172OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDtoward extinction, must inevitably and briefly have a single final survi-
vor.^25 The narrator indulges his own imagination as well as the hypo-
thetical future animal: “Let him eat the last red meal of the condemned,”
the heart of an elk, which will cause an idea to “stream into his gnawing
head,” just as the idea has flowed into the speaker’s. The last wolverine,
Dickey joyfully and angrily elaborates in his vision of the wolverine
apocalypse, will “walk / Out into the open,” climb to the top of a “single
spruce tree,” where it will have a vision of heaven and then mate “to
the death” with “the New World’s last eagle.” Out of this mating comes
“something gigantic legendary,” an avenging winged wolverine that will
wage “holy war against / Screaming railroad crews” and resist human
domination of the natural world.
Interestingly, the wolverine figures prominently in Claude Levi-
Strauss’s The Savage Mind, his examination of the fundamental struc-
tures of human classification. Levi-Strauss argues that the wolverine
is for the Hidatsa people of North Dakota the mythical origin of the
knowledge of how to hunt eagles, which involves the human hunter put-
ting himself in a trap, so that he may catch the eagle with his bare hands
when it comes to investigate the bait. The wolverine is the source of this
knowledge, Levi-Strauss surmises, because it is notorious throughout
aboriginal cultures for being a raider, rather than a victim, of human
traps. The wolverine, like the eagle hunter in the trap, “knows how
to deal with this contradictory situation” of being both “hunter and
hunted.”^26 The wolverine is still more interesting to Levi-Strauss because it
is an elusive animal that is nonetheless widely featured in native myth
and so is a good example of the “historical and geographical problems,
as well as semantic and structural ones... related to the exact identifi-
cation of an animal which fulfills a mythical function: Gulo luscus.”^27
The wolverine is unknowable and the possessor of extraordinary knowl-
edge, real and unreal, an anachronism known and named by Western
science. For writers like Dickey and Levi-Strauss, the wolverine is also
hybrid, possessing human, animal, and even celestial knowledge, which
makes it powerful in native understanding. This is presumably also what
makes it interesting for Dickey, who may well have read Levi-Strauss’s
account.^28 Dickey also suggests this intrinsic hybridity by referring to