I was about 12 or 13 years old when I obsessed with wolf-like dogs in my dreams. I was a bad girl to my mother, she was a dearly hated persona to me at that time.

We partnered in good fights around who could yell the loudest, get the angriest, who would win? So I was tough. And reading was my favorite activity.

This bad girl chose Jack London and his books about wolf-like dogs that “mushed” and pulled the sleds in the tough northlands of the Yukon Territory in the 1900s.

There was White Fang, one of the hero dogs in London’s books.

What I loved about him was that he was wolf-like and had a streak of wildness in him.

What a fabulously angry name White Fang, gifting me the vision of this dog howling like a wolf, and hauling the sleds loaded with provisions and supplies over the snows of the northlands like the Yukon Territory.

He snarled at the other dogs in the harnesses behind him, with his sharp white teeth barred while he gulped most of the food for himself and snapped at them, grazed their muzzles with his teeth if they got close to the meat he was wolfing down.

I read that book over and over, and never strayed from it, for example wolfing my food down at mealtimes around my family’s dining room table, or snarling at my mother when she said I couldn’t walk down to Harvard Square in Cambridge Mass at night with all the stores lighted up in the company of Dottie Abreu my best friend.

That’s all I thought about, the fights of the sled dogs amongst each other for the red meat, or White Fang slashing their ears like a wolf would with blood flowing out. I would even take the book to bed some nights and put it under my pillow.

If Mother and dad said no to something I wanted to do I would feel the rage of a wolf inside me so I could feel bigger and stronger and yell at them and insist that I could.

I wanted us to own a doglike a malamute or a husky, wolflike, as a pet, although my parents wouldn’t allow it. That’s all I thought about, the sled dogs…I weaned myself off “wolfdogs” when I was fourteen when I began to have dates with boys.