The Wolf Keepers

by Elise Broach

  Lizzie rolled her eyes at him.

  “Just asking,” he said. “It would be nice if it was hot.”

  They each took one side of the box and bumped awkwardly through the porch door, down the steps, and across the yard to the apartment. “You sure your dad won’t come home early?” Tyler asked.

  Lizzie shook her head. “He’s way too busy.”

  “What about other people?”

  “Nobody else comes all the way back here,” Lizzie said. “It’s our yard.” They climbed the stairs to the little kitchenette and began unpacking the food and putting it away. Eventually, the dryer buzzed.

  “Hey, your clothes are all finished,” Lizzie said, pulling Tyler’s freshly laundered backpack, blanket, and clothing out of the hot dryer and dumping them on the bed.

  Tyler picked up the blue T-shirt and buried his face in it. “This smells great!” he said. “And look! My backpack is a totally different color now.”

  Lizzie thought the color of the backpack looked a little strange, like maybe it shouldn’t have been washed with the other stuff. It had turned a streaked, murky brown. But thankfully, Tyler seemed pleased with it. “It’s tie-dyed,” he said.

  After they’d put the food away in the kitchen, Lizzie surveyed the apartment. “Can you think of anything else?”

  Tyler looked around. “Nope. This place is nice.” He grinned at her. “I never had my own room before.”

  “It’s not yours,” Lizzie corrected. “It’s Grandma May’s. But I know she wouldn’t mind … and anyway, it’s a whole apartment.”

  Tyler poured himself a glass of milk and raised it in the air. “Thank you, Grandma May,” he said.

  * * *

  That night, Mike barbecued chicken in the backyard. Lizzie sat on the porch, nervously watching the upstairs windows of the garage. Tyler knew not to turn on lights, not to make any noise, and not to stand near the windows where he could be seen. They’d closed the windows that faced the house, so from the yard, the apartment looked as still and empty as it always did.

  “Hey, Mike?” Lizzie asked. She had her notebook open on her lap, casually sketching the tree house on its tall, delicate stilts. That was the other thing she liked about keeping a journal; there were no rules. If she wanted to cover one page with a drawing, or another with a poem, that was her choice. John Muir had made a lot of sketches in his journal, too.

  Her father seemed preoccupied, turning pieces of chicken over the smoldering coals.

  Lizzie tried again. “Dad.”

  Now he looked up. “What?”

  “There’s an old picture in Grandma May’s apartment, of a wooden house or something. In the woods. Do you know what that is?”

  “Sure. It’s John Muir’s lost cabin.”

  Lizzie leaned forward. “What? John Muir had a cabin?”

  He glanced up. “Yeah. In Yosemite. Don’t you know about that? I thought you were studying him in school.”

  Lizzie held up her notebook. “We are. It’s my homework for the summer, remember? Keeping this journal, like John Muir did.”

  Sometimes she felt like her father paid no attention to her life at all.

  “Well, that’s what I thought,” he said, clearly trying to cover for his lapse. “Muir lived in Yosemite in the late 1800s, and he built a cabin by a stream. It was a mill, actually. A sawmill, with a little shack on top of it that he lived in. Lots of famous people visited him in Yosemite.”

  “Like who?” Lizzie asked.

  “Let’s see. Teddy Roosevelt went camping with him … and he was the president who probably did the most for the national parks. And Ralph Waldo Emerson stayed with Muir once.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Mike sighed. “Emerson? Thoreau? Ring any bells?”

  “Nope.”

  “Emerson was a great thinker and writer of the nineteenth century, part of the transcendentalist movement.”

  Lizzie rested her chin in her hands. She was starting to feel bored. “What’s that? A religion?”

  Her father thought for a minute. “It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically Emerson and Thoreau and the other transcendentalists believed that people were fundamentally pure and good on their own, out in nature. But not in civilization.”

  Lizzie thought about that. Did people behave worse around other people than they did on their own? She wasn’t so sure. She thought most people behaved better when someone else was watching.

