Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

The stallion was free not long ago and a part of him remains that way,

For the first sixteen years of our lives, Aggie and I spent a couple of months each year visiting our father in his forest. Our true home, the place we belonged. A landscape that made sense of me. As a child I believed the trees of this forest our family.

Aggie liked to wait for the deepest silence and then shout something so loud it shook the world. I liked the quiet better.

Dad took it all in silently, took it upon himself and grew older as he did.

“It’s a threatened species now. Ninety-nine percent of old-growth Douglas firs have been cut down. Which makes this one of the last of its kind.” “Is it lonely?” I asked, aching for the roots that must be reaching to find nothing to hold. “Yes,” Dad said. Then he rested his forehead against the Douglas fir, and he did something Aggie and I had never seen him do, not before that day and never again after, he wept.

But even once I returned home to the concrete apartment building and the treeless sandy beaches and their crashing oceans I still dreamt of the lonely Doug fir, and I would wake certain its roots had been my own, reaching to find no others, not even Aggie’s.

Your mirror-touch makes you vulnerable and on top of that you’re too kind, Inti. If you’re not careful—if you’re not vigilant—someone’s going to hurt you. Do you understand?”

It is easy to tell myself that what passes between them is only biology, nature, but then who said love does not exist in the nature of all things?

This world he describes, empty of wild creatures and places, overrun instead by people and their agriculture, is a dying world.

In the following silence I take the measure of him, as he wants me to. But I see more than he might imagine. I’ve met him so many times I could laugh, except that I will not make the mistake of underestimating the damage an angry man can do, not again.

even though Mum acted like nothing mattered to her she still had feelings, she still got hurt. She still spent her whole life trying to help people.

“The forest is where I love best,” she says, a little dreamy, definitely a little doped. “All that breathing.”

There are languages without words and violence is one of them.

It took me to Dad’s yard and the hooves and the snorts and the knowing those mustangs would rather be free, however much they might have loved my father.

It frightened her that I didn’t know how to protect myself, because what kind of creature is born without this instinct?

This is how the world dies, he said, with laziness.

And it seemed to me that what was once the wisdom of a man courageous enough to see another path was now turning slowly toward madness.

“I have a question, Dad,” I said as I sat beside him. “I hope you have more than one, always.”

A man’s anger, his violence, is no one’s responsibility but his own.

I try to explain that she’s a wild creature in mourning. But the thought of a beast grieving her mate in such a confronting, almost human way is too much for most folk. None of us can help carrying her voice within us.

I take a breath; the forest takes it with me. Wind is a distant ocean, calming as it reaches me until it’s no more than a kiss to my cheeks, my eyelids, my lips. I recognize this kiss; I have felt it before.

My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart. He said we might survive this mistake if we found a way to rewild ourselves. But I don’t know how to do that when our existence frightens the creatures we must reconnect with.

“The people here are good people, and they work hard. I don’t like to see them scared. Fear makes for danger, whether it was there to begin with or not.”

“She was kind,” he says. “That’s what I remember best. You couldn’t offend her. She cared about everyone, even if they didn’t behave well. In the face of anything, she had compassion to offer. It’s a kind of strength I think women know better than men, maybe.”

It was something, it was all things. We couldn’t trust him anymore, and that was the worst betrayal of all.

In the deep parts of our bodies we knew that he had taken himself off to die quietly and without fuss, like an animal. Maybe to put an end to whatever he was becoming, to exert what little control he had left. Or maybe to protect us in the only way he knew how.

“I’m not minimizing. It’s just that if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men. They’re all of us. Too fucking many of us and all too human. And the women they hurt aren’t passive victims, or Freud’s masochists who like to be punished either. They’re all women, and all they’re doing, minute by minute, is strategizing how best to survive the man they loved, and that’s not a thing anyone should have to do.”

“Well now, you don’t have to rewild on such large scales. You can start small, in your own backyard. I’ve been growing wildflowers for years and oh—all sorts of wee creatures have been coming to visit me.”

“And when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”

She’s not a person, who understands right and wrong. You can’t be angry with an animal, can’t hate it, get revenge upon it. That doesn’t make sense. She didn’t kill because she was cruel. She killed because there are instincts in her body telling her to do so, to protect against threats, to survive, sustain herself, live on.

No one can meet your trust if you don’t offer it.

All creatures know love.

And looks at me. I am halved and doubled at once.

I know nothing about hatred or love, about cruelty or kindness. I know nothing.