Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  “You ever wondered why conservationists tend to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds? They’ve got money. They don’t have to rely on the land to survive, they aren’t scraping by, one day to the next.”

  “I understand that the impact of conservation has not fallen equally on rural and urban shoulders, and that we need to share the burden of change equitably,” I say. “I do get that, Duncan. Everyone here seems to think I have some vendetta, but the only thing I have against farmers is that they seem to have something against me.”

  “Your project threatens their livelihood.”

  “It doesn’t, actually. They just don’t want to share.” I think of my father. “You can rely on the land and you can work it, and you can feed it and care for it at the same time. You can reduce your impact. That’s got nothing to do with money. We have a responsibility to reduce our impact. Rewilding is how we fight climate change, and everyone seems to have forgotten that that’s the only thing that matters anymore. We certainly don’t matter.” I pause and then add, “Maybe we ought to just wipe out the human race and show some mercy to the poor trampled Earth.”

  “That’s just ecofascism.”

  I’m surprised, and laugh.

  “It must be frustrating,” he says, and I wait for him to elaborate. “Being smarter than everyone and not being listened to.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “I’m serious,” he says. “You’re here to help and all you get is animosity.” Duncan sits forward again. “You have a right to be angry. I would be.” His fingers lace together and it feels like he’s holding my hand. “The question is how angry.”

  “Angry enough to kill someone?” I clarify for him.

  “Nobody said anyone was dead.”

  “We’re both thinking it. And we both know the guy was scum.”

  “That’s a pretty strong opinion to have of someone you barely knew.”

  “Yes,” I agree.

  “I’ve known that man all my life,” Duncan tells me. “There’s demons that get into a head out here, in a place like this.”

  I stare at him in disbelief. “You justify his behavior all you want, Chief, but men beat their wives all over the world and it has nothing to do with where they live, and actually it doesn’t matter why they do it.”

  “If we don’t know why they do it we got no hope of helping them stop.”

  I fold my arms. “Seems to me he’s been stopped.”

  Duncan meets my eyes, doesn’t say anything.

  “You’ve got plenty of motive without bringing me and my wolves into this,” I say.

  “That’s just it, though. Nobody died out here until you and your wolves showed up.”

  “I thought nobody said anyone was dead.”

  He smiles that rare, crooked smile of his. “My mistake.” He lets a moment pass and I’m hoping this is over, that he’s going to wind it up, but instead he says, “Have you been married, Inti?”

  “No.”

  “Any serious relationships?”

  I almost fidget but hold myself still. “No.”

  “Did your parents share an abusive relationship?”

  “My parents lived on opposite sides of the world and barely knew each other.”

  “I’m trying to work out why you’re so protective of a woman you hardly know.”

  “Because someone ought to be.” I spread my hands on the table; they’re shaking. “Shouldn’t we all be? How many women have to get killed before we get angry?” My voice breaks. “Why aren’t we all angry? Why aren’t we furious, Duncan?”

  He searches my face, giving me nothing.

  I take a deep breath.

  “I didn’t kill Stuart,” I say evenly. “I have no idea what happened to him, but the guy’s probably pissed off to somewhere sunny where he doesn’t have to worry about a failing farm and his own shame staring back at him from the other side of the bed every morning.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s lying dead somewhere.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I can’t account for your whereabouts after two thirty on Sunday morning.”

  I’m getting really over this now, I want to get the fuck out of here. I take a breath and tell him the thing I couldn’t tell him in tenderness, I fling it at him like a weapon. “I didn’t kill Stuart because I can’t do someone physical harm.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I have a condition called mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain causes my body to feel the sensations I see.”

  He frowns, bewildered.

  “I’ll forward you my medical records.” There are a lot of them: it took some time to diagnose, given mirror-touch is so rare and understood by so few specialists. Even then it didn’t make much difference, having the diagnosis, as it was never a disease to be treated or a problem to be solved, but simply a different way of existing. It was only ever Mum who cared enough to help me find ways of living with the condition. Oddly, I have almost no memories of that time with the doctors.

  Duncan takes this in, watching me, turning it over in his mind. Maybe thinking back to our nights together, his wounded face, my reaction to it … He holds up his pen, taps his finger against the plastic. “All sensation?”

  I nod, not in the mood to go through the whole demonstration.

  “You can feel that? Where?”

  “On my fingers, as if the pen were in my hand.”

  His eyes widen a little. “Shit. Whatever you see, you feel?”

  “Yep.”

  “Everything, Inti?”

  “Everything.”

  There’s a long silence. I wait for him to test it further, to touch his body somewhere so he can watch me feel it and when he does I will hate him.

  Instead he says, “So it’s not exactly impossible.”

  “What?”

  “It would be difficult, but not impossible, right? To do someone harm? To end their life. It wouldn’t kill you.”

  I stare at him. Is it possible I haven’t been taking this seriously? Does he actually want me for Stuart’s murder?

  “You really think I’m capable of that?” I ask, trying to keep the hurt from my voice.

