Wolfish, page 10
To talk about a woman dying by the teeth of a real wolf and not a metaphorical one is to talk about a statistical sliver of occurrence robed disproportionately in fear. After mosquitoes and other humans, people are most likely to be killed by snakes, and then dogs, which kill an average of nineteen people in America each year. Domestic dogs kill “orders of magnitude more children than wolf-dogs have ever been accused of doing,” write Pierotti and Fogg in The First Domestication. To call a death by wild wolf a freak accident is almost to understate it. Throughout the twentieth century, there were no authenticated reports of healthy wolves seriously injuring or killing people in North America, not until November 2005, when a young man died in Saskatchewan. What those snowmobiling Chignik residents saw that March evening was that Candice had just become the second.
She was far more likely to have been killed by bears on that road, or to die from the cold. More people are killed each year by cows, by toddlers who pick up guns, falling vending machines, lawnmowers and lightning and ladders, autoerotic asphyxiations. And yet, I imagine Candice’s death was covered in newspaper after newspaper because it was both exceptional and, for ears tuned to the song of Little Red, familiar. A bell we had been told to expect had finally rung: the wolves had killed the woman. Not just any woman, but the petite blonde one, grinning on the deck of a boat as she held up two freshly caught crabs, as the photograph accompanying a Reuters story depicted her. The BBC put “killed” in quotes when it headlined the death, as if trying to differentiate between the killing an animal and man will do.
In the toxic sediment of blog and newspaper comments that accumulated after news of her death, Candice—like Perrault’s Little Red—was blamed. She was blamed for daring to run alone (“a big risk … she paid with her life”), for not tracking the season’s dip in moose and caribou populations, for running without a “sidearm or some loaded weapon,” for wearing headphones. The wolves were blamed too. For being bloodthirsty, for being “destructive intruder[s],” for stoking fear. The follow-up governmental report and biologists’ investigation was over forty pages long. It found that the two, three, or maybe four wolves who attacked Candice were not afflicted with any of the things that make a wolf most likely to be aggressive. They were not rabid or sick or starving, they had not been habituated to humans, they were not defending their food or young. Officials know this because, in the aftermath of her death, locals were told to hunt wolves. When efforts failed, bans on killing wolves in wilderness refuge areas near Chignik were lifted, and even the Alaska State Troopers sent in an officer to play assassin. Eight wolves were killed in the area, but when their bodies were examined, no identifying triggers were found, and no clear DNA match was found, though the report’s authors speculate that at least one of the killed wolves may have been present during the attack. “This case represents one of the best documented cases of a predatory attack by wolves,” wrote Linnell et al. in their most recent overview of global wolf attacks, adding that it “stands out from all others in that there were no warnings or underlying risk conditions.”
Government biologists found, similarly, that Candice was not at fault. She was not carrying food, and sure, she was listening to music—headphones were found in the snow fifty feet from her body—but even if she had not been, she would likely not have been able to hear their progress. A wolf in the snow can move silently, appearing as quickly as a summer squall. The attack on Candice defied the statistical logic of those thousands of encounters where wolves have, upon seeing humans, fled. Tracks in the road revealed both were running toward each other down the curved, brush-flanked road, but the wolves would have smelled her long before she saw them. Footprints show that she sensed their presence at some point and turned around. The wolves would have easily collapsed the distance. Her death, the evidence shows, was quick.
It feels important to clarify neither Candice nor Anna are Little Red. They are just two young women who left their homes and were killed by forces beyond their control within eight months of each other, both within that first year I too was leaving home. The mechanisms of their deaths are, adamantly, not the same. “I do not consider the suffering that prey experience from a predator a form of cruelty,” writes psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. The difference between humans and other predators, notes Masson, is choice. The animal predator does not decide to draw blood: he just kills so he can stay alive. Humans, of course, are different. This is why most wolf metaphors go slack.
I did not hear about Candice’s death when it happened, and I avoided reading about it for years afterward, even when I started studying wolves, even when I was trying to understand the legacy of human fear in the face of them. I did not want to look at her death because it was such a freak accident. I did not want to privilege this wolf story above others. But now, reading Candice’s blog, I am drawn to it as I am drawn to so many stories of those who vault themselves into the unknown. I found her story because of how it ended, but I stay because I am intrigued by the motor that made it go. “[F]eminism has nothing to gain by seeing women solely or predominantly as the victims of their histories,” writes Jacqueline Rose. As she notes, the key question is not “How did she die?” but “How did she live?” With Candice, I return to her awareness of risk. “To be a kid again with no fear…” she had written after that cliffside hike, words heavy with an all-too-familiar longing. Her strength and courage did not negate her fear.
