by Kurt Caswell
“Why would we do that?” I asked.
“So we can take their teeth,” she said, and then she laughed and everyone laughed with her.
I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but no matter. We rounded a great curve in the freeway and on the opposite side, blowing through the snow-covered road, a long yellow bus pushed up the pass and into the night. I read the words on the side as it went by: Ganado Unified School District.
“That’s them!” I said, and everyone cheered.
We turned around at the next exit, and started after them. Our little bus was slow and bumpy up the great hill. We chased the Ganado bus all the way to Gardner, Colorado, where they finally stopped for fuel. We pulled into the station behind them. By this time it had stopped snowing and the roads were clear.
“Mary!” I said.
“Hey!” she said, and we embraced warmly.
“You guys made it,” Mary said. “We wondered.”
“We wondered too,” I said.
Mary and I agreed that we had come too far to give up now. We had a cold night ahead of us, and the kids were complaining about everything. But the weather had improved, and we were almost there.
“Let’s go,” Mary said when the drivers had finished fueling up. “Let’s make this happen.”
“We’ll follow you,” I said.
I stepped onto the bus and sat down. We were off again.
“Hey, Mr. Caswell,” Vanessa said from the back. “Is that your girlfriend?” All the girls giggled.
“No,” I said. “That’s Ms. Juzwik from Ganado. She’s a teacher over there.”
“Looks like your girlfriend,” someone else said.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “She looks like your girlfriend.”
“Well, she’s not,” I said. “I’d tell you if she was.”
“Girlfriend! Girlfriend! Girlfriend,” they all chanted together.
Redd started up the bus, and we followed the red taillights of the Ganado bus into the dark night.
A few minutes after eleven, we arrived at Mission: Wolf, tired and cold and hungry. Mary and I left the kids on the buses and walked up a dark road to the light in the window of a ramshackle cabin. The ground was bare of snow. The sharp wind blew through our clothes. We passed a series of fences and realized the dark motions behind them were wolves. We knocked on the door. A rush of warm air and smoke blew over our faces. Inside, a half dozen bearded men and one woman crowded around a woodstove. I asked for Kevin, whom I had made arrangements with over the telephone.
“That’s me,” Kevin said, and got up to shake my hand. He was tall and lean, and his face looked weathered by the mountain air. “We almost gave up on you,” he said.
“We did too,” I said. “The roads were slow.”
“Uh-huh,” Kevin nodded. “Well, it’s late. You can camp out there on top of the hill. Expect to see me in the morning about ten.”
I stood there with Mary in the light of the door hoping he would invite all twenty-seven of us into the warm cabin to sleep on the floor. He didn’t. We would have to brave the cold night in our tents.
We parked the two buses in a V to part the wind around our little camp. Mary and I had planned to cook supper that night, but it was late and dark, and we were too tired and too cold. Mary helped some of the kids make sandwiches, but most of them just wanted to go to sleep.
I had brought three big canvas tents from school and two cotton sleeping bags for each of the girls. It was so cold that I suggested the girls all sleep in one tent. “It’ll be warmer,” I told them.
Vanessa, Renee, and Jolanda helped me with the tent, while everyone else stayed on the bus. The wind blew across our exposed hands, and the aluminum poles numbed our fingers. We struggled to fit the poles through the loops along the tent and then to erect the huge thing in the wind. Renee tried to drive the tent stakes into the hard ground with a stone, but they bent double. We piled big rocks in the corners inside the tent, more on the windward side, and weighted down the rest of it with sleeping bags and pads. Still the wind pressed in on the walls and pushed the tent a little way across the ground.
“It’s still movin’,” Renee said.
“Okay,” I said. “Get everyone off the bus and into the tent. Then it’ll stay put.”
The girls filed off the bus and through the tent door. I helped them arrange their sleeping bags inside.
“It stinks in here,” Jolanda said.
“And it’s freezing,” Vanessa said. “I’m too cold.”
