This Is Not a Werewolf Story

by Sandra Evans

  “My goodness!” the ranger says. He’s surprised by what I do, but he doesn’t move his hand away. “Can you believe it?” he calls to the others. “Look at this gray one here. He’s licking my hand. Tame as a puppy.”

  I keep licking. He tastes like roast beef and cheddar cheese.

  Feet surround me. Black shoes, polished. Hiking boots, expensive. Tennis shoes, very well used.

  “Well, I’ll be,” someone says.

  I lick the ranger’s hand some more and then slowly place my front paw on his hand. His face is familiar, his voice is familiar, and so is the feel of his hand in mine. What is happening? The hair on the back of my neck stands up, but not from fear. From wonder. The magic must be working again.

  “Now, that’s a new one. I never seen that before,” says a woman. “That wolf is trying to tell you something, I think.”

  I do my best to nod my head and wag my tail.

  I must have done a pretty good job, because they all stop talking.

  “Did you see that?” the woman in the hiking boots finally asks. Good style and good brains. I reach over with my front paw and pat the toe of her boot very gently.

  “I’ve got goose bumps,” someone says. “That animal is trying to say something to us.”

  “I’ve never seen the likes of it.” The woman sounds amazed. “Not in thirty years working these woods. He’s thanking me for noticing. You realize that, don’t you? That wolf’s not just tame. He’s downright civilized.”

  The ranger gets down low to study me; he must be crouching on all fours. He looks into my eyes. I bark a happy bark. I do know him. That’s my dad.

  In the distance a shot rings out.

  “Got him!” a voice cries. “We got the cougar!”

  Chapter 27

  WHERE A WOLF IS NEVER WRONG

  Budget. That’s the word I keep hearing my dad say on his phone as he paces between a trailer and the kennel where White Wolf and I wake up.

  To my dad, it’s a bad word. He says a lot of real bad words when he’s talking about the budget—worse even than the ones Mean Jack used to use. Sometimes he slams the trailer’s screen door shut when he gets off the phone.

  To me, “budget” is a good word. It’s the reason why White Wolf and I are still here with him. The “budget” doesn’t have the money to transport two wild wolves from an island in Puget Sound all the way to Montana and “integrate” them into a new environment. There’s a red wolf exhibit at the Point Defiance Zoo, but they don’t want us. Thank goodness.

  The cougar went straight to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, where he has a cage all to himself. Since he tried to attack me and Sparrow, they consider him too dangerous to release back into the wild. Ha. Tuffman’s too wild for the wilderness. They got that right, even if they don’t know the half of it. Lock him up, boys, lock him up and throw away the key.

  The trailer where we’re staying is located at the ranger station on the far end of White Deer Woods. At first my dad keeps us out back in a big cage. It’s a huge square of chain-link fence with a cement floor and a wooden roof.

  Whenever my dad’s not at work or yelling at someone on the phone about the importance of saving the wild wolf population of this country, I do what I can to show him that I’m not a wolf like any other.

  When I see him, I sit on my hind legs with my front paws stretched out in front of me. Sort of like I’m bowing to him.

  When he greets me with a “Hey, gray wolf,” I yip in return.

  One day, instead of stretching out in a bow, I sit up and offer him my paw. He blinks at me for a long time. Then he says, “Well, I’ll be,” and takes my hand and shakes it.

  It doesn’t take long to train him. He’s a smart man. By the end of the week he opens the cage door and leads us into the trailer.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he says to us. “I’ll lose my job if they catch me with wild animals for roommates.”

  I don’t know who exactly he thinks I’m going to tell. The blue jay who hangs out near the kennel? Yeah, he’s a real chatterbox.

  My dad lives in the trailer. It’s his home.

  In the last year he must have moved away from Seattle. He must have gotten a job as a ranger in the White Deer Woods.

  But if he was living so close to the school, then why didn’t he ever come see me?

  Once we’re inside, I realize he’s been seeing me all the time.

  There are pictures of us everywhere. Pictures of the three of us at the Woodland Park Zoo with the penguins. Me in a little kiddie car on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. Me and mom standing by the sound sculpture at Magnuson Park. Me trying to eat a pinecone at Green Lake. Man, I was a dumb baby!

