Lone Wolf A Novel Read online

  “No.”

  I turn the chair around so that I can see the computer screen. It is a clip from the Today show, of a young man in a cowboy hat. “He got into an ATV accident in 2007,” Cara explains. “Doctors declared him brain-dead. His parents decided to donate his organs, because he said he wanted to on his license. But when they went to turn off the life support machines, one of his cousins—who was a nurse—had a hunch and ran a pocketknife blade along his foot, and the foot jumped. Even though another nurse said it was just a reflex, the cousin dug his fingernail underneath one of Zack’s, and Zack swatted his arm away. Five days later, he opened his eyes, and four months after the accident he left rehab.”

  I watch the montage of Zack in his hospital bed, of his parents recounting their miracle. Of Zack receiving his hero’s welcome in his hometown. I listen to Zack talk about the memories he’s lost, and the ones he remembers. Including one where he heard the doctors pronouncing him dead, although he couldn’t get up and tell them he wasn’t.

  “Doctors said Zack Dunlap was brain-dead,” Cara repeats. “That’s even worse off than my dad is now. And today Zack can walk and talk and do just about everything he used to do. So don’t tell me my dad isn’t going to recover, because it happens.”

  The video clip ends, and the next Favorite in Cara’s YouTube queue rolls into play. Transfixed, we both watch Luke Warren rubbing the tiniest, squinting squeal of a wolf pup with a towel. He tucks it underneath his shirt, warming it with his own body heat.

  “She was one of Pguasek’s babies,” Cara says quietly. “But Pguasek got sick and died, so my dad had to raise the two pups in her litter. My dad fed them with eyedroppers. When they were old enough, he taught them how to function in the pack. This one, he named Saba, Tomorrow, so that she’d always have one. It was the one thing he never got used to in the wild—how a litter would die, in order to teach the mom wolf how to do a better job next time. He said he had to interfere, because how can you throw out a life just like that?”

  On the tiny rectangular screen, Luke Warren’s hair falls forward, obscuring the pinched face of the wrinkled pup. Come on, baby girl, he murmurs. Don’t you quit on me.

  LUKE

  Who tells the new generation what they need to know?

  In a household, it’s a parent. In a wolf pack, it’s the nanny. The position is a coveted one, and when an alpha is pregnant, several wolves in the pack will advertise themselves for the role, like beauty pageant contestants, trying to convince this mother-to-be to pick one over the rest. You are awarded the job because of the experience you have—often an older alpha or beta who can no longer perform the tasks necessary to keep the pack safe will take care of the new pups. In this, wolf culture is a lot like Native American culture, where age is revered—and nothing like most Americans, who stick their aging parents in rest homes and visit twice a year.

  I didn’t audition for the nanny role in the wild; I would have been a disaster, since I could barely keep myself safe and my own learning curve was so steep. But I watched the wolf who became the caretaker, and committed her actions to memory. And it was a good thing, too, because I became a nanny by default. When I was back at Redmond’s years later and Mestawe refused her pups, Cara and I saved three out of the four—and someone was going to have to teach them how to function as a pack. That meant guiding them into positions of leadership—by the time I was done, I would rank higher only than Kina, who was destined to be a tester wolf.

  You teach wolves by example; you discipline by taking away the warmth the pups crave. When the pups were behaving well, I would be in the tumble of their play. When they got out of hand, I’d nip them, roll them over, and bare my teeth over their throats so that they knew they could trust me. I started their differentiation in hierarchy through their food source, because wolves truly are what they eat. It’s a cycle: what the wolves feed on determines their rank in the pack; their rank in the pack determines what they feed on. So as soon as Cara and I weaned the pups off Esbilac and onto rabbit, I gave them the three different parts of the animal. Kina, the lowest-ranking pack member, could have the stomach contents. Nodah, the tough beta, got the “movement meat”—the rump and leg muscle. Kita was given the precious organs. As we moved on to single calf carcasses, I directed the wolves to the appropriate parts, the way my wolf brothers had done for me in Canada.

  Nodah, who was a bully, sometimes shoved Kita out of the way to get to the good stuff—the heart, the liver. When that happened, I’d go off and have a fake fight with Kina for a few minutes, and then I’d come back with my blood racing and my adrenaline levels raised. Just like that, Nodah would back down and do what I told him to do.

  I taught them their own language: that a high-pitched whimper is encouraging, that a low whimper is calming. That a growl is a warning, and an uff, uff sound means danger.

  But the hardest lesson I had to teach them was the order of importance. If a pack is in danger, they protect the alpha at all costs. Anyone else can be replaced, but if you lose the alpha, the pack will likely break apart. So after digging rendezvous holes—deep holes they could run to and hide in if danger came in the form of a bear or a human or any other threat—I would play tag, biting at their legs and hindquarters as if a predator was in pursuit. I directed them toward the RV holes, so they’d learn that the only way to get away from me was to burrow. But I had to make sure they always let Kita in first. Compared to this future alpha, Nodah and Kina were nonessential.

  It killed me, every time. Because as much as I wanted to be a wolf, I was only human. And what parent chooses one child at the expense of another?

  CARA

  Zirconia Notch lives on a sustainable farm so high up in the state of New Hampshire it’s practically Canada. There are goats and llamas milling free-range in her yard when my mother drives in, which delights her, because it means that she can let the twins pat the animals to kill time while I’m meeting with my brand-new lawyer.

  She told me on the phone that she doesn’t do much with her law degree these days; instead, she’s got a new profession: a medium to pets that have passed. It wasn’t until five years ago that she realized she had this gift, when the spirit of her neighbors’ dead Labrador came to her in the middle of the night and started barking. Sure enough, the neighbors’ house was on fire. Had Zirconia not roused them, it could have been a disaster.

  When I walk into the house, I smell incense. A window with twenty-five tiny panes has a jelly jar in each cubicle, filled with what looks like water with food coloring mixed in. The result is a cross between a rainbow and what I always imagined Romeo and Juliet’s apothecary shop to look like, when I read the play in tenth grade. There is a curtain of crystal beads hanging in the doorway, but if I stand at a certain angle, I can see Zirconia sitting with a client at a table draped with purple lace and strewn with heather. Zirconia has long white hair and a tattoo of a sweet pea vine that wraps around her neck and disappears into her collar. She’s wearing a furry, sleeveless vest that looks like it started its life on the back of one of the llamas in the yard, and she’s holding a pet’s rope chew toy. “Nibbles wants you to know that she didn’t mean to soil the Oriental rug,” Zirconia says, her eyes shut, her body swaying just the tiniest bit. “And that she is with your grandma Jane—”

  “June?” the client says.

  “Yes. Sometimes it’s hard to understand the dialect in a bark . . .”

  “Can you tell her we miss her? Every day?”

  Zirconia purses her lips. “She doesn’t believe you. Hang on . . . I’m getting a name.” Zirconia opens her eyes. “She’s talking about a bitch named Juanita.”

  “Juanita’s our Chihuahua puppy,” the client gasps. “I guess technically she’s a bitch, but she hasn’t replaced Nibbles. No other dog could do that.”

  Zirconia holds a hand to her temple and squints. “Nibbles is gone now,” she says. She sets down the chew toy.

  The woman sitting across from her is frantic. “But you have to