  “The only thing I know with any certainty,” Duncan replies, “is that we are all capable of it. Let’s wrap it up now, Inti, I’ve got what I needed. Thanks for coming in.”

  * * *

  Aggie has the fire blazing. It’s warm in the little cottage, and she’s reading a book with her back to the flames. I sink onto the old carpet beside her; it’s seen better days, marked here and there by coal specks from the fire. There is a red stain in the corner that I hope was wine. The whole place needs a good freshen up, and I wouldn’t mind furnishing it ourselves (everything is floral) but still, I’m growing fond of our little home. Aggie reaches to give my hand a quick squeeze without looking up. It’s one of her good days and I’m grateful for it, so weary I slump to the floor, back flat, eyes on the low ceiling. Tendrils of smoke escape the fireplace and snake their way up. My vision wavers a little, watching them. My hands rest idly on my stomach; I become aware and move them away. For a moment I imagine how Duncan might have reacted if I’d blurted it out during that interview.

  “A man disappeared,” I tell Aggie.

  From the corner of my eye I see her lower the book.

  “They’re searching the forest for him tomorrow. They’ve called for volunteers.”

  Will you go? she signs.

  I nod, and something twists within me. It’s disgusting to pretend to want to find him. This feels like a worse crime than burying him, somehow.

  Do you want me to come?

  I tilt my head to look at my sister’s face. “Would you?”

  She doesn’t answer and I know she wants to, she wants to be with me, just as I’d give anything to have her by my side, but there are chains about this little stone cottage, keeping her trapped within, and there are chains about her body, keeping her trapped within. It’s too da
rk for her to face, anyway. I can’t ask her to come. What if we found him?

  “No,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  Do you think he’s dead?

  I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Instead I give a stiff nod. All the muscles in my body seem to have seized up; I feel a thousand years old.

  Why?

  I want to admit everything. Before Alaska, I would have. What I knew, Aggie knew. But now there is a world I want to protect her from, there is violence to be kept at bay.

  “Because men like him,” I say, “don’t just leave. That’s like giving up all the things that belong to him. If he’s gone it’s because he’s dead.”

  Something passes through Aggie, a shudder of memory. She is swallowed by it and I reach for her, wanting to catch her before she is gone again but knowing too late that I’ve made a mistake. “Hey,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  Is he coming? she asks, and like each time she asks this she takes on a childlike quality that unnerves me.

  No, I sign, because this is the language she trusts.

  * * *

  We meet at the Burns stud at dawn. About sixty people have turned up to help, along with a host of local police and several sniffer dogs. Even though wolf Number Thirteen is still in the pen and we’re all worried about her, about why, my team is here—Niels, Evan, and Zoe showed up without being asked. I can see Amelia and Holly standing nearby, and clustered around a blank-faced Lainey are a few young men who must be her brothers from out of town, plus Red McRae and Mayor Oakes. Duncan and his team of cops stand out in front to give us our orders—we’re to leave no more than a couple of feet between us at all times, and we keep our eyes trained on the ground ahead of us, scanning for anything at all that could be a sign of human presence. Footprints, items of clothing, personal belongings. Anything unusual is worth pointing out. He doesn’t say that we’re looking for a body, too, but we all know it.

  We move into the forest as one, this forest that is meant to be a quiet place but quickly becomes punctured by the noise of shouting voices. Our feet trample the undergrowth without care, our hands tear at low-hanging branches to rip them from our paths. Any animals in these parts will hear us and flee as best they can. Warrens and nests will be destroyed underfoot.

  I pray the wolves are far from here.

  * * *

  By nightfall we are cold and exhausted, and we’ve found no body. Stuart Burns is south of the land we have covered. I want to ask how long we will keep doing this, how much ground Duncan means for us to search. But I don’t. Somehow I must pretend to myself that I know nothing more than the rest of these locals; I must bury that body much deeper within myself than I buried it in the ground.

  14

  After Dad disappeared Aggie and I went home to Sydney, and a mother who hadn’t changed at all in the two years we were gone, except that her thick dark hair had gone silver. We blinked and life was returned to how it had been, only I felt a wild creature stuffed into the body of a human. I felt called back. Only alive within the forest.

  I studied hard and fast and earned two science degrees before I turned twenty-five. Aggie turned her mind to the adolescence she had missed out on. By the time I graduated she’d dated half the men in Sydney. I didn’t admit that I wanted her life instead of mine, that I wanted to be the one who lived in the body, for touch and taste and desire. I didn’t need to admit it; she already knew.

  * * *

  On a hot night after I’d started my PhD I went to see Mum in our old place. Aggie and I had moved out by then, into a little terrace near my uni. But I tried to visit Mum as often as possible because she spent her nights alone scrutinizing photos of criminals or victims and both seemed grim company.

  Tonight she was sitting in front of two fans that did nothing but push the hot air around. She was alternating between mouthfuls of red wine and ice cubes, and had one of her current cases open in front of her on the floor. I helped myself to a glass of wine and sat beside her, spraying my arms and legs in bug spray because she still hadn’t got flyscreens to stop the mozzies.

