The grey wolf sits at the centre of Turkic origin telling and plays two separate parts.
In the first it carries the line on: in the Ashina telling an enemy destroys a clan, a she-wolf feeds the one wounded child left, and the line continues from there. That wolf is later named Asena.
In the second it leads the way: in the Migration epic, when the clan is trapped, a grey wolf appears before them and takes them through a pass between the mountains.
What the two share is that the wolf is never tamed. It helps, but it is not owned.
In Balbal the Grey Wolf is the fourth tile of the Middle World's Tamga suit — Grey Wolf. The same code is a Horned Skull in the Underworld and an Eagle in the Sky.
See also: tamga