One November afternoon, while jogging on the edge of a swamp about two miles from his house in Massachusetts, John Kaag encountered a lone wolf. As he ran frantically homeward, he discovered a rock cave in his own back yard that he had never noticed before. His wife, though, knew about it. “That cave has a name,” she told him. “The Bloods called it ‘Wolf Rock.’ ”
Thus Kaag introduces readers not only to the family at the center of his book but also to the work’s governing metaphor: the Bloods’ “wildness,” their wolfish nature. Wolves and wildness reappear throughout the narrative, in epigraphs that introduce the book and its various chapters. Both themes appear in quotations “written three miles from Blood Farm,” Kaag notes.
