Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “That why you rushed over to help us tonight?” I ask. “Civic responsibility?”

  “In my experience, cops can make a problem where there wasn’t one.”

  I find his eyes. “There was a problem, Duncan.”

  After a long moment he says, “My apologies. I misread.” Then, “You don’t seem like the kind of woman who couldn’t handle a pair of drunken eejits.”

  “Why should I have to?”

  He tilts his head to acknowledge this. “You’re not in any danger here, Inti. I’m watching.”

  The words prickle my neck. Some place deep, there is a thrill.

  “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.”

  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.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anyone. It takes me by surprise.

  I make a decision, and say, “Can I show you something?”

  “Where?”

  “Inside.”

  He doesn’t answer, considering. Will he let the wolf in? He leads the way into the warmth. The back door opens straight into the stone-and-timber kitchen. I stand by the windowsill and turn up the volume on my phone.

  Duncan waits warily by the door and doesn’t reach for the light, leaving us to stand in the red glow of the stove coals.

  “Come here,” I say.

  Slowly, with a pained kind of shuffle, he does, he stands close, each of us near to the phone.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I’m not sure he wants to, but he surrenders, lids falling shut. I press Play on the audio file and the sound slowly swells to envelop us.

  At first, birdsong. A call passed back and forth between two birds. The cries of ravens flying overhead and the air swooshing by their wings. The chirps of smaller birds, crickets in the grass, leaves rustling. All the tiniest sounds of a forest, an ecosystem in balance and so calming I see Duncan’s entire demeanor change, the muscles in his face and shoulders relax. And then comes something else, raising the hairs on my neck.

  It sounds like a distant ocean.

  Or the first stirrings of a storm.

  Wind in the canopy of trees.

  “That’s the sound of wolves whispering.”

  Duncan opens his eyes.

  “Two separate packs, speaking to each other as they draw near.”

  It is eerie and so beautiful.

  “Nobody knew they did this until they were recorded,” I say. “An accident.”

  I want him to see them the way I do. I knew playing him this would swallow us and it has.

  Duncan lifts my hand to his lips. “You’re frozen,” he murmurs, and leads me to his bedroom.

  I know this dark. I have lost myself in it before. His hands are mine, and his lips and his tongue, and I am inside him, carried deep, far from air. There is no light, only his skin and what it feels, his touch alongside mine and too much and enough to drown in.

  * * *

  I wake to gentle fingers along my hairline.

  Full afternoon sun lights his face. “You’re alive.”

  I barely feel that way.

  He is sitting beside me on the bed, and the collie is asleep in the crook of my knees. I stay where I am, anchored by both. “How long did I sleep?”

  “It’s two P.M.”

  “Oh my god.” I struggle to sit up. “Sorry.”

  He shakes his head a fraction, studying me.

  My skin feels raw to the touch; the soft sheets have become rough. Aggie calls when I get this way “sensation-fatigued” and I have only known it a small handful of times. A kind of dulling of my mirror-touch.

  “You okay?”

  I nod. “I have to go.”

  “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I’ll walk. I need the walk.”

  “I don’t like you wandering around out there alone.”

  “Didn’t you learn anything last night?”

  This makes him smile.

  At the door I pat the dog for a few long moments; he gazes lovingly up at me and makes me want to stay. “What’s his name?”

  “Fingal.”

  “Hello, Fingal.”

  The dog greets me silently.

  Duncan’s expression isn’t as transparent, but even so, if I spend too much time lingering here I really will stay: as exhausted as I am I still want more of him, and more. I turn for the trees.

  7

  At home I chop firewood because Aggie has let the fire go out. My breath makes clouds of the crisp air. Gall watches me from the paddock, ravens dotting the grass around her. I pause and peer back.

  “What do you think of all this?” I ask her.

  She tosses her head.

  “Would you like to stay?”

  No movement this time. She is undecided.

  I gather an armful of wood and carry it inside, kneeling before the fireplace. Twigs and newspaper for tinder. Small slices of wood to form a teepee. Aggie is curled inside a blanket on the window seat, reading.

  “What happened?” I ask her, of the fire. She knows not to let it go out.

  You didn’t come home, she signs.

  “Did your legs stop working?”

  The woodpile is outside.

  It stalls me. The match I forgot burns my fingertips. “Shit.” I light another and lift it to the paper, watching it blacken and curl and smoke. The flame passes its way through the rest of the material, sputtering into life. I rented this place over the phone without having seen it so we’d have somewhere to move straight into. It is smaller and more run-down than I expected, its furnishings and decorations belonging to another time, but we don’t need much. Aggie went outside for the first few days, short walks and wanderings to discover the area, and then it was less often and then one day she stopped altogether and now the very thought of leaving these walls terrifies her. I didn’t think about the heating, about the woodpile beyond her reach. “I’m sorry,” I tell my sister. “I’m really sorry. I’ll make sure I bring more in for you.” And I’ll buy her an electric heater, for emergencies. And I won’t stay out overnight again. I should never have left her so long.

