A Study Guide for Leslie Marmon Silko's "Four Mountain Wolves"

Four Mountain Wolves

Leslie Marmon Silko

1975

Introduction

Four Mountain Wolves by Leslie Marmon Silko is an excellent example of the work that has emerged from the recent Native American Literary Renaissance. Silko, along with Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and others, is a representative figure of this renaissance, in which the writers meld Western and Native American literary techniques, themes, and subject matter. Silko’s poem, which originally appeared in the anthology Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Native American Poetry (1975), immerses the reader into nature. In the wintry mountains of New Mexico, the narrator of the poem watches four different wolves, each representing different aspects of the natural and spiritual world, travel from the northeast. The poem combines a modernist-influenced free verse structure with a quiet, almost chant-like feel. Silko’s Laguna Pueblo heritage comes out both in the form and the content of the poem, but the poem is not only interesting for its Native Americanness: it is a poem that beautifully evokes a natural setting and gives us a close, almost frightening, but still respectful perspective on an animal that has always represented fear and threat to