Wolves, The Various Uses Of

Take the humble wolf…

They get everywhere don’t they? Play an RPG and wolves will merrily attack you, ride your horse through the barren landscape of Red Dead Redemption and wolves will merrily attack you, go to ASDA on a Friday and wolves well, there’s no wolves, but there could have been. It’s only because they were hunted to extinction in the UK somewhere round the 1700s (or about five o’clock, for those not familiar with military lingo).

Yeah, doing the Friday big shop would have been a different story if the wolves were still around. They’d leap out from behind the chilled goods and savage you before you knew it. But it wouldn’t have been all bad news because, had you managed to catch one in the household aisle and deftly managed to finish it off with one of the fine array of knives available in the supermarkets (over 18s only, kids. I once had to be age-checked to buy the knives you get in a cutlery set, let alone a sharp one) you’d be quids in because, as we have learnt through games, wolves carry loot.

Firstly, there’s the obvious monetary value of a wolf pelt. Every game ever to feature a wolf has you collecting wolf pelts. Go out and collect five wolf pelts. Go out and bring me the skin of the white wolf. No, I came in here for a sherbert fountain and a copy of TV Quick, I’m not going out to get you bloody wolf pelts. What do I look like, eh? Do I even look like I’d be able to skin a wolf? I wouldn’t know where to start. Usually the wolf pelts are used to grease the wheels of the information train. Bring me wolf pelts and I will tell you more of what you want to know. Again, we’re lucky that wolves became extinct around tea-time because paying for information would be a hell of a lot messier, and trickier. With a clever bit of palming you can discreetly slip a waiter a crisp note to get you a decent table, imagine trying to palm a wolf pelt – it just wouldn’t work.

Once you’ve got the wolf pelt, you may as well gather up a bit of wolf meat. That’s worth a bob or two on the open market. You can even eat it if your health gets a bit low. It’ll probably restore about a third of your energy, regardless of how large your energy bar may be so it’s a good meat to have around. There’s very rarely any mention of having to cook the meat either. Just nosh into it raw, like some kind of gaming Bear Grylls (although to be fair, Bear would also be using the eyes as a kind of gobstopper and sucking on a pebble to generate saliva).

But the usefulness of a wolf doesn’t end there. If you’re lucky your wolf will have further loot. Wolves are, naturally, famed for their carrying abilities – had they not been wiped out in the early evening there’s a chance that many of them would be working for Pickfords. Only doing carrying, mind, not driving the vans – that’s just silly. In the gaming world though, the wolves are renowned for carrying gold, swords, daggers, arrows and other gubbins that they’ve seemingly thought “ooo, shinies, I’ll have that” – a fact which makes me wonder if they weren’t wiped out in the UK as some kind of contract kill put out by the magpies who, as we know, have cornered the stealing shiny things market (alongside, you know, burglars).

So that’s why the wolves were killed. Killing a wolf is, in a lot of ways like going to a car boot sale and coming home with a box full of junk. But without having to get up at a ridiculously early time in the morning and standing in a windswept car park.


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2 responses to “Wolves, The Various Uses Of”

  1. Simon avatar
    Simon

    Love it.

    And now I have the mental of image of hunting Wolf the gladiator on the plains of Azeroth.

    Someone needs to make that mod.

  2. Loz avatar
    Loz

    can you imaging how much his ‘pelt’ would go for!? look at that early 90’s boufant, we’d be quids in! 😛

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