My life is strong. It is worth asking for.
What happens when a wolf wanders into a flock of sheep and kills twenty or shirty of them in apparent compulsion is perhaps not so much slaughter as a failure on the part of the sheep to communicate anything at all—resistance, mutual respect, appropriateness—to the wolf. The wolf has initiated a sacred ritual and met with ignorance.
This brings us to a second point. We are dealing with a different kind of death from the one men know. When the wolf “asks” for the life of another animal he is responding to something in that animal that says, “My life is strong. It is worth asking for.” A moose may be biologically constrained to die because he is old or injured, but the choice is there. The death is not tragic. It has dignity.
Consider the Indian again. Native American cultures in general stressed that there was nothing wrong with dying, one should only strive to die well, that is consciously choose to die even if it is inevitable. The greatest glory accrued to a warrior who acted with this kind of self-control in the very teeth of death. The ability to see death as less than tragic was rooted in a different perception of ego: a person was simultaneously indispensable and dispensable (in an appropriate way) in the world. In the conversation of death is the striving for a death that is appropriate. I have lived a full life, says the prey. I am ready A die. I am willing to die because clearly I will be dying so that the others in this small herd will go on living. I am ready to die because my leg is broken or my lungs are impacted and my time is finished.
The death is mutually agreeable. The meat it produces has power, as though consecrated. (That is a good word. It strikes us as strange only because it is out of its normal context.)
(Source: Of Wolves and Men—Barry Lopez)