Chapter 9

On the floor of the passenger seat, I set my shoes with the socks carefully tucked into each. I drape my jacket across the back of the passenger seat with cuff links and tie inside the pockets. Shirt glowing brightly over the top. Then I fold my pants on top of my shoes. My boxer briefs come last, lying on top of my pants.

The cold is a relief on my naked body. The shivering has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with my fear that I will stretch out my wrists and nothing will happen. What happens if my wolf has been so poisoned that he can no longer struggle up?

What is the point of living, if all you are is human?

Sitting on the cold damp ground, I awkwardly hold my wrists out in front of me. Nothing happens. I press harder, pushing toward the dark hills, waiting for the faint, buzzing electricity of my wild to take over. I look back to the road, in case someone comes.

I try again. In the dim light, all I can see are my manicured and clean hands with their masculine but not bestial smattering of hair.

My wild has to be all right, doesn’t he? The universe can’t be that pathetic. It couldn’t allow the holiest thing about me to die with no more warning than a dream about French cuffs.

Could it?

I try again and again. I try different things—twisting my shoulders and tightening my haunches—but nothing lights the spark. In the back of my mind, I keep worrying that the human who mowed this land in the autumn will come back and find me sitting naked on the damp ground and ask what I’m doing.

Yoga, I suppose.

The moon’s path hovers over the prickly heights of the pine trees on the ridge above me. It shines down expectantly.

Well? she asks.

Well, what? I’m trying as hard as I can. But suppose a human comes and sees me mid-change. What then?

Strangely enough, the moon speaks to me with Gran Sigeburg’s impatient voice. Why do you worry so much about humans? she says in that same snappish tone. They are like blackfly, an irritation whose season the earth will survive. Must survive. You are something else. You are wild. The wild and the earth are intertwined, one and eternal.

This time, I lay myself belly down, stretching out my arms and legs so that more of my skin touches the damp ground, so that my face is buried in it, so that the cool breeze caresses my back and shoulders, so that my fingers can dig into the muck, so that I feel the heartbeat throbbing deep in the soil. My consciousness grows beyond the me of this poor form, and I am bombarded by the smell of moldering autumn cuttings, the scrabbling of small claws on rough bark, and my fingers reach deep into the cold where life waits patiently to begin again.

This time, when I press the heels of my palms out, power rushes in. My body coils and my skin tingles and my head tilts back as the muscles contract and lengthen. My mouth waters, and my tongue stretches out across teeth that grow and thin from my jaw. As my eyes and ears and throat contort, I am blind and deaf and speechless and immobile.

Eventually, consciousness, real consciousness enters into me. The cold is no longer cold. The dark is no longer dark, and the emptiness is full. I remember that I am a link in the chain of the world.

Pack used to like open spaces, back when we earned the name heath-wanderers, before we realized that open spaces meant a clear shot. Now we really prefer the shadowy and protective embrace of the woods. But that ancestral longing to race at full speed is still there, and I can’t help but charge across the shaved bowl of grass, jumping into the air and twisting mid-leap only to twist again, and coming back on legs that are already churning at the grass.

I run back and forth across this bit of land until a distant car horn pulls me to my senses and I sprint for the forest.

The woods here are not like the Homelands. We have been expanding out from the plot of land we bought in 1668, and the whole of our territory is marked in the way of wolves. It may look trackless to humans, but to us, it is a rich web of greetings and warnings and signposts.

The paths through this forest smell like polyurethane and steel-toed boots and Cheetos. No wolf has been here for over a hundred years, and the things that have thrived in their absence have lost all sense of perspective.

In an attempt to restore some perspective, I eat two of them.

Loping back and forth through the woods, I search for Thea’s scent until I find an unmarked track with fresh tire prints. At the end is a tiny cabin, maybe an old fire watch cabin, though there’s no lookout tower nearby.

Thea’s scent calls to me, unlike the two other scents here. One belongs to a man who uses her front door and smells like sex. The other belongs to one who circles her cabin but never goes in.

Thea is not here. Her car is, but the engine is cold. She left recently on foot, and her tracks lead around the back—past the cistern and the propane tank and the tarp-covered compost and several cords of firewood—into the trees. I do not smell the circling man, the man who doesn’t use the front door, here.