  I sit down in the middle of the room and look at the pictures.

  The ranger kneels next to me. He puts a hand on my back. “My family,” he says, and his voice sounds squeezed—like there’s a lump in it that won’t let the words past. “See,” he says as White Wolf walks up and sits on the other side of him, “you two are lucky. You still have each other. I’m gonna make sure it stays that way too.”

  I learn things when he talks on the phone. I learn he took the ranger job so that he can live here next to my school. Sometimes he talks to the photos of us on the wall. He asks the picture of me why I didn’t want to see him anymore, why I wrote him all those letters and told him to stay away. He says that if he hadn’t listened to me, then none of this would have happened and he and I would still be together. He says he moved out here to be as near to me as he could be, until I was ready to see him again.

  I never wrote him a letter. I don’t know what he is talking about. Did someone play a trick on us? Was it Tuffman?

  I sit close to him then. His sadness is the same as mine. We can’t say what we want to say to each other. I guess I was wrong. I guess sometimes words matter.

  One afternoon he has to go to town to get some supplies. He opens the trailer door and White Wolf and I walk straight into the cage.

  “You two must really like it here,” my dad says.

  When he comes back, I hear voices.

  “The wolves are out here,” I hear my dad saying.

  The back door opens. I smell him before I see him. Mean Jack.

  Do you know what is strange? I’m happy to see him. I push my nose through the wire, and before my dad can tell him not to, Mean Jack has his hand right in front of my mouth. I lick him all over. Beef jerky and lemonade. This is my kind of kid.

  “Never,” my dad says sternly as he comes out the door, “never do that with a wild animal. Promise me you’ll never do that again.”

  Mean Jack freezes and then yanks his hand back. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ranger. Please don’t tell Dean Swift.”

  My dad puffs his cheeks up and blows the air out. “I won’t tell him if you won’t! I promised him I’d let you guys take a look, not get your hands bitten off.”

  Mean Jack nods. It’s crazy how respectful he is with my dad. Maybe it’s the ranger uniform. Or maybe Mean Jack is a nicer kid than I thought.

  “Anyway, there’s no real danger with this gray wolf, but he’s somewhat of an anomaly,” my dad says. “You know what that is? An anomaly is something unusual. And this gray wolf loves people.”

  “Anomaly comes from the Greek,” I hear another voice say. “ ‘An’ is a prefix meaning ‘not,’ and the middle part, ‘oma,’ is a shortened form of homos, meaning ‘the same’ or ‘equal.’ So anomaly means ‘not the same.’ ”

  Mary Anne. The prettiest dictionary walking God’s green earth.

  I’m even happier to see her. I don’t mind how mad she was at me the last time I saw her. Vincent had us both fooled.

  “If this wolf is not the same as any other, then why shouldn’t I do this?” she asks, and sticks her hand into the cage. Dean Swift always says she is too impertinent.

  But I rush over and lick her hand like crazy. Wolf me is not shy, not one little bit. Sigh. Honey and blackberries.

  My dad stares at her,
but he doesn’t chew her out. That’s the power of Mary Anne. She can get away with anything. Words and beauty—a killing combination.

  “I’m conducting research,” she explains, even though nobody asked. “I’m penning a novel about a wolf family. I need to experience the precise texture of a wolf’s tongue.” She reaches through the fence and strokes my fur. “And its coat. Coarse.” She pulls out a notebook and takes the cap off her pen with her teeth. “And a little . . . sebaceous.” She lifts her hand and sniffs it, then makes a face. “Sacre bleu! For such a civilized specimen of canis lupus, he would do well to consider a bath.”

  After a minute my dad glances up to the trailer. “Where’s the other one?” he asks.

  Mary Anne shouts, “Come on, I thought you wanted to see them in the flesh.”

  “Is it safe?” I hear a worried voice ask.

  The smell of him makes my nose twitch and my lip curl up. Vincent.

  Then I see him in the doorway, chicken as usual, only this time he’s got a really good reason to be.