  “Did John Muir believe that?” she asked.

  “I would bet so,” her father said. “He thought nature was the source of beauty, and peace, and everything good, and he convinced a lot of other people that he was right.”

  “How’d he do that? Why did anyone listen to him?”

  Her father thought for a minute. “Well, his ideas were new, you know? I mean, it’s hard for you to see it now, because we recycle everything, and we conserve water, and we try to be so careful about the environment. But back in John Muir’s time, nature was just seen as … well, a resource, something to be used up.”

  “What do you mean?” Lizzie asked.

  Mike turned the chicken pieces with his tongs, and they sizzled over the flames.

  “I’m trying to think how I can explain it to you,” he said after a bit. “A long time ago, people were pretty much only interested in nature for what they could get from it. Land was for farming, animals were for eating, trees were for lumber, water was for irrigation. Coal, silver, gold—if anything could be taken out of the wilderness and used by humans, it was. John Muir was one of the first people who saw the danger of that … how it was destroying the wilderness.”

  “And that was a new idea?”

  “Yes. Muir thought nature should be protected and preserved, because he knew once we used it up, we might never get it back. And through his writing—his letters, his books, his journals—he convinced people that wilderness should be preserved. That it had value all on its own, not just as something humans could use. And that really was a new idea.”

  Lizzie was silent for a minute. “Is that why the zoo is named for him?”

  Mike smiled. “Well, this is kind of his territory. Around Yosemite, a lot of things are named for him.”

  Lizzie looked down at her sketch again. “But what about the lost cabin?”

  “Yeah, the lost cabin. There’s a picture of it in the apartment. Muir built it around the 1860s, supposedly somewhere along either Yosemite Creek or Tenaya Creek.”

  “Really? He lived there? It looks like a tree house. It’s got different floors, and it’s kind of on stilts.” Lizzie smoothed the open page of her notebook with the drawing of the cabin and, below her picture, she wrote in small print, John Muir’s lost cabin. Yosemite Creek or Tenaya Creek.

  “That’s because it was built near a waterfall,” her father said. “As part of the mill.”

  “But why did you say it was a lost cabin?” Lizzie asked, losing patience.

  “Because that’s what it’s called—John Muir’s lost cabin. Nobody’s ever been able to find it.”

  A lost cabin! She couldn’t wait to tell Tyler. “How come?”

  “Well, you saw the picture. It doesn’t look too sturdy. It probably fell apart or got destroyed a long time ago. Maybe it was washed away in the creek. And nobody’s even sure exactly where it was located. Your mom and I—” Mike stopped.

  “What?” Lizzie set her notebook on the step and leaned forward, hugging her knees. She loved hearing stories about her mother.

  “Your mom and I used to go on camping trips in Yosemite to look for it.”

  “You did?” It was the first Lizzie had heard of this, though she knew that her parents had loved camping in Yosemite before she was born. She liked this new image, of her young mother and father exploring the park, searching for a lost cabin.

  “Yosemite Creek, by the falls, is such a tourist attraction, it definitely would have been discovered if it were still there. But Tenaya Creek goes through Tenaya Canyon, and that part
of the park is pretty much off-limits.”

  “What do you mean, off-limits?” Lizzie asked.

  “Well, it’s really rough terrain, very steep in parts, with lots of waterfalls. The park rangers discourage people from hiking or camping there. There have been injuries and deaths in the canyon. And then there’s Chief Tenaya’s curse.”

  A curse! Lizzie picked up her notebook again, thinking she should write this down. “What’s the curse?”

  “Just an old superstition,” her father said. “But based on something real, the way legends usually are. Chief Tenaya was the leader of the Ahwahneechee tribe in Yosemite Valley. When the white settlers tried to move the Indians to a reservation, his son was killed, and then the chief cursed forever after any white person who dared to set foot in Tenaya Canyon.”

  Forever after? Lizzie shivered. It sounded like a fairy tale. “So white people who go into the canyon will die?” She jotted the curse down in her notebook, near the picture of the lost cabin.