“Yeah,” everyone said. “It stinks and it’s too cold.”
Then Vanessa said, “Mr. Caswell! This sleeping bag’s somehow!”
“Yeah, and they stink too,” Jolanda said.
They did stink. The bags probably hadn’t been used in years. The tent smelled old and musty, much like the canvas tents I used on camping trips growing up. But the girls were out of the wind, and they buried themselves inside their sleeping bags. They looked warmer, maybe happier. I told them good night.
Redd insisted on sleeping on the bus. I had planned to use one of the canvas tents myself, but it was so cold I knew I could never heat that big thing up alone. I asked Mary if I could bunk with her. We were not lovers; we were friends. But we were on a school trip just the same, and we wondered if it would be a problem to share a tent. We talked it over and decided that the circumstances made it acceptable. No one would likely even notice, we thought, and everyone was too cold to care. I crawled into Mary’s tent with Kuma and went to sleep.
Several times during the night I woke to the sound of wolves. They howled in chorus, bright notes pitched high, then wavering and falling. Kuma crawled out of the bag and pressed his nose to the zipper on the tent door.
I had read that some Indian peoples believe that wolf howls are lost spirits searching for a road back to the earth. In Navajo mythology, Wolf, like Coyote, is a bad omen. Hunters who see a wolf cross their path will turn back home, lest they meet bad luck or illness or even death. A Navajo could never be sure whether he was looking at a wolf or a wolf witch, a human being dressed in a wolf skin. Ma’iitsoh, the Navajo word for wolf, is a synonym for “witch.” Wolf is also said to have quarreled with his wife about sex in the myth-time and thereby helped bring about the separation of the sexes. Because the men and women could not get along, they went to opposite sides of the river. Years passed, and the women grew weak and mad with desire. They masturbated and gave birth to monsters that later plagued the world. The men also masturbated in excess, but no evil survived them. After long suffering, the women begged the men to take them back. The men did, but only after the women agreed that men should decide about matters of sex. The story suggests that desire must come into balance with control, that men and women need each other, that the world is incomplete without both their energies. In contrast to Coyote, Wolf is considered the leader of all hunting animals. In that sense he is also dependable. In the puebloan cultures, Wolf is associated with the East. It is also said that a person who puts a wolf’s earwax into his own ears will be able to listen beyond his ken.
As I lay half-awake in the tent, I heard a low growl that increased in intensity until it became a diesel engine groaning to life and evening out into a steady hum. I sat up. That’s my bus! Our bus! Were they leaving? Had Redd gathered the girls and decided to go home? Would I have to ride back with Mary on the Ganado bus? It was too cold to go out and have a look, or at least I didn’t want to. Or maybe I didn’t care. I didn’t want to care. Mary stirred next to me, turned over, lay still. If they wanted to leave me here, I thought, then I wanted them to go. I was not going out into the cold to stop them. I lay back down and fell away into a troubled sleep again, my dreams traveling in and out of wolf-song and the hum of the bus engine in the bitter cold.
I rose early to Kuma’s soft whimpering at the tent door. I pulled on my pants and warm fleece anorak, a little panicked and curious about the bus. It was still there, and I could see Redd asleep at the wheel. The sky was blue and eve
r clear, and Kuma headed out to have a look around.
We were camped on a knoll rising out of a broad field that sloped down and away and back up to the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I stood for a moment looking out. The world was alive and beautiful. The rocky landscape was softened by pockets of conifers and the tall dry grasses running up the hills and talking in the wind. It came in waves, the wind in the grasses, and they made a soft shushing sound as they folded and moved together like birds. Kuma worked the edges of the camp, tumbling down through the grasses, pausing here, pausing there, and for the moment, at least, I was happy we had come.
I built a fire in the fire pit and went to check on the girls. Their tent was empty. I hesitated a moment before realizing what had happened: they must have spent the night on the bus with Redd. He must have started the engine to keep them warm.