I follow her for a mile or so until the path hits a trail and the trail hits a trailhead. There are people there with trucks and lights too bright for my eyes. Guns. It’s a staging ground. A lot of people wearing acid-yellow jerseys saying CASART: Central Adirondacks Search and Rescue Team. I sniff the air for Thea. She was here, but she isn’t anymore, so I trace a wide circle until I find her tracks again, but this time, she’s not alone. Now she is with the man who enters through the front door.

“Do we really have to talk about this now?” she says.

“Well, when is going to be a good time?”

Thea says nothing. He’s a bulky man, this front-door man in the sheriff’s T-shirt. From the smell of things, he is a moderate drinker and an immoderate consumer of saturated fats.

“Thea,” he says, a plea in his voice. THEEE-ah. “We have a good thing here.”

“I know we do. I just don’t understand why you want to change it.”

“Not change it. Grow it. I’m not like Lee. I’m not going to try to get you to move to town with me. But there are things we could do to make your cabin more…just more. Put in a TV and a sofa? That’d be nice, right? A real refrigerator. You’ve got to have a refrigerator. I mean, you can’t live like this forever.”

She doesn’t respond at first. Just pulls tight on the straps of her backpack.

There’s a hoarse voice echoing up ahead. It belongs to a man, human and fiercely frightened. But neither Thea nor Front-Door Man can hear.

“I’ve been through this before. You want more, but what you want more of, I don’t have. You already want me to go out more. You want me to see people, to entertain and be an audience, and I’m not good at that. Any of it.”

Why can’t they hurry up? This man is screaming. He’s so close and so…unwell.

And who is this Timmy he keeps yelling for?

“You know…” He pretends to laugh. Ha-ha. You won’t believe this. “Lee said you were a sociopath. Hold up, babe. I’ve got a stone—ow—right at my heel.”

Thea waits patiently while Front-Door Man holds on to her arm and digs around with his finger. “Got it,” he says, pulling his low boot back up.

“A sociopath lacks a conscience. I didn’t go to his nephew’s christening, and he thinks I don’t have a conscience? He didn’t want to go either, but the difference between us is he did it and fumed for weeks after. Look, I’ve never made a secret of it. I like to be alone. I need to be alone. I like you, but—” She stops suddenly. “Shh.”

“‘I like you.’ I like you? We’ve been together for a year, and all I get is—”

“Doug,” she snaps. “Just listen.”

Doug listens and finally—finally—hears. I chuff out a long breath, because the man was driving me nuts, all that screaming for Timmy. They move faster but still cautious over the rough terrain, calling out. The owner of the desperate voice holds his forearm up to his eyes, shielding himself from the bright lights.

“Are you the police? Have you seen Timmy?” he asks. His voice is hoarse from screaming. “Have you seen my son?”

“Mr. Fanning?” Doug holds out his hand. “Doug Glenn, sheriff’s department. Your son’s fine. He’s waiting for you at the trailhead.”

“Oh, thank you, God,” the man says, his voice shivering. “Thank you, God.” He is too lightly dressed for a human in this time when the woods are trying to decide between winter and spring. Between the two of them, winter always wins.

“I don’t know what happened, but he wandered off. He’s never wandered off before.”

Doug radios the staging ground to tell them they’ve found Mr. Fanning, while Thea quietly unhitches her backpack. She gives him a bottle of water, shakes out a down jacket wrapped tight in a little bag, hands him gloves, a hat. Then helps him put on a headlamp.

She offers him a bar of something, but he pushes it away.

“Did they feed him? He needs water. My wife must be… My wife…”

“He’s fine, Mr. Fanning. We’re going to get you there as soon as we can.”

“Look.” Doug pulls out his radio. “Why don’t you talk to your—” Before he can hand it to Mr. Fanning, Thea plucks the radio from Doug’s hand.

“What are you doing?” Doug asks.

She twists the dial, finding nothing but static. “That’s unfortunate. The reception up here is so spotty.”

The three of them start very slowly back toward the staging ground, Mr. Fanning talking disjointedly, worriedly, though Thea’s quiet responses seem to calm him just a little. Doug stomps and grouses behind them. When they stop to let Mr. Fanning rest, Doug pulls Thea aside.

“What are you doing?” he whispers angrily. “Just let him talk to his son already.”

“I think it’s better to wait till the trailhead,” she whispers back.

