. – Thus thought Alpha Dog. That moment, a shiver ran through the pack. Scientific data to date confirms that mental telepathy is shared by wolves when they roll in packs. Even the Omegas, lost souls, nomads, they’d picked up in British Columbia – even they concurred.

Plus, the sun shines too much – thought Alpha. The air’s too hot for these fur coats. And the cars! What a trip. Big and shiny, smooth or noisy: they’re all so big. So inefficient, speaking aerodynamically. They made him miss the runners of the sled he’d previously led. And, of course, he missed the skis of his master’s sled. Looking around 3rd Street Promenade he saw no obvious masters instead. None he was drawn to. The sitch was like a Code Zed. Leader of the WolfGang, unleashed and acting masterlessly. It was now his job to act decisively. 

The pack reassembles tightly, sensing Alpha’s almost-ready intent. And so as to assess the current situation. Where to claim their patch? – the question hung cold on their minds. It hung hot on their hearts like when an icicle drip-drip-drips until it subsides. Alpha’s pack, they growled in mutual agrees. This was, yes indeedy, a most foreign territory they now perceived. The beach, they’d decided collaterally, was just too much to bear. Yellow granules everywhere – hard little crystals got wedged between the pods of their paws and the hairs between their claws. They unconsciously ignored a nearby neon sign proclaiming Manicures & Podiatry. Across the concrete parking lot, a neighborhood tarot reader eyed the wolves with the disappointment of a trick that couldn’t be sold to the arctic beasts.

As for the sea? A deep, deep lake like they’d seen smaller versions of, in summertime in the Northern Territories. Here, so vast – their eyes couldn’t identify the furthest edge of the meltwatery plane. A horizon: that was all their hungry eyes could see. That’s no use for our pack – it’s no use at all, geometrically. 

Don’t go there, the wolf gang thinks as one. They pause their thought for a moment as they catch the scent of an ice cream truck.