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Birds
For Cantú, wolves represent violence as a shadow side of human nature that must be recognized and understood. He shares his first dream about wolves at the beginning of Part I—the section that charts his training as a Border Patrol agent and his time spent working in the desert. In the dream, after inspecting mounds of severed body parts, Cantú is told he must go see a wolf in a nearby cave. The wolf is frightening and huge, but Cantú holds out his hand, and the wolf approaches him and licks him. Later, Cantú recounts a story his mother used to tell him about Saint Francis and a wolf that was terrorizing a town by eating its animals and even people. When Saint Francis went to the wolf, the wolf ran at him in attack, but Saint Francis calmed it and struck up a deal: if the wolf would stop eating the town’s livestock, the townspeople would promise to feed it every day. Like Cantú’s dream, the story uses the wolf to symbolize a dark force that can only be tamed by friendship rather than retaliatory violence. Cantú continues to dream of wolves throughout his time with Border Patrol, including a nightmare at the end of his time in the agency in which he shoots a man and a young boy. He wakes up vowing to make peace with brother wolf—which is to say the violence within him that’s haunting him. Later, Cantú quotes from Carl Jung on the necessity of accepting humans’ shadow sides. Jung wrote, “When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf … this means: it wants to come to you” and advises that the best stance to take with such a nightmare figure would be “Please, come and devour me.” This final consideration of wolves prefaces Part III, in which Cantú will reckon with his own and his culture’s shadow sides by working with José on his immigration case and seeing for the first time the true scale of the violence he helped perpetrate as a member of Border Patrol.
Wolves Quotes in The Line Becomes a River
The The Line Becomes a River quotes below all refer to the symbol of Wolves. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 2
Quotes
Saint Francis proposed a compact: in exchange for the wolf’s promise to cease its killing of livestock and townspeople, the residents of Gubbio would feed the animal every day for the rest of its life. “Thought shalt no longer suffer hunger,” he told the wolf, “as it is hunger which has made thee do so much evil.”
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Wolves Symbol Timeline in The Line Becomes a River
The timeline below shows where the symbol Wolves appears in The Line Becomes a River. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1
In the dream, Cantú is told to visit a wolf in a nearby cave. When he finds the wolf, he is terrified, but his mother...
(full context)
Part 2
...He recounts a story she told him, in which a village is terrorized by a wolf that’s eating its people and livestock. When St. Francis goes to the wolf, it tries...
(full context)
...field. That night, he dreams again of a cave littered with body parts and a wolf circling the dark. Cantú gets up to write the dreams in a notebook in the...
(full context)
...day’s work. Images from his dream still circle in Cantú’s mind. He wonders what the wolf symbolizes: he knows wolves used to roam this area but were deemed too dangerous and...
(full context)
Cantú wakes and cries, sensing the familiar wolf nearby. He longs to reach out his hand to the wolf and befriend it.
(full context)
Part 3
...to be expressed. If you dream of a “savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf,” Jung wrote, the best response is to say to it: “Please, come and devour me.”
(full context)