Mary was up now too, and she knelt down for Kuma, who went to her now to say hello. She ruffed him about the ears and chest and shoulders, and she said hello and good morning, and wasn’t it beautiful and clear after the storm. We agreed we should get breakfast started, so I needed to get on the bus for the food. I knocked on the door. Redd woke up and let me on. The girls were asleep in there, spread out across the seats near the back of the bus.
Mary and I had the meal sorted out, the stove set up, and the bacon frying when Vanessa, Renee, and Teresa got up. They approached the fire and stood warming themselves.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Mr. Caswell,” Renee said. “Teresa wants to ask you somethin’.”
Teresa stepped forward. She was very thin and wore her hair cut short like a boy. When I met her in class on my first day at school, she asked me if I had taken the Lord into my life, and if not, she said, she could help. I politely declined.
“Yeah,” Teresa said. “I have somethin’ to ask you.”
I waited. She looked guilty, like she’d done something bad and wanted to confess.
“Yes?” I said. “What is it?”
“Hey,” she said finally, “can we go over there and get some Skoal? And will you buy it for us? We don’ got no money.”
Chewing tobacco was one of the many substances on the contraband list at school. A lot of students at Borrego chewed tobacco at home, however, and for some reason, especially girls.
“No,” I said. “You can’t buy Skoal. Of course not.”
“Ahh, c’mon,” Vanessa said.
“No. There’s nowhere to go anyway. We’re in the mountains,” I said.
“Yeah,” Teresa said. “There’s a town way over there. Redd will take us to the store over there on the bus. He said so.”
“No.”
“My grandma lets me at home,” Vanessa said.
“No way,” I said.
“You don’t even like us,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah,” Renee said. “And why were you sleeping with Ms. Juzwik, anyway,” and they went back to the fire.
They were right. I shouldn’t have slept in Mary’s tent, but I was going to do it again if only to insist that it was no big deal. And it was true I didn’t like them, not at that moment anyway. They had bitched all the way here, and they were bitching now. Their request was unreasonable. I didn’t care who let them chew at home. I felt like Redd was in no position to offer them a trip into town for chew. I knew I was being stubborn, defiant, even arrogant, because I felt like the trip was a flop. I felt like I was a failure. But who did he think he was, anyway? He drove the bus. He wasn’t a teacher. I was in charge here, not Redd.
After a good breakfast of pancakes, bacon, and fried eggs cooked on our gas stove, Mary and I asked our students to introduce themselves to each other. The Borrego girls huddled together around Redd, but each of them said their name and where they were from and shook hands with their exchange partners. It seemed to go all right.
Mary and I went to work on the dishes. I heard a couple of the Ganado kids laughing about how the Borrego girls talked. I hadn’t been aware of them speaking with an accent, but apparently they did, likely because they spoke Navajo as their first language and English as their second. Most of the Ganado kids spoke English as their first language and only broken Navajo, if they spoke any at all. In this part of the world, it seemed that speaking two languages fluently (English and Navajo) did not indicate intelligence and worldliness; rather, it was a sign of growing up poor in the isolated hills. Most of the Ganado kids had working parents. Borrego families, with the exception of those who worked at the school, mostly relied on government assistance. Every spring, a good number of Borrego kids missed school to harvest pinyon nuts in the mountains with their families. They sold the nuts at roadside stands. For many Borrego families, this kind of extra income was the difference between making it and not making it from month to month, season to season. The Ganado kids had traveled a bit more and spent more time in cities with white influence, like Gallup, and even Flagstaff, maybe Phoenix and Albuquerque. They ate in restaurants and went to movies. Many of the Borrego kids had yet to experience much of the world off the reservation. If they went to town with their parents at all, they might know the inside of a grocery store like Bashas’, perhaps a hardware store, and Wal-Mart. Other than that, town life was a mystery to them. Bringing these two groups together was going to be more challenging than Mary and I had anticipated.