  “Of course,” my dad says. “Dean Swift says you’ve been asking about these wolves since the day we caught them.”

  “If you nourish even the slightest hope of illustrating my story, then you had better come feast your eyes,” Mary Anne says. “These animals are magnificent.”

  Yeah, Vincent, come on. Let me illustrate something for you with my teeth.

  The growl starts low in my throat. Mean Jack hears it first. He steps away from the kennel. But Mary Anne stands her ground, watching me with her lips moving slightly.

  Take a mental note, Mary Anne, because this is what a wolf looks like right before he attacks.

  My hair stands on end. My muscles tense, but I stay perfectly still. Then the growl in my chest explodes into a round of barks so loud every other noise disappears. Even the trees stop talking to the wind.

  I leap up against the fence. I’m taller than Vincent now, stretched long against the wire links, 155 pounds of rage. The cage rattles with the weight of me. I push my paws and chest against the metal and shake it so that it clangs and bangs.

  Vincent screams and falls to the ground like a bird that has flown into a closed window. As he falls, his arm scrapes against the cage and my outstretched claws. A strip of his shirt rips away, and a thin line of red appears on his skin.

  My dad looks at Mean Jack. Mean Jack looks at my dad. They both look down at Vincent. The whole time, Mary Anne stares at me.

  So that’s all it takes to get her undivided attention.

  “No!” my dad shouts.

  I jump down. I tuck my tail under and creep to the back of the cage. I curl up against White Wolf, who has watched it all so calmly. I sink my nose onto my paws. In one second I have ruined everything. My father will think I’m as wild as any other wolf. He’ll forget all that I’ve done to show him who I really am.

  “I’ve never seen that wolf do that,” my dad says as he helps Vincent sit up. “Are you all right?” He pulls Vincent’s arm out to look at the cut.

  Vincent looks like he’s seen a ghost. He should. I’m the ghost he made.

  “It’s a superficial flesh wound,” Mary Anne announces after she glances at Vincent’s arm. “It may or may not leave a scar.”

  “That wolf is dangerous,” Vincent says, moving away on his knees. “You’re gonna have to put it down,” he says to my dad. “That’s what happens, isn’t it? When a wild animal attacks a human? It gets put down.”

  I feel a snarl start in my throat. I glance at White Wolf. Her body is tense. She moves forward slightly.

  “Now, see here—” my dad starts to say.

  But Mary Anne interrupts. “Nobody knows what you are saying, Vincent. Nobody saw that wolf attack you. I, for one, will testify that it was the fence and not the wolf that caused your injury. Everyone here will say the same thing.”

  My dad and Mean Jack nod. “I think the lady has made a fine point,” says my dad.

  There’s a long silence, and then Mean Jack says in a voice like he can’t believe it, “It was like the wolf had a score to settle.”

  I sit up. My humans are smarter than I thought.

  “That wolf despises Vincent.” Mary Anne nods.

  Interesting. Whatever Vincent did to Mary Anne since I saw them last must have been pretty rotten, because she sure doesn’t like him anymore.

  “All I know,” my dad repeats, “is that I have never seen that wolf act that way.”

  “Mr. Ranger here and me can vouch for this wolf. So, Vinnie, you gonna tell me why it thinks you’re a problem?” Mean Jack asks.

  Vincent starts walking really fast up the little steps to the back door.

  “You wouldn’t sink so low as to tease an animal, wouldja?”

  I’ll never call Jack “Mean” again, and that’s a promise.

  I slink over, really low to the ground. Then I push my nose out toward my dad. He scratches the top of it gently, the way I like.

  All of them—even Vincent at the back door—stare at me. The blue jay comes to sit on the lowest branch of the cedar that shades the kennel. I could swear she winks at me.

  Then Jack, Mary Anne, and my dad turn. Now all of us stare at Vincent.

  My dad asks, “Dean Swift said you take your dirt bike out on the trails in the woods. Did you come across these wolves once and harm them somehow?” He glances back at White Wolf. He noticed the scar in her flank when we first got here.

  Vincent looks at his feet. He digs his toe into the plank of the step and shakes his head.

