Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

I’ve never liked car travel at night for it turns the thriving world into something empty and gaping. If I stopped and walked into it, it would be a different world altogether, filled with the shivering of life, blinking reflective eyes and the scurry of little feet in the underbrush.

My fingers twine within her pale hair and I let myself fall asleep, safe now in the sphere of my sister, who was always meant to be the stronger of us.

Is that the way of all love? That it should carry the risk of death?

“The forest has a beating heart we can’t see,” Dad told us once. He lay flat on the earth and we copied him, placing our hands on the warm ground and our ears to the underbrush, listening. “It’s here, beneath us. This is how the trees speak with and care for each other. Their roots tangle together, dozens of trees with dozens more in a web that reaches on forever, and they whisper to each other through their roots. They warn of danger and they share sustenance. They’re like us, a family. Stronger together. Nothing gets through this life alone.” He smiled then, and asked, “Can you hear the beating?” and we could, somehow we could.

So you must form a defense.” “I’ll be her defense,” Aggie said. “I know that, but you won’t always be together—she needs one of her own.” Aggie and I looked at each other and mutually dismissed that comment.

It isn’t going to work. I’m sure of it. The world is not that kind; I am not so lucky. And then it does. Because really it has nothing to do with me and my luck.

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?

Only twice in my life had I caught a glimpse of a wolf, and both times had been many years ago when I was a child. I’d almost started to believe I’d dreamt those moments. “Can you help me follow it?” He shook his head. “Can’t track wolves, not really.” “Then how do you find them?” “You don’t. You leave them be.”

“You must know monsters well, wolf girl.” “I’ve never met one in the wild. They don’t live there.” Something shifts in the space between us. Or maybe this prickling thing always lived here. I don’t know but there is something in his regard and I am filled with frustration, with the need to make him see what I see, to make him understand, and I think I want those things because what I actually want is him.

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 wanted our dad back, our all-knowing, large as a Doug fir father. I wanted his passion back, his love of nature that I might show him I had cultivated the same.

I wanted to share this awakening in me, share what I had learned, what I now knew my life was to be, and for him to be proud of me. That hope trailed behind us like a rattling tin can for a while until I cut it loose for good.

he said once that forests are all of our homes, no matter where in the world,

“It’s one tree.” “What do you mean?” Aggie asked. “It’s not a forest. It’s one tree. One huge organism. It’s called the trembling giant and it’s the oldest living thing on this planet, and the largest. Some think it could be a million years old. And it’s dying. We’re killing it.” I turned to see my father crouch to the earth’s floor and place a large hand on it. Over the web of connected roots, from which shot thousands of genetically identical trunks, clones of each other. I watched as he closed his eyes and listened to the giant tremble beneath us. When he opened them once more they held tears and the trees had returned him to us.

Fingal sleeps on the rug before the fire, his tail twitching every so often to the shape of his dreams.

When I turned thirty, almost to the day, I started thinking about a child. Something in my body said Now, now, this is why you’re here, this is the meaning. An urgent clock I hadn’t believed was real until I felt its chiming. The cells of me wanted to nurture, they wanted to love and protect.

In the face of anything, she had compassion to offer. It’s a kind of strength I think women know better than men, maybe.” “Not all women.”

“Why then. If not Stuart,” he asks. Why did I come here. My lips brush the corner of his mouth. Why. This will have to be the last time my feet find their way to his door.

I have never heard his voice like this, I think under that anger he is afraid.

“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.”

“All any of us do is hurt each other,” I say.

“So you’d live like your animals, then. Off in the woods and free of people, but you told me yourself what they need most is each other.” I don’t say anything because for a moment I hate him.

Later in his bed he holds me, his body so hot it’s as though he has laid the fireplace within himself. I realize how cold I have been, for so long.

No. Please, not today. Not this morning. I don’t have it in me to look after her. Except that I must, so I do.

I hold her in an embrace and press my lips to her shoulder and I grieve for the sameness that is leaving us, stolen from us. I miss her so much and I think I am holding her too tightly, and then I think maybe if I hurt her she will wake.

“I can’t, Duncan,” I say. “I don’t have anything to give you.” “Then take from me. I have more than enough.”

“You told me.” “Did I?” “Not with words.” “What else is there?” “Plenty.”

It occurred to me how handsome he was and suddenly I didn’t just viscerally dislike him, I also wanted him, and much to my horror, wanted to impress him.

As he pulled over in front of our house I was struck by the realization that I hadn’t told him where I lived. Something went cold inside. But a tiny quiet piece, the darkest of me, it already suspected, didn’t it? Didn’t I know in that first moment?

“Men get taught to expect control but a modern society no longer supports that, so some men feel it slipping and it humiliates them. The humiliation makes them angry, and then violent.”

“Tell me if you think he’s a good man or not.” “I think he’s human.” “Yeah, that’s what I suspected.”

I hated them for their politeness, hated that they seemed perfectly nice and yet they were out here doing this heinous thing, hunting for the sake of it, not to survive, not to eat, only to feel power over another creature.

the thousands of kilometers she has covered, the places she has run, the world she has explored, only to return in time to protect her sister and her pack as they prepare for the impending litter. As if somehow she knew.

because wolves, as Niels said, have an unrivaled ability to make humans feel.

All creatures know love, Dad used to say. All creatures.

And always, there is the little one within.

I think he must be a good man. But nobody is only one thing.

“Still. There is too much love for it to ever be easy. Forgive yourself for that.”

Sitting alone in the marshy grass, about thirty brilliant spotted pink orchid flowers shoot off the one upright stem. It is more vivid than any of Werner’s colors, but in the family, I think, of lake red, the shade of red tulips, Rosa officinalus, and the mineral called spinel. No animals are this shade, except perhaps some lucky birds. It is almost strange to see such a vibrant hue out here in this land of browns and grays. “That’ll make a beautiful bouquet,” I say. But Evan straightens without having picked it. “I think we’ll leave this solitary sweetie. It has its own role to play here.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while. Then, “Darlin’, you’re going to figure this out one day, but we’re most fallible when trying to raise our children.”

“You were right, you know,” I say abruptly. “I did need to toughen up.” And I have, I’ve toughened so far up I’m wrinkly old leather now.

There has to be a way to heal, and if she has not the will for it, then I will be strong enough and sure enough for her. She can have my soul in place of hers, if she needs it.

“If we’re talking about conservation, about saving this planet, we have to start with the predators. Because if we can’t save the predators, we’ve got no chance of saving anything else.”

“Yeah, but why really?” “I…” I stop and try to think of the answer. “I have always loved them, without reason. Have always wanted to know their secrets. And then I learned they could save forests…” I glance at Duncan. “Some people need wildness in their life.”

But too quickly I realize I was so inside the wolf I didn’t feel what the deer did. No tearing at my flesh, no being eaten. Only the taste of blood. I turn away from Duncan.

“But now, change is frightening to some,” she concedes after a little while. “And when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”

This week she is the length of a zucchini. She might not be a she, but she’s taken her own form in my mind, without any decision from me. My body makes and I wait.

I pause, hand on my belly, on the firm swollen bump there. There is a universe within.

I stop being a woman, a human, an animal, whatever I was. I am fury dressed in flesh.

I swallow a few swigs and lie on my back in the cold grass to watch the enormous full moon above. The sky is so clear, so boundless, I fall into it. Tears trickle into my hair. Footsteps in the grass, and a body next to mine. My sister takes the wine bottle from my hand and drinks from it, before placing it out of my reach and then lying beside me in the dark. Our fingers twine.