A woman and a wolf

Lessons I've learnt from my dog

May 27, 2025

For the mythological mind, women and wolves are intertwined. We walk beside each other as companions, mirrors and protectors. Across time and story, this bond echoes in the tales of Artemis and her hunting dogs, Hecate and her black hounds, and the wolf-women who appear across cultures. She has many names; La Loba, Salu’ah, Sarama, to name a few.

In all these stories, she is the wild woman, the shape-shifter, the bone-gatherer, the one who lives at the edge of the village and the edge of knowing. Those of us who have read Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ classic Women Who Run With Wolves will know these stories well.

I’m not here to retell them. Instead, I want to share my own. I didn’t set out in search of a wolf. I found a dog. Over the years, she has taught me more about instinct, presence and wild companionship than I ever expected.

Cleo does have mystical beginnings. She is named after The Cleopatra, an abandoned discotheque where she was found, and she arrived in my life just weeks after my 29th birthday, on a Cancerian full moon, in the heart of my Saturn return. If you dabble in astrology, you’ll know this marks a cosmic initiation that asks us to confront the path ahead, our responsibilities and our truths.

In her nature, Cleo is gentle, loving, loyal, excitable and sweet. She is also protective, reactive, stubborn and mischievous. Like the moon, she has two sides. She is both domestic and wild, something I forget until she’s chasing rabbits at dawn.

Living with an animal, you fall into each other’s rhythms. In many ways, Cleo and I are now tethered to each other. We understand, without words, each other’s moods. Not that we need science to tell us, but research shows dogs and humans sync heart rates and stress levels. Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, rises in both during quiet, affectionate moments, deepening this felt connection.

Cleo’s way of being, closer to the wolf, has brought me closer to my animal self. In the woodlands, I follow her path. I watch her sniff and move close to the ground. I notice shapes and shadows, flowers and roots, in ways I didn’t before. When she’s restless with the calling of owls, I hear them too. When she finds nooks of sunlight to rest in, I’m reminded of my own yearning to lie in the sun.

She nuzzles my hand in moments of comfort, curls into my lap when I cry and sleeps at my feet. I’m greeted with two firm paws in the morning, and when she takes herself to bed at 9pm I know I’m to follow. She takes me outside every morning, and her sense of deep presence is something I’m always learning from.

I don’t think of Cleo as a pet, nor myself as her owner. This bond we share is kinship, not ownership. We are guardians for each other. Over time, we formed a language that lives in the body. The dance of her ears, the softness of her posture, and how she glances across the path. I know when she is uneasy, and she can read it in me; listening for my breath, watching my movements. At times, she shows me how I feel before I recognise it in myself. We reach for each other, sensing these hearts outside our bodies.

As Cleo is reactive, I have had to learn the skills to read her. To be more attuned with her, to be her voice when she needs. To be patient with her and, in turn, with myself. To soothe her when she’s scared, and to know that what truly heals what lies in the past is love, time and kindness.

If you live alongside a dog, you will know that the bond is both ordinary and sacred. Across cultures and centuries, we women and dogs have moved through the world together. At home and on hunting trails, in solitude and in stories. The dog as a guardian, a companion, a familiar, a shadow. The woman as the keeper of the hearth, the one who tends, the ones who lead and follow in equal measure.

I think about all the women who have walked like this, side by side with a creature who answers to no one, yet chooses you. Who watches over your dreams. Who stands between you and danger. Who shows you what it means to be alert and alive. Not because we asked, but because the bond asks it of us both.

This relationship between women and wolves is not a fairytale. It’s not mythology. It’s real. It lives in the morning walks and the late-night mysteries, in the protection and the play.

Living with Cleo may not have made me wilder, but it has made me truer. To my instincts. To my needs. To the quiet animal part of myself that wants to move beyond the human clock. I watch her and I remember how to be in kinship with the world.

Like all the stories of women and wolves, we walk alongside each other as companions. Teaching each other how to love, how to protect, how to play, how to rest. How to listen to the heartbeat of the Earth, and walk with it.

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