Mr. Fanning comes closer, trying to listen. “Is there something about Timmy? Something you’re not telling me? Did he get hurt?”

“Mr. Fanning. Give me a second, and I’ll get him on the radio.”

“Doug, plea—”

Doug ignores her.

“Mr. Fanning?” He holds up a finger and then calls someone on the radio. “Here’s your son.”

“Dad?” I recognize the voice on the radio as one of the men from the trailhead.

“Dad?”

The old man blinks and then holds the radio away, staring at its dark face. “What the hell are you trying to pull?” He drops the radio. “Where is my son? Where’s Timmy?”

The radio falls, still faintly echoing with the man’s voice. “Dad? It is me. It’s Tim. Dad? Dad!”

The father lurches back toward the mountain, screaming for the boy who is so vivid in his memory.

Thea leaves Doug sweeping the ground for his radio while she follows Mr. Fanning. She lopes across the rough terrain and catches up to the old man. She doesn’t try to stop him, just parallels him, talking to him in that quiet voice. After a while, she moves slower and he slows down too.

Doug shouts, giving directions as the trail fills up with EMTs, rangers, CASART, and Tim, the burly forty-five-year-old with a fringe of gray hair and a fringe of rosy fat, who probably hasn’t been called Timmy for thirty-five years. There’s a lot of frightened shouting between father and son.

I stay well back, lying in a dirt hole left by an uprooted oak. There are too many eyes and too many lights that, if they shine my way, will catch the green lucidum of my eyes, and someone will shoot. I lie below the level of the fingery roots and wait. These people all know each other, so there is the endless human ritual of promises that no one intends to keep.

Get together.

At the pond, at the bowling alley, at church.

With the kids, with the wives, with the team.

Soon, soon, soon, soon.

Never.

Thea says nothing. Just recovers her jacket, hat, gloves, and headlamp from the EMTs and heads back into the trees, returning the way she came.

“Thea!”

She stops but doesn’t turn around. Doug’s booted feet come running after her.

“You knew he wouldn’t recognize his son?”

“Of course I didn’t know. But listening to him…I just thought maybe it was best to wait.”

“Oh Jesus, The. Let me give you a ride.”

“It’s all right. It’s not far,” she says and starts walking into the woods. “It’d take longer in a car.”

“But it’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m good,” she says, but before she can take another step, he grabs her arm, pulling her close.

“Thea, please. Promise me you’ll think about what I said.” And for some unaccountable reason, I hate this man who is touching Thea and still smells like her.

“I’m sure I will.” Then…she rubs the back of his hand. It’s a gesture that looks a lot like There, dear, don’t fret and nothing like You make my spine tighten and my legs clench, and later when I touch myself, it is your name—oh, Doug—that I will scream into the night.

And I can tell that Doug knows it.

“You’re going to regret it some day,” Doug yells to the bright light bobbling into the black forest. “When you wake up in that cabin in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to but cats.”

“You’re right about that,” she says, her voice fading in the distance. “Always been more of a dog person.”

With a little gleeful kick of leaf litter in Doug’s general direction, I trot along parallel but hidden by the dark woods and my own silence, because neither Doug nor I want her walking alone.

For a human, she moves quietly. To a wolf’s ears, it sounds about like an arthritic bull moose, but still, unlike most humans who blunder around in a shell of disruption, treating the rest of the world as an inconsequential backdrop, she is aware. She pays attention to everything, gives everything its due.

She stops to listen to a woodcock call out his heart (meeep meeep meeep), and because he is doing something really important, she slowly moves away so he can have a little privacy.

It doesn’t take her long to get to her cabin, and when her door closes, I lower my head to the ground. The man who doesn’t use her front door has been back. Even worse, he has used her front door. He went in and came out again, but to be sure, I run to the side window and jump up, the pads of my front paws landing silently on the windowsill.

Thea’s cabin is so small that I can see immediately that she is alone. She’s already hung up her coat. Her boots are side by side next to the door as she crouches in front of a cast-iron stove, scraping away ash. She puts on new kindling and prods it into place. Then a new log. The stovepipe creaks as the fire starts, and smoke mixes in my nose with the slow ferment of pine needles dampened with snow.

She sits on the side of her bed, her hair falling forward over her shoulders and touching her knees. She stares at her knuckles for a long time.

