“Yikes! You better get out here. It’s the wolves! They are making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I have shivers running down my spine!!”

Once I am horizontal, it usually takes the power of a billion nuclear explosions (aka the sun rising) to get me up out of bed but Sal looked pretty excited and I could hear the howling through the walls. They seemed very close.

We stood listening to a pack of wolves while in our housecoats standing together at midnight on the southside deck with the stars brightly hung overhead and a brisk SE wind in our face. Romantic in a Transylvanian kind of way, don’t you think?

Fiddich and Meg were hysterical. Running up and down the property, doing their best to join in with the singalong but, without larynxes, it is hard for them to make much of a contribution. So they just ‘struck a pose’ with muzzle pointed to the sky and grated out a Louis Armstrong impersonation of a howl now and then. Meg, of course, just pantomimed it.

It was up to me to answer. “HHHhhhhhhooooooooooooowwwwwwwwooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, HHHhhhhhhhoooooooooooooowowowwowowwoooooooooooooooooooooooo”

Everything fell silent. The wolves shut right-the-hell up and Meg and Fid looked at me like I had just said something completely in bad taste. ‘That was all wrong!’ They were embarrassed for me. Sal just muttered something about old dogs.

Another try (this time with feeling!) “HHHHHHhhhhhhoooowwwwwooooooowoowowooowowoowoooooooooooooooooo”

Meg and Fid were thrust back into the game. Sal looked away from me and back to the sky. And the wolves were set off on a blood-curdling chorus once again. My first faux pas de lupine had been forgiven. (I wonder what I said?)

The wolves were just letting it all hang out and they were less than a quarter of a mile away. There seemed to be a half dozen ‘voices’ but, it has been verified that they have the ability to make a couple sound like a choir so there is no telling just how many there were. But it seemed like a lot.

It was scary.

And, when they are that close, our muted mutts may be heard by the pack. And that would not be good. The wolves would come over (swimming en pac across the water that divides our peninsula from the main part of the island) and send an attractive female over to play which would almost certainly lure Fiddich to his demise. Meg would have caught the next ferry to town so she is less at risk. But Fid would be putty in a female’s paw.

Gee, remind you of anything?

The Call of the Wild. Literally. At our back door. Very cool.