I'm struggling with reality at the moment. I mean this literally. I'll see a sigh-inducing video of little birds sheltering under a leaf umbrella during a tropical rainstorm and realise that they're beautiful fabrications of the AI hive mind. Then I see an aerial shot of a radiant, hot pink field of cherry blossom trees and surmise that such a thing can't actually exist in nature, therefore it must be an AI creation, only to discover that it's real and presently in full spring bloom in Japan. I had the same feeling of semi-disbelief when I saw the alarmingly cute picture of three dire wolf pups, all white fur and big puppy eyes, snuggled together in a basket. It transpires that they're not digitally generated, an image direct from the Game of Thrones production facility. They are, in fact, real.
Here's a quick recap for those who, like me, may have a loose relationship with the basic facts of dire wolves. They're not mythical animals. Instead, they're creatures that didn't survive the last ice age. They expired along with the woolly mammoths and the sabre-toothed tigers of these “before” times. They lived on, however, in the dusty museum section of our imaginations, filed away with the dinosaurs. Some mad scientists have now harvested their DNA from the ancient skeletons and spliced it with some stone cold, basic grey wolves and this is where we now find ourselves (precisely where that is, I can't say). The dire wolflings are to be kept in a large pen for life because, well, you've probably seen what happens when they're let loose in the wild and someone does something they don’t like to their Stark-family wolf pack.
These wolves are something like 30% bigger than their present day cousins, the grey wolves. In Little Red Riding Hood, the plucky, albeit slow-reasoning heroine asks a series of salient questions of the wolf in grandmother's clothing working her way through the obvious gigantism issues: “Why are your teeth so big?” is a purely rhetorical device in the tale. By that stage everyone knows that Little Red Riding Hood is about to continue her investigations from the inside of the wolf's supersized digestive system.
Dire wolves are most decidedly carnivorous creatures and now that the grey wolf numbers are back on the rise, the domesticated sheep, goats, domestic cats and dogs in their proximity are fair game. Imagine what a pack of dire wolves could achieve if they escaped their pen and interbred? If we're faced with an apocalypse, in addition to fending off the rabid hordes of desperate humans, we'll also have to deal with the crazy experiments that have escaped their pens and are on the prowl.
It makes perfect sense to mess around with nature. I mean, that approach has worked out brilliantly for us this far. We're totally on top of it. Every time we wilfully introduce alien species into an unsuspecting biome it works out marvellously, doesn't it? Giant African land snails chewing their way through foreign fauna and the plaster in our walls; Gambian pouched rats breeding like, well, rats; conehead termites; spotted lantern flies; feral cats; Burmese pythons; European starlings; red fire ants — anything that's come unbidden into an environment it didn't evolve for causes chaos and disaster, wiping out the local populations of the creatures it eats and overwhelms with its sheer weirdness and preternatural advantages because it's not of that place. As William Butler Yeats put it: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”
We, of course, are the most invasive of invasive species, a gigantic bumbling threat, to ourselves mostly. To illustrate this for all to see, just last week an influencer bribed his way onto North Sentinel Island, one of the Andaman Islands and part of an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. It is one of the last outposts of isolated humanity, where the protected Sentinelese really don’t want to be disturbed — they're legally permitted to defend themselves (from contracting potential diseases from outsiders) and their territory, even to the point of killing trespassers. He left a can of Diet Coke on the beach. It goes without saying that this bloke was American and could think of no better way to break the seal for the Sentinelese — the self-isolating folks who wisely shoot arrows at invasive drones and helicopters. The influencer reckoned that this tribe, previously untrammelled by so-called civilisation, would take one sip of the magic juice and boom, their minds would be blown.
In Norse mythology the fearsome and mighty dire wolf, son of Loki the demonic trickster god and a giantess, is kept chained, imprisoned and muzzled by the gods because they know that once he breaks free on doomsday he will destroy the Earth and swallow Odin, the chief god, whole. What big teeth he has! I suspect, as they say in The Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming”.