  “What’s this one?” I asked her.

  She glanced at me, perhaps only now becoming aware of my presence. “Missing person.” She slid a photo around so I could see the face of the teenage girl.

  “Could she have run away?” I asked, studying the smiling young face.

  “She didn’t run away.”

  “Then what happened,” I asked, because I wanted to know but I also didn’t. I always wanted to know and also didn’t. A kind of dance my mother and I did together, or perhaps a contest I always hoped to win but never did.

  “Someone killed her,” Mum said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s always what happened, when someone vanishes. Any cop knows it.”

  “But maybe not,” I said softly. Maybe she went on an adventure.

  “I’d like to visit that world you live in, my girl,” Mum said. “It sounds kinder than this one.” Then, “How are the wolves?”

  “A long way from here.”

  “What’s keeping you then?”

  “I’ll have better job prospects if I do the PhD.”

  “You’re stalling because you don’t want to leave Aggie.”

  “What are you talking about?” Leaving Aggie wasn’t even an option. Could it be possible Mum still didn’t understand that?

  She shrugged, running a piece of ice over her forehead. “One of you will have to leave the other eventually.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she doesn’t belong in the forest, and you do,” Mum said simply.

  Abruptly there were tears in my eyes. “But I don’t want that without her.”

  Mum studied my face. Hers blurred. “Toughen up.”

  * * *

  Some weeks later, I was sitting on the grass of the Sydney University campus and enjoying the evening sun. My eyes had started to droop shut when a shadow fell across the pages of my book. I looked up at the silhouette.

  “Hello,” it said.

  “Hello,” I replied.

  The man shifted so I could see him, a stranger’s shape and features. Tall, square in the face, clean cut and shaved. His cologne wafted freshly down to me and conjured something familiar. “Are you pre or post class?” he asked.

  “Post.”

  “Shall I buy you a drink and you can tell me how it was?”

  Curious.

  I glanced at the time. Aggie wouldn’t be finished teaching her language students for hours. It wasn’t like me to befriend strangers unless I was with my sister, but then they didn’t tend to approach me out of the blue and make it this easy.

  “Why not,” I said, gathering my books into my pack. He offered a hand to help me stand and I took it, noticing its sweatiness.

  At the university bar we sat outside in the sun among the gaggles of students. I loved these long summer nights, when it didn’t get dark until late.

  “What was your class today?” the man asked. He seemed older than me, but not by too much. I wondered if he was a student or a lecturer.

  “It was just a meeting with my supervisor.”

  “Supervisor of…?”

  “My PhD.”

  “Huh. Look at that. You’re surprising me already.”

  I frowned, unsure if I should be offended.

  “What’s your topic?”

  “Wolves.”

  He laughed. “Of course it is. Classic academic bullshit, studying something in a country about as far from any real wolves as possible, meaning you never have to get out from behind your computer.”

  I stared at him.

  “So tell me what you’re learning about wolves from a book,” he said.

  I looked away, across the lawns to the pond where the ducks swam. Fat white geese waddled along the bank, honking happily. A breeze lifted the hair off my forehead. I could ask him his name, but somehow I knew this was part of the game. I wouldn’t ask until he did.

  “Come
on, kid,” he said, “I’m interested, I admit it.”

  When I looked at him again he was leaning closer. A big man, big like a linebacker, and in this light he had the look of an old-fashioned movie star, all those sharp angles, the cleanness of him. It occurred to me how handsome he was and suddenly I didn’t just viscerally dislike him, I also wanted him, and much to my horror, wanted to impress him.

  “I’m studying the cognitive maps wolves make of their territories. They pass these geographic and temporal maps down through generations, and know their land so intimately that they go nowhere unless it’s deliberate. Wolves don’t wander. They move with purpose, and they teach their pups how to do the same. They can share the mental images with each other.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “By howling. Their voices paint pictures.”

  Now he was really looking at me, and I didn’t think anyone had looked at me like that before, with such appetite.

  “Okay, that’s pretty cool,” he afforded. “So why that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s interesting to me that some creatures can pass on memories, and that some memories are so deep they can live in the body instead of only in the mind.”

  “Nothing lives in the body, not really, that’s just a trick of your brain.” He traced a finger along my hand, the one holding my gin and tonic. It startled me. “It was your brain that felt that, not your hand.”

  “And when the brain can’t be relied upon?” Sometimes the function of my mind made life very difficult. Of course sometimes it made it wonderful, too. I wasn’t about to admit this: a peril I learned long ago to guard against. Men took it as an invitation to test me, to touch me. “What are you studying?” I asked to change the subject.

  “Neurosurgery.”

  “You’re a brain surgeon? Fuck.”

  “Guilty. Or I will be.”

  “Now I feel stupid for going on about brains.”

  “Nah. I’m just a butcher. Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

  I blinked. “What about our drinks?”