  I sit opposite her in the window seat, our raised knees touching. She shares her blanket with me.

  “The wolves are free.”

  Aggie smiles. Bravo. Were you out celebrating?

  I nod.

  Then you’ve made friends?

  “I don’t need friends.”

  She considers this and between us hangs the question. Where were you, then? But she doesn’t ask it and I don’t answer it, and I could cry right now just to end this silence. Instead she passes me the book and I read it to her, my voice wobbly but growing stronger, and as she listens she rests her cheek against the glass and it is so cold on my face. But for my trip to the grocery store and some bread baking, this is how we spend the rest of our weekend, reading and entwined.

  * * *

  On Monday I am the first to work and so I’m alone when I realize why it took the Abernethy Pack so long to abandon their pen—it was because they didn’t want to leave their daughter, pretty Number Thirteen, who is curled beneath tree roots in the back corner of the cage where we couldn’t see her. But leave her they did.

  Evan arrives with a handful of yellow wildflowers. “Marsh marigolds for you, my dear, to brighten your morning,” he says. “Caltha palustris. I found them on my walk, poking their way up through the frost. They’re some of the first of the season.” He places them in a glass of water and puts them on the desk beside me. Before I can thank him he is taken by the sight of Thirteen alone in her cage. “Oh no. What
are you doing in there, sweetheart? I’m surprised they left her.”

  “They stayed as long as they could,” I say.

  I head out, on the hunt for an answer. It’s unlikely I’ll ever discover why her pack left her there, and why she alone decided to stay, but I’m going to try.

  * * *

  In a landscape this big you need height to find wolves. They wear GPS collars but first we have to be able to locate them and get close enough to download the data stored in these collars, and we do that by tuning in to their individual radio frequencies, most easily done by air.

  Our pilot is called Fergus Monroe, and he stinks of booze.

  “You okay to fly?” I ask him, making no secret of my skepticism.

  Fergus laughs. “Aye, of course. Night on the drink’s never stopped me before.” He is wiry and orange haired, and has a boyish smile despite his hangover. I’d be more worried about the fact that he’s clearly still inebriated if we had any other option, but since he’s the only pilot in the area with his own plane and a mind to help us, I’m going up in the air with him today, and there’s no point dwelling on it.

  I strap myself into the little plane and Fergus starts the engine with a cheerful whoop. I wonder if he makes that sound every time he starts his plane, or if it’s for my benefit. Either way I laugh. The propellers whir and we bounce along the grass of the tiny airstrip, and then up we go, stuttering woozily into the air, seemingly defying the rules of physics. My stomach bottoms out and I have to breathe through the sudden nausea.

  “How long have you had her?” I call over the sound of the engine. We have headpieces on to talk, but it’s still an intense roar of noise.

  “Coming on twenty years now. And she’s a hell of a lot older than that!”

  I must look alarmed at this, because he glances back and chuckles. “Don’t worry, she just keeps on going, the old lassie. Never failed me yet.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” I reply, which makes him laugh like he’s escaped from the local sanatorium.

  I have a map on my tablet that I mark off as we do wide circles, and my radio tracker is ready at hand. Fergus knows the area well, and where the herd animals go for water and grazing—the most recent GPS pings we have came from these hot spots, so we start from them and work our way out in wide circles. I keep my eyes peeled on the ground, trying to learn the land, but it’s so different from above. Shapes and colors that need making sense of. Patches of forest, long sloping mountains, bleak moors, and sheep everywhere you look. Unfenced, unpenned. I wonder if these people are trying to get their livestock eaten.

  * * *

  It takes hours to spot a wolf. We’ve been following a herd of red deer, tracking them north along a river. We fly low, gliding between undulating green and brown mountains that rear up on either side of us. We are high above sea level here, and the mountains further in the distance, those monoliths of the Cairngorms range, are still snow covered. We seem tiny in this giant place, as small as the red dots of deer grazing below.

  My eyes seize on something. “There!” I shout. Fergus circles around to give us a better view.

  It’s the Glenshee Pack, minus Number Ten. They’re on the trail of the herd, some distance behind but gaining quickly, loping over long stretches of yellow grass. When they hear the hum of the plane they look up, and as we soar overhead they scatter quickly into a copse of pinewoods where we can no longer see them. I grin, giving a whoop of my own.

  “They’re a sight, aren’t they?” Fergus cries.

  “A bloody beautiful sight!”

  There is always lingering fear that they’re sick or injured or dead, so to see this pack intact, each of its members healthy and on the hunt, is electrifying, it is joy.

  Close enough now, I connect to the GPS collars the wolves wear and download their most recent data. Each collar takes about three minutes, so by the time I’ve done the first couple of wolves the rest have scattered too far for me to catch. But getting two from a pack is a good start. We can look at every location they’ve been to in the last week and start to log patterns. With enough data Zoe can create a map of their movements, and we can begin to see the packs’ territories emerge.