  “It’s a dangerous place,” her father said. “Hikers get lost, injured, or killed in Yosemite every year, and many of those incidents happen in Tenaya Canyon. It’s one of the few places in Yosemite where John Muir himself had a fall.”

  “Really? And you and Mom hiked there?” Lizzie asked in surprise.

  “No, no,” her father said quickly. “We’re not mountaineers! We didn’t have climbing equipment. But we hiked a good stretch of Tenaya Creek, and then turned back when the trail ended. We never saw any sign of the cabin.”

  Mike stared at the glowing coals. “She loved that photo of your grandmother’s because it belonged to Clare Hodges.”

  He lapsed into silence, and Lizzie could tell he was sad. Sometimes talking about her mother made him happy, but other times, it seemed to suck the light out of him. She wished she could take back the barrage of questions that had ended up leading them here.

  To change the subject, she said, “How was your day?”

  Her father always had interesting stories from work, either about animal exploits or human ones. Sometimes the behavior of the people at the zoo was far stranger than that of the animals.

  Mike used the tongs to move a piece of chicken away from the grill’s orange flames. “Athena has gotten worse,” he said. “Karen doesn’t think she’s going to make it.”

  “What?” Lizzie sprang to her feet, panicked. “But you said she would be okay.”

  “I know, honey. I thought she would be. But she got a lot sicker last night, apparently.”

  “Did you go check on her?”

  “I didn’t have a chance today, and Karen is worried about containing the illness, in case it’s contagious.” He hesitated. “One of the other wolves doesn’t look so good now.”

  Lizzie’s heart clenched. “It’s not Lobo, is it?”

  “No, no, he seems fine.” Mike rearranged the pieces of chicken over the coals. “It’s the other young female, Tamarack. She’s … well, hopefully it’s nothing. I thought she seemed lethargic when I stopped by this afternoon, and I saw her vomit.”

  Lizzie knew that “lethargic” described an animal that wasn’t up to its usual level of energy or activity. “Are you giving her medicine? What are you doing to help her get better?” she asked urgently.

  “It’s hard to treat it when we don’t know what it is,” Mike said. “Sometimes these things just have to run their course. Karen has Ed keeping an eye on her.” Ed was Karen’s assistant in the clinic, a thin, bearded graduate student who had barely spoken a word to Lizzie since he arrived at the zoo a year ago.

  Just then, her father’s cell phone rang, shattering the evening quiet.

  Mike set down the tongs and fished his phone out of his pocket. “Hello? Oh, hi, Karen. What?” He tensed. “She did? Oh.”

  He stood silent, listening. Lizzie could tell from his expression that something bad had happened.

  “Okay, well, I’ll come right over.” He paused. “Oh, you did?” Mike grimaced. “Already?”

  The chicken sizzled and popped, and he turned back to the grill. “Shoot! No, I’m just burning something over here. Yeah, okay, we’ll talk tomorrow. Thanks, Karen. I know that wasn’t easy.”

  He clicked the phone off and turned to Lizzie. “She had to put Athena down.”

  Lizzie covered her face with her hands. Even though Athena was one of the shyest wolves, she could picture her clearly. She was slim, more delicate than the others, and a tawny brown color.

  “What happened?”

  Mike piled the crispy chicken on a platter. “She couldn’t walk and her legs were spasming. Karen said she was having trouble breathing.”

  “But what was it? What made her sick?”

  Mike ran his hand through his hair, his face grim. “We’re hoping it’s an isolated thing. I was thinking we should do an autopsy…”

  Lizzie flinched at the word, which sounded both hopeless and final.

  “But Karen’s already disposed of the carcass,” he continued grimly. “She’s trying to contain it, whatever it is that killed her.”

  He lowered the lid of the grill and climbed the steps to the back door. “Come inside, Lizzie. We might as well eat.”

  She didn’t feel at all hungry. They sat at the table in silence, picking at their dinner, as the clock over the kitchen stove ticked loudly.

  After a while, Lizzie said, “Athena was one of the youngest ones, wasn’t she?”