Kevin came down from the cabin to give us a tour of Mission: Wolf. We followed him into the warm sun near the wolf pens. Kevin was one of only a few full-time volunteers. The rest of the people living at Mission: Wolf were sometime college students and travelers holing up in the woods. One of them lived in a shelter he built in a nearby gully out of aspen boughs and black plastic sheeting. Mission: Wolf offered him the space to camp out in exchange for volunteer labor.
Kevin offered a short history of Mission: Wolf. Founded in 1986 by Kent Weber as a sanctuary for captive-born wolves and wolf-dogs, its mission is to educate the public about wolves and habitat protection. Over the years, donations have made it possible to buy fencing, build modest housing for volunteers and facilities for visitors, and purchase more land. Kevin told us that Weber and other Mission: Wolf volunteers travel the U.S. with a few wolves, making appearances at schools and in communities to talk about wolves and wolf recovery and about habitat protection. The Ambassador Wolf Program’s success is founded on the public’s thirst for real encounters with wolves. No film or lecture or book of photographs can compare to meeting a real wolf, Kevin said. When people meet a wolf for the first time, Kevin told us, they discover what beautiful and mysterious creatures they are, and often become wolf advocates.
The need for a sanctuary and education center like Mission: Wolf coincided with a growing public interest that rose out of efforts by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reestablish wolves across portions of their former range in the lower forty-eight states, especially in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. For Kevin, and for Mission: Wolf, the eradication of the wolf from these lands during the early 1900s is an indication of a much larger problem, that of the desire to subdue and take dominion over nature. If we can learn to respect the wolf, Kevin told us, and all creatures of the wild, we will protect the habitat the wolf needs to survive. The same becomes true the other way around: by regarding wild lands as sacred and worthy of our care and protection, we will also protect the animals that live there.
Kevin led us through the maze of pens and paused to talk briefly about each of the wolves, how they came to Mission: Wolf, and why people should not raise wolves as pets. “Wolves are not dogs,” he said. “They don’t follow household rules like dogs. People who try to keep a wolf as a pet are often attracted to the cute little puppies. But they soon grow up. And they prove to be wild animals, not pets.” Weber rescued a number of wolves that had injured their owners, or their owners’ children. “It’s not the wolves’ fault,” Kevin said. “They’re just being wolves. They don’t belong in people’s houses.”
We stopped in front of a pen housing a huge black tim
ber wolf called Shaman, one of the first wolves to tour the country in the Ambassador Program. Weber had recently retired Shaman because he had become too aggressive and unpredictable in front of audiences. “He was one of the best for a long time,” Kevin said. “Maybe he just got sick of being on display all the time.” A smooth path marked the line where he paced back and forth along the fence, hour after hour, day after day. As Kevin talked, Shaman approached the fence, his bright yellow eyes penetrating the group. The kids went silent and still. Then Shaman set to pacing again. Although he had never lived in the wild, something wild and untamable lived in Shaman, as if he sensed there was a larger world beyond the pen.
Kevin led us on to a great mound of road-killed elk and deer parts, wild game scraps from local butchers, and stillborn livestock from area ranches, all donations. The pile was partially frozen and blackened by the cold mountain air. The Borrego girls scowled and whispered to each other, pointing at the weirdly shaped frozen babies in the pile. The boys from Ganado spied the axes and machetes lying about and pushed and poked at each other, enthused.
Kevin told us that it was feeding day and that we could help feed the wolves if we wanted. Everyone agreed to help. A few more resident volunteers came down from the cabin. We used the axes and machetes to break apart the frozen pieces and sort them into buckets, equal parts of fat and muscle and bone. The meat thawed in the sun as we worked with it. Our hands and sleeves became stained and bespattered with blood.
We separated into small groups and followed the volunteers to the wolf pens. A couple of the Ganado girls had made a good effort to connect with the Borrego girls, but there was still little interaction between the two groups. The Borrego girls stayed together to feed the wolves, and I ended up with a Ganado group.