Two wolves
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The things that scare you most are almost never as big as they sound.
It’s 1845. Texas.
Ulysses Grant is twenty-three years old. He’s a second lieutenant who never wanted to be a soldier. His father signed him up for West Point without asking.
He’s riding back across the Texas prairie with a small group after a long journey gone sideways. Food is running low. One of the men is sick. A horse has died. The nearest outpost is six days away. The territory is dangerous, and they’re sleeping on open ground every night.
Then, as the sun goes down on the first day out of Goliad, it starts.
Howling.
Not one wolf. Not two. It sounds like dozens. It comes from somewhere in the tall prairie grass ahead of them. Low, unearthly, relentless. Grant can’t see anything. Just darkness and sound.
He writes later: “To my ear it appeared that there must have been enough of them to devour our party, horses and all, at a single meal.”
He wants to turn back. Every instinct is screaming at him to turn back.
But he looks over at his companion, Lieutenant Benjamin, a man from Indiana where wolves still roam freely. And Benjamin isn’t scared. He isn’t even slowing down. He’s riding toward the sound, calm as a man heading to breakfast.
Grant doesn’t turn back. He admits it himself. He stays purely because he doesn’t want to look like a coward in front of Benjamin. He writes that he “lacked moral courage” to turn around. That if Benjamin had suggested going back, he would have seconded the motion immediately and added that it was hard-hearted of them to leave their sick companion behind in the first place.
But Benjamin doesn’t suggest going back. He just keeps riding. And after a while, almost casually, he turns and asks: “Grant, how many wolves do you think there are in that pack?”
Grant, trying to sound knowledgeable, lowballs it. “Oh, about twenty,” he says. Indifferently. Like he knows wolves.
Benjamin smiles and says nothing.
They keep riding. And then they find them.
Two wolves. Seated on their haunches, side by side, mouths pointed to the sky, making every bit of that noise between the two of them. When they see the soldiers, they tuck their tails and disappear into the grass.
What Grant never forgot
Years later, after Vicksburg, after Appomattox, after two terms in the White House, Grant is dying of throat cancer. He’s racing to finish his memoirs before the money runs out and his wife Julia is left with nothing. And he still comes back to those two wolves on the Texas prairie.
“I have often thought of this incident since,” he writes, “when I have heard the noise of a few disappointed politicians who had deserted their associates. There are always more of them before they are counted.”
Two wolves. That’s it. That’s always it.