  Mike nodded. “About three years old.” He stood, scraping their plates into the garbage and knotting the bag. “I feel really bad about it.”

  “Me too,” Lizzie said.

  And then she stiffened, realizing that her father must be planning to take the garbage out to the garage. She jumped up. “I can take that out if you want.”

  Mike looked surprised, but then nodded. “Okay. I’ll go upstairs and e-mail the board. I should let them know about Athena. We haven’t lost an animal in a couple of years.”

  Lizzie noticed the slump of his shoulders as he left the kitchen. Anything that happened to the animals, her father took personally. It was what made him a good zookeeper, Lizzie knew, but it also meant he would feel responsible for this and worry about it.

  When she was sure he was upstairs on the computer, she quickly assembled a plate of food for Tyler—some chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, and a hard roll. She covered it with foil and, juggling the bulky garbage bag in her other hand, she slipped out the side door to the garage.

  After she’d dumped the bag in the trash can she took the key out from under the flowerpot and let herself into the apartment. Tyler was waiting for her at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m starving!” he said. “I could smell that chicken all the way up here.”

  Lizzie had been excited to tell him about the lost cabin, but now she didn’t feel like talking. She handed him the plate and turned to go.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “One of the wolves died.”

  His eyes widened. “No … for real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.” He put the plate on the table, glancing at it, and she could tell how eager he was to rip off the foil and start eating. But he waited. “Was it sick?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tyler hesitated. “Well, you know, it probably lived longer here in the zoo than it would’ve in the wild.”

  “Maybe. But it was one of the young ones.”

  Tyler was quiet for a minute, watching her. Finally, he said, “The animals here, they got so many people to take care of them … your dad, and the vet, and the other zookeepers. If that wolf died here, I just think it would have died anywhere. You know? Probably nothing anybody could do.”

  Lizzie sighed. She knew he was trying to make her feel better. “I guess you’re right.” She took a deep breath. “But my dad says one of the other wolves looked sick today.”

  “Oh,” Tyler said. “You think it’s something catching?”

  Lizzie nodded. “I go to Wolf Woods every d
ay, and I saw a couple of them lying down this morning. But they were in the back of the pen, not close enough for me to see if anything was wrong.”

  “Hey.” Tyler brightened. “We could go there tonight if you want. To check on them. Want to? Would that make you feel better?”

  Lizzie looked at him in surprise. “Now? It’s dark out.” She peered through the apartment windows into the yard, which was a blur of shapes and textures in the soft moonlight.

  “We’ll take a flashlight.”

  Lizzie hesitated. “I’d have to wait till my dad is in bed.”

  “Sure.” Tyler flashed a wide grin. “It’s not like I’ve got somewhere to go.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie decided. “Let’s do it. I think it would make me feel better.”

  “Cool. When?”

  “I’ll come back in a couple of hours.”

  Tyler nodded. “I’ll be ready.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Lizzie?”

  She smiled at him, warmed by the way he said her name.

  “Yeah?”

  He was still standing at the table, and she knew it must be taking every ounce of his self-control not to start eating. “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Sure.”

  “And for letting me stay here.”

  Lizzie nodded. “No problem. Better than the elephant house, right?”

  “Yeah. A lot better.”

  “See? Told you.”

  Chapter 10

  A NIGHT VISITOR

  THAT NIGHT, AS soon as Mike’s breathing turned heavy and slow in the next room, Lizzie got dressed and grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen drawer. She opened the back door quietly and stepped into the dark yard, sending one guilty glance at her father’s darkened window. Going into the zoo at night felt no different from walking around her own yard—it was so familiar to her. Still, if Mike woke up for some reason and found her gone, he would be worried. Tyler was sitting on the stoop outside the garage. She jumped when she saw him shifting in the blackness.

  “What are you doing out here? Somebody might see you!”

  “I was feeling cooped up,” he said. “I’m not used to being inside so much. And anyway, it’s dark now. Nobody can see me. I blend in a lot better than you do.”