User:Fizghoi/Wolfbrother, Tauren

Few are aware of even the rumors about the existence of the Tauren Wolfbrothers. The following article, which was originally found abandoned on a tavern table in Ratchet and has since made the rounds among a few members of the goblin scholar community, is perhaps the only known concrete evidence of their existence.

A Brief Summary of the Tauren Wolfbrothers

by Fiz Fizzerlink, Historian and Folklorist

Among those who have even heard the term, who are few, there is much confusion about what a wolfbrother is. According to some, they are supernatural monsters, half-tauren, half-wolf abominations with outrageous origins such as tauren Worgenism or the unholy union of a hunter and a pet with which he has an unnatural attachment. Most myths also attribute supernatural or mystical abilities to them. Rumors usually attribute them with a wolf's heightened sense of smell and hearing. One myth says a wolfbrother can speak telepathically with wolves. Another says he can enter a dream world similar to the Emerald Dream, a world in which wolves exist simultaneously with this one. Some claim they are the feral offspring of tauren who, when born with the yellow eyes of a wolf, are abandoned to be raised by a wolf pack.

Most of these rumors could not be further from the truth however, as, in fact, through study and interviews, I have shown that there is nothing supernatural about that rare caste of tauren hunter known as the wolfbrother. While he may show some wolfish characteristics, such as a tendency to growl or sniff a newcomer (though luckily, in my experience, not in the crotch like his pet did me), such proclivities are due to the wolfbrother's unique lupine social history, not any mystical or physiological traits.

Experiments prove the wolfbrother senses to be nothing unnatural. That a tauren, with his larger than the average biped's nasal cavity, should have a more sensitive schnozz than your average goblin should come as no surprise. While a wolfbrother may have above average senses of smell or hearing, mostly he simply has a higher awareness of his senses, being more apt to notice smells we overlook or more apt to hear the slight rumble of a distant kodo herd carried by the wind; there is nothing extrasensory about them. To illustrate, when told to wait at the table at Ratchet's inn while I grabbed a pen and paper from my room, both a wolfbrother and a non-wolfbrother tauren were able to identify the faint odor of oily blackmouth left by a special scratch and sniff sticker stuck to bottom of the table. The only difference being that the non-wolfbrother tauren only noticed the aroma after his companion pointed it out, supporting the conclusion that a wolfbrother is simply more accustomed to using his nose. The same outcome occurred when I very softly called out the tauren's name in a ghostly voice from outside a nearby window; he only noticed my voice when the wolfbrother pointed it out to him.

The other aforementioned myths are also easily debunked. In interviews with reputable sources I have never come across any evidence or even mention of wolf telepathy or dream-worlds, nor was the wolfbrother I spoke with able to read my mind while I thought like a wolf (I concentrated on peeing on trees and howling at the moon). The one myth with perhaps the strongest seed of truth is that wolfbrothers are feral tauren children raised by wolves. Where the myth gets it wrong however, is that a tauren wolfbrother is neither a feral child, nor raised by wolves. In fact, he is raised with wolves, of which more will be said later.

Wolfbrother History

The nomadic and clan-based history of the Tauren is no doubt responsible for the confusion and mystique which surrounds the wolfbrothers. Due to the relatively recent unification of the tauren, documented examples of Tauren Wolfbrothers have only recently come to light, as formerly isolated tribes have emerged from obscurity to join Cairne and his followers. The tribe with perhaps strongest traceable connection to wolfbrother myth is the Grimhorn clan, a small, solitary clan with distant ties to the Grimtotems, whose beginnings are intertwined with wolfbrother legend.