  “Let’s move on and find the others, I don’t want to disturb them too much while they’re hunting.”

  “You got it, boss.” Fergus steers the aircraft around in a big eastern arc, while I mark on the map where I saw the Glenshee Pack—heading through the Mounth Hills on the south side of the park. I wonder at the size of the territory they seem to be carving out for themselves.

  As we fly over long stretches of peat bog and marshland, Fergus asks, “Do you know how it used to be here?”

  “Forest?”

  “Aye, that’s right. All of the woodland that once covered this area was burned down so as to smoke out the wolves and give them nowhere to hide, so they say.”

  I am startled, and turn in my seat to look at him.

  “A purge, of sorts,” he says, seeming unbothered by my interest, lost in the story. “Three wolf hunts a year were required by the old kings, and men being punished were made to pay for their crimes in wolf tongues. Even Mary, Queen of Scots came up here to hunt wolves for sport. An entire nation out for their blood. The beasts had no chance. But they did survive here longer than down in England and Wales. They gave it a good shot.” He fiddles with something on the dash, and then, as though I have asked him a question, says, “There’s all kinds of stories about the last wolf of Scotland. Every district has its own claim, and all of them violent. But probably the last wolf was hiding out somewhere, and died alone. My guess, anyway.”

  I close my eyes, overcome.

  We don’t find the Tanar Pack, but as dusk is nearing and we decide to head home, we loop around to the western edge of the national park and happen upon the Abernethy Pack.

  Or one of its members, at least: breeding male Number Nine.

  He is in a forest clearing when I shout for Fergus to circle around and get lower. It is a stroke of exquisite luck to spot him here like this. He’s come a long way from his cage, which means he’s on the hunt. This is no easy feat on his own, which makes it stranger still that he left his stepdaughter behind—wolves hunt best in packs, the more members the better. His new mate, Number Six, should be here with him, too. And so it occurs to me. Number Six must be pregnant. Only the need to build herself a den for the impending litter could explain why she isn’t part of this hunt, and why she left her daughter behind.

  The thought fills me with excitement but I keep my eyes on the huge gray wolf, the creature I have begun to equate with the health of this project, the strongest of them all. He has always been a mighty creature, larger than any wolf I’ve seen, but more than that, there is a stillness in him, a calm certainty in his eyes. As we circle lower he looks up and spots the plane. We are close enough that I can see his handsome face clearly, his golden eyes. He is more at peace, free in his habitat, than he was in the cage.

  Instead of running to take cover like most wolves do, he stands his ground and gazes up at us, watching. Daring us to land and come for him, daring us to try.

  It sends a shiver inside me of great, overwhelming awe.

  “My god,” I hear Fergus say distantly.

  I’ve no breath to reply.

  Nine waits for us to move on, and as we fly away from him my stomach bottoms out because I can see very clearly how close he has traveled to the edge of the forest, to where there is farmland just over the stream.

  * * *

  Some part of me must know, because I begin to tune in to Nine’s radio collar frequency far more often over the next days than I tune in to any other wolf’s. A week passes uneventfully; I am beginning to relax when on the tenth day I switch to his frequency and hear the mortality code.

  * * *

  The collar might have been lost or damaged. The wolves chew free of them sometimes. It could be lying on the grass somewhere.

  But when Duncan calls and s
ays my name I can hear it in his voice and I know, of course I know. I knew before it happened.

  The word is cut free of me without my permission. “No.”

  “One of the wolves has been shot dead. I’m sorry, Inti.”

  * * *

  I know whose farm it will be even before I’m told.

  Red McRae’s land is in the northwestern corner of the park and borders the Abernethy Forest, where we set Number Nine’s pack free. He owns an enormous expanse of land, rolling hills dotted with hundreds of black and white sheep. Red and Duncan are waiting for us at the sheep yards. Niels and I climb out of the car. I opted not to bring Evan—this will upset him too much.

  “We’ll show you to the carcass and you can get the damn thing off my property,” Red says by way of greeting.

  Duncan meets my eyes and there is pity there, and I must look away from it or scream. I want to shake that pity out of him so hard it hurts.

  We start the long walk together, the silent four of us.

  I see his body long before we reach it. Gray fur nestled into the earth. Cradled by it. He is lying beside a stream that borders the farm, and he is on the forest side of the stream, and as I make sense of this I realize he has been shot without having crossed over onto McRae’s land.

  Wild, floundering despair and a rage so hot I think I will scream, or vomit, or turn and strangle Red by the throat. Instead I sink to the ground beside Nine and place my trembling hands in his fur as I never would have done when he was alive.

  “This is illegal,” I hear Niels say. “He’s not on your land.”

  “I thought it was a wild dog,” Red replies, unworried.

  They fade into the background and all I am is this wolf, all I see is the beauty of him, and the power even now, even so reduced. Why didn’t I come to him when I knew he was straying too close to danger? Why didn’t I come and move him along somehow? The strongest of them. The mightiest. The most at home here. Snuffed out.