Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

Not long ago, not in the grand scheme of things, this forest was not small and sparse but strong and bursting with life. Lush with rowan trees, aspen, birch, juniper and oak, it stretched itself across a vast swathe of land, coloring Scotland’s now-bare hills, providing food and shelter to all manner of untamed thing. And within these roots and trunks and canopies, there ran wolves. Today, wolves once again walk upon this ground, which has not seen their kind in hundreds of years. Does something in their bodies remember this land, as it remembers them? It knows them well; it has been waiting for them to wake it from its long slumber.

I am unlike most people. I move through life in a different way, with an entirely unique understanding of touch. Before I knew its name I knew this. To make sense of it, it is called a neurological condition. Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals; if I see it I feel it, and for just a moment I am them, we are one and their pain or pleasure is my own. It can seem like magic and for a long time I thought it was, but really it’s not so far removed from how other brains behave: the physiological response to witnessing someone’s pain is a cringe, a recoil, a wince. We are hardwired for empathy. Once upon a time I took delight in feeling what others felt. Now the constant stream of sensory information exhausts me. Now I’d give anything to be cut free.

She doesn’t respond. It’s one of her bad days, which means I can talk and talk and she will do nothing but gaze listlessly at something beyond my capacity to see. But I will keep talking, in case she can hear me from that faraway place.

“If we hadn’t taken them across an ocean they might have been able to.” I help Aggie out of the bath and dry her off, then dress her in warm, comfortable clothes and park her in front of the fireplace while I make breakfast. “There’s no love between Six and Nine yet,” I say. “But they haven’t killed each other, either.” The words fall so casually from my mouth that I am startled. Is that the way of all love? That it should carry the risk of death? But the words haven’t reminded Aggie of the same things, she is too far distant to be reached. I want to follow her to wherever she’s gone and I also fear that place more than anything. I fear, too, the day she stops returning from it.

“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.

Dad used to tell me that my greatest gift was that I could get inside the skin of another human. That I could feel what nobody else could, the life of another, really feel it and roll around in it. That the body knows a great deal and I have the miraculous ability to know more than one body. The astonishing cleverness of nature. He also taught us that compassion was the most important thing we could learn. If someone hurt us, we needed only empathy, and forgiveness would be easy. My mother never agreed. She had no kindred ocean of kindness inside her, no forgiveness. She had a different knowledge of what people do to each other. I shied from it. It felt rough and hard and those were not the instincts I was born with. I chose to live by my dad’s code, and it was easy until it wasn’t. It’s obvious now, and has been for a while. Mum was right, she was so fucking right I am embarrassed, and now I have had enough, I have no more forgiveness left.

“It’s out there I’d be more worried about,” Duncan adds, nodding to the trees, the hills, the mountains and moors. “You must know monsters well, wolf girl.” “I’ve never met one in the wild. They don’t live there.”

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.

“What about your mother?” I ask. “What was she like?” “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.”

“He’s a monster,” I say. “You’re giving him too much credit. He’s just a man,” Duncan says. “That’s dangerous. That’s how you let people do terrible things.” He doesn’t take to this. “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.”

“What happened to you?” Duncan asks. “Nothing.” Then he says, but not like a question, “What kind of thing must you be.” What kind of thing.

“And have you not heard the tales of those lucky men and women who have raised wolves and set them free, only to come upon them somewhere in the wild, years later, and be shown affection by the creatures?” I nod, though I’ve never been sure if I believe these stories, or suspect them to be made of longing. “Do you believe them?” I ask Niels, expecting his certainty in the unambiguous scientific. But he says, “Of course. Many animals are capable of this, we see it time and again. I believe they are more inherently loyal than we are and that connections are built deep within, where instinct lives. With the disappearance of that man there is anger brewing here, and there are those who would fight to destroy the wolves, and those whose apathy would see them destroyed. And so we must be the ones who fight for them. That will always be the right action to take.” His words stir my protective instinct, my certainty. All creatures know love, Dad used to say. All creatures.

He cares deeply; it is the fabric of his life here. I think he must be a good man. But nobody is only one thing.

“Are you … Lainey, are you glad he’s gone?” The answer matters too much. She stares at me. “You’re really asking me that?” I nod. She passes a hand over her face. Then says, “He was my best friend and I loved him and I’ve been a ghost for years. Of course I’m glad he’s gone.”

I close my eyes and my hair is wet with salt, I am made of it.

Her body barely survived. And when she woke, she’d gone elsewhere, and she’d taken all the strongest pieces of her, even her voice.

My fury has none of the same calm. The wolf is provoking it into something frenzied. There is violence in me, in my hands, which vibrate with the need to exert some kind of control, some defiance, and if it is revenge for the things that have been taken from me then fine, I will have that too. I am done with falling prey. I will be predator, at last. I will forget the walls and the self-protection and I will become the thing I hunt and feel it all.

She takes a huge breath and she is breathing into my lungs, lungs we share, and I thought my condition was a trick, a curse, a burden to carry but in this moment it is a gift. She opens her eyes. And looks at me. I am halved and doubled at once.

But the immensity of a will is still nothing, not compared with the body. The body is master of us, and it can only be asked for so much. I try to stand but nothing happens. I try to yell but only a rasp comes loose. The cold is too deep, I’ve lost too much blood.