  “You can tell me the truth. It would be the right thing to do.” My dad walks toward him.

  Vincent runs back into the trailer. We hear the front door slam.

  “There’s a mystery here,” Mary Anne says. She caps her pen and sits down on the bottom step.

  Jack sits down on the step below. “Well, I, for one, ain’t got nothin’ better to do this summer than solve it,” he says.

  I sit down and look at them. I’m grateful. Even though I know Jack has the attention span of a fruit fly and Mary Anne will probably spend days looking up synonyms for the word “mystery.” Even though I know the chances of the two of them working together well enough and long enough to figure this out are slim, to say the least. But it’s funny to think that of all the kids I’ve ever known, these two are turning out to be my best friends.

  The mobster and the novelist.

  Chapter 28

  WHERE TUFFMAN’S NEFARIOUS DEEDS ARE REVEALED

  A few evenings later there’s a knock at the door. Dad gets up to answer it. He must be tired because he forgets to send us outside.

  “Hello, hello,” a cheery voice says.

  I sniff. My tongue rolls out of my mouth, I’m so happy. Dean Swift.

  He comes in and sets a shoe box down on the table.

  “It’s been a few weeks since . . .” Dean Swift stops like he doesn’t want to say the rest.

  My dad finishes for him. “Since the search for Raul was called off.”

  “This has been a hard couple of months for all of us, and you especially,” says Dean Swift. “But I have discovered something that might answer at least one question.”

  I stretch and crawl out from under the table. I come at Dean Swift very low, on my belly almost, with my tail droopy and my ears back. Dad is looking at me, waving his hand to tell me to get back under the table, but I know better than he does. If anyone can help, it’s Dean Swift.

  “Is that one of the wolves?” asks the dean. He doesn’t sound as surprised as you’d expect.

  “Yeah.” Dad nods. He scratches his head. “The white one’s over there, in front of the TV. She really likes prime-time dramas. This one stays close to the food. The darnedest thing—he loves cereal.”

  Dean Swift looks down at me. I scoot up closer and try to put words into my eyes so that he can see the Raul me inside them.

  Instead, what I see stuns me. Above Dean Swift’s head I see the shadow of an eagle’s head. And behi
nd him, I see wings. Well, not really wings. More like a hologram of wings—like I could push my hand through them. Like the ghost of a skin.

  In his eyes there’s a flash that tells me that above my wolf head he sees the shadow of my Raul skin. He smiles and touches me above my eyes.

  We know each other in the woods. That’s what he said to Ms. Tern. This is what he meant. This is the shadow my mother saw when she hunted with Tuffman. This is why she wouldn’t eat his kills. This is how she figured out his evil secret.

  Dean Swift takes a big breath. He smiles at me and then pushes the shoe box he brought toward my dad. “I found this among the belongings of our former PE teacher. He left us suddenly.” The dean glances down at me. “In fact, he disappeared the night the cougar got shot.”

  There’s a long silence. Then he says, “Jimmy, there is no question that I made a serious mistake. Not once have you blamed me, and yet you should. I should have kept track of where Raul went on the weekends. I thought he was with you. You thought he was with me. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could have been so negligent.”

  My dad looks sad, like he does whenever anyone talks about me.

  “Well, here’s part of the answer.” The dean opens the box. “It was Mr. Tuffman.” He pulls out a couple of yellow notepads.

  “Do you see the traces here?” He points to the top sheet on one of the pads. “He pressed down so hard with his pen when he wrote that it left the imprint of the word on the next page. I took a pencil and gently shaded over the blank page.”

  He reads aloud, “ ‘Dear Dad, We have been very busy. I go fishing with Sparrow and the Cubs. I have a lot of friends. I don’t want to see you yet. You remind me too much of Mother. Please send more money because my shoes are too small. All my love, your son, Raul.’ ”

  My dad swallows and his lower lip moves a little. Don’t cry, Dad. Please don’t cry.

  “How much money did you send him?” Dean Swift asks.

  My dad puts his head in his hands and shakes it. “I don’t know. Couple hundred—a thousand. It doesn’t matter. The money doesn’t matter.”