Eventually, she stands, her hands at her buttons and then at her zipper, then her thumbs hook over her waistband and pull low enough for me to see the top of her hips.

Oh god. Just one more minute, I tell myself. She shifts her hip; her jeans lower on one side. Just one more minute, I tell myself. She shifts the other hip, her jeans below the level of her black underwear. One more minute…

The wind changes, bringing the stench of the man who has now used the front door. The man who stood here, doing exactly what I’m doing.

I am better than this. At least that’s what I tell myself. A shiver runs across my withers, and lowering my head, I follow that man who has gone uninvited through her front door. His stench leads east through the spotty woods. I move carefully, keeping close to uneven ground near trees, because I know this must be Liebling, and however strong I am, if those traps are still out there, I will be broken.

A possum scurries across my path, heading straight for a tree. I’m full, but I eat him anyway. Because of that perspective thing.

Liebling lives in a trailer. Not an RV; there is no vehicle here, just a white trailer with a beige-and-brown curlicue painted on the corrugated-metal side. It isn’t old, but it’s also not well maintained. A wire from the trailer loops around trees, heading, I presume, to the roadside and an illegal hookup.

The lights are blazing inside, so I circle the trailer cautiously, giving the rusting jumble of traps in the back an especially wide berth. With more of a bump than a jump, I put my paws carefully on the metal lip of the window, looking through the thin, lopsided blinds. He must have about as much room as Thea, but it is full, crammed with the thinginess of humans. A big boom box. A small TV on top of a VHS machine surrounded by piles of black plastic tapes with scraped-off labels. A microwave sitting on a propane stove. All sorts of objects I can’t identify but that were probably once “As Seen on TV”: a high casserole, a giant dumpling press, a plastic dish with fine combs for holding bacon upright. I know because there is still bacon in it, sitting in a puddle of cold grease.

Liebling is asleep on a bed that takes up all of one end of the trailer. He is still in his clothes, his feet hanging over the side of his bed, his boots kicked higgledy-piggledy to the floor next to a clear bottle of gin or vodka.

A gun rests on the beige-and-brown plaid arm of the built-in sofa next to his head.

I really don’t like this man. The most satisfying thing to do would be to break through the flimsy front door and grab his neck in my jaws, then disembowel him. Satisfying but also messy, a potential PR disaster for the forever wolves, and a Slitung, if the Pack found out I had changed Offland and killed a human.

Besides, Pack law dictates that life not be taken frivolously and that anything we kill must be eaten. I really don’t want to eat Liebling. I ate part of a state trooper once. He tasted like fat and Styrofoam. It was a week before I could eat anything other than oatmeal.

As soon as I’m in skin again, I nudge the door, because it’s always worth trying the easy option first.

There is no latch, just a loose circle of string on the inside that keeps the door closed. All it takes is tracing one finger up through the gap to unhook the string and open the door. Unfortunately, the door is poorly hung and swings against the metal side of the trailer with a violent bang.

Liebling wakes with a start, his bleary, bloodshot eyes fixed on my naked body crowding in through the door of his cabin. He shrieks, and everything moves very fast. Grabbing for the gun on the sofa arm, he knocks it to the floor, then throws himself after it, dislodging the bacon cooker, so that when he tries to right himself, he slips on the bacon grease and hits his head on the edge of the white table holding the TV, which shudders for just a second before falling onto his neck. The gun in his hand goes off, and his hips jerk up, then settle back down with a sigh.

Blood seeps from under his body, mixing with bacon fat.

Well.

I lean over to feel his pulse, careful to avoid actually stepping inside. No matter where I place my inexpert fingers, there is nothing. I don’t feel anything about his death. Humans think that their deaths are somehow more significant. Wolves don’t see it that way. A human’s death is no more significant than a deer’s, except for that thing about humans tasting so much worse.

I only meant to tell him that I knew he’d entered Thea’s cabin unlawfully and would be serving him with a cease-and-desist letter. What killed him was his humanity: carrion and guns and too much stuff.

When I leave, I don’t close the door.

Folding myself back into the front seat of my car, I check my reflection in the rearview mirror. My hair bristles with forest detritus. My naked skin is caked with the scabrous bits of mud and the drying gore of that possum and the last gluey remains of my fur.

Okay, maybe I did have something to do with his death.

Still not going to eat him.