Grimhorn lore claims that many generations ago a small extended family of taurens was exiled from the Grimtotem clan. According to the few Grimhorn I have been able to interview, the details of just what caused this exile are completely lost in the haze of history; some would argue that this lack of rumor of the transgression among them implies that it was not favorable to the Grimhorn, which gives rise to some of the more foul, (and in this author's opinion) unfair, and unfounded, myths of wolfbrother origins (see first paragraph). Much more likely is that the Grimtotem tribe simply did not have the resources to care for all its people, so purged some undesirables to help the stronger survive. What is known is that, cast out of the clan, this small, exiled band of Grimtotems struggled to survive. The fledgeling tribe, unable to follow the larger bands of kodo due to the danger of skirmishes with the Grimtotem who claimed them, followed smaller herds on the fringes of Grimtotem territory, but even those proved difficult for the struggling tribe to subsist on with their few reliable hunters. Also following these smaller kodo herds however were wolf packs. Though at first competing for the same food source, some resourceful Grimtotem exiles began to work with the wolf packs in a mutually beneficial relationship. Together the wolves and tauren were better able to acquire food and protect themselves from the marauding centaur. And thus began the Grimhorn tribe.

All the Grimhorn seem to agree that these first wolfbrothers lived amongst and hunted with the wolves; this is corroborated with the fact that Tauren wolfbrothers continue to spend much of their lives travelling and hunting amongst the pack. However, the non-wolfbrother Grimhorn I spoke with (which are admittedly few) claimed that the wolfbrother tauren of the Grimhorn have always lived a dual life, half with the wolf pack and half with their tauren brethren, while the actual wolfbrothers I spoke with (which are admittedly even fewer: just one actually) claim that originally the entire group of Grimtotem exiles which eventually became the Grimhorn tribe lived harmoniously with the wolf packs and that it was only over time, as the tribe grew strong enough to survive without the wolves' help, that the wolfbrother caste became the isolated loners they are today. (Though maybe loner is a misnomer; they are quite social when you think about it. How many people do you know who can move back and forth between the company of animals or bipeds? That takes some highly honed social skills if you ask me.)

Also worth noting is an obscure tauren legend told to me by a Grimhorn elder, one of those old stories where gods and animals and people talk to each other like I'm talking (or writing I guess) to you. Evidently shortly after the Earthmother made taurens and druids and centaurs or whatever, Wolf talked to Tauren and invited him to join him in the hunt. Most of the tauren must have forgotten this myth though, since I've only heard about it from that one old bull.

The Modern Wolfbrother

Today wolfbrothers tend to live on the fringes of Tauren society. Wolfbrother groups tend to be small offshoots of tribes who spend much of their time in the wild hunting with their packs, and occaisonally join up with their respective tribes to provide food or companionship. With the founding of Thunder Bluff and the transition from nomadic life to permanent settlement, wolfbrothers will no doubt be increasingly more uncommon than they already are, as evidenced by the fact that the lone wolfbrother I was able to study was himself separate from his pack and visiting Ratchet. Apart from his tendency to sniff things and growl a lot, one could easily be unaware that he was not your average tauren hunter.

In Conclusion

In the distant past, when small wandering groups of tauren were much more common than today, a typical social organization involving Wolfbrothers might have consisted of an entire tribe of tauren who travelled with a wolf pack. Though of course, given the rarity of wolfbrothers, this must have been a far from a common tribe dynamic, as most tauren are not even aware of wolfbrother existence or have only heard outlandish rumors. Perhaps, if the Grimhorn elder I spoke with is to be believed, wolfbrother tribes were more common in the early stages of Tauren history. My theory is that over time, as tauren society developed, becoming less animalistic and more civilized, the mixed wolf-tauren social groups of a wolfbrother tribe gave way to the more standard hunter-pet relationship we commonly see today. If this hypothesis is correct, imagine the implications! Wolfbrothers are actually a remnant of cultural evolution somewhere between wild animals and hunter-gatherers! Perhaps other races had similar societies hidden in their past that have since vanished! How lucky we are that the tauren, being as backwater as they are, are only now forming permanent settlements, otherwise we might have lost this window into the very transition from wild beast to civilized animal.