What made her do it? What made her go? Not just to Alaska, but into the wilderness, alone? Candice knew how many ways Alaska could kill her, and still she woke to jog through the frozen black, lashes iced, headlamp a little sun, the dogs she had befriended warm shadows beside her. “Why does the chicken cross the road?” asks essayist Lily Hoang. “Because I can’t stop walking.” Speaking to a reporter after her death, Candice’s father described her as “small and mighty,” someone who lifted weights and liked to box and was training for a race. When she ran, he said, she entered a meditative place. She died doing the routine she always did. When asked if the attack had changed his perspective of wolves, her father answered similarly. They too were just “doing what wolves do … Their nature happened to kill my daughter, but I don’t have any anger towards wolves.”
The aberration of Candice’s death is what makes it hard to look at, but also, it seems to me, somewhat essential. Being human means learning to evaluate risk, but also learning to exist beside the statistically improbable. We cannot dwell on those stories, and certainly not sensationalize them, but what is lost if we erase them entirely? Now, when I think of Candice, I think of how many snowy miles she must have run in the months before that March afternoon. I imagine all her frozen footprints strung together, a shimmering rope of curiosity, the trail for someone fierce.
* * *
The year OR-7 left his pack, his travels were traced by collar, by camera, by witness. It was common for a young wolf to make a short, pre-dispersal journey before heading home, returning to his pack before leaving on a longer trip. OR-7, though, wasn’t turning back. One day he walked near Crater Lake, the deepest lake in North America, banks frosted with snow. Another day he fed on a young elk calf who had died after catching its legs in a wire fence. One afternoon, former Iditarod racer and bed-and-breakfast owner Liz Parrish saw him at the end of her driveway. Standing beneath a fifty-foot cedar tree, his coat was dark and mottled.
“I was stunned—it was such a huge animal,” she told a reporter. Liz knew wolves—she had seen them before in Minnesota and Alaska—but she wasn’t afraid of them, even though she, like Candice, was small, five feet tall, nicknamed “Little Musher” in her races. Now, woman and wolf watched one another, unblinking. “We had a stare down that seemed like a long time, but was probably just a few seconds,” she told the reporter. She reached for her camera. By the time she looked up, the wolf was gone.
* * *
After watching Vertigo—the Hitchcock film where a man becomes obsessed with a living woman because she reminds him of a dead one—writer Maggie Nelson asked her college film professor “whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.” When I read this, I felt a thud of body truth. The insolvability of patriarchal violence is at its crux. “There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent, and there was nowhere to go to leave it behind,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence.
When we feel powerless, we look for who to blame. I knew “Little Red Riding Hood” had not created what the World Bank would dub a “global pandemic” of violence against women and girls in 2019, but it seemed the popular versions of the story shouldered some responsibility for how I experienced it. They seemed like origin stories for a dominant narrative about predator and prey, one rehashed so often as metaphor. Not only do they unfairly vilify the wolf, they teach girls that to grow up woman is to grow up inside its belly, as if, in Anne Carson’s words, “the entire female gender were a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things.” In Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm tellings of Little Red, “the heroine [became] responsible for the violence to which she is subjected,” writes folklorist Maria Tatar.
More than two hundred years after Perrault’s publication, though, French folklorist Paul Delarue collected and studied the original oral storytellings that would have inspired the nobleman’s curated adaptation, publishing a story—now the more historically accurate one—called “The Story of Grandmother.” There are several differences between his and Perrault’s, but the most important is that after the exchange about the wolf’s teeth—in this story, he is a werewolf—the girl butts into the plot. Her fate swerves.
“Oh Grandmother, I need to go outside to relieve myself.” The interjection is so surprising I laugh the first time I read it. The (were)wolf’s response? “Do it in the bed.” But the girl is persistent. Finally, he agrees. He ties a “woolen thread” around her ankle and sends her out. Once in the yard, she unties the thread and knots it around a plum tree. By the time he realizes she has taken too long, she is gone. He follows her home, but she is safely inside. The only hero is the girl, who outwits her captor then hightails it to safety.
In “The Tiger and the Children,” the iteration of the story told in Eastern Asia, the child also frees herself with the excuse of needing a bathroom, and scholars studying the evolutionary route of folktales now believe it evolved from the same early oral storytellings Delarue later traced. Unlike the Brothers Grimm story where the girl lives but the wolf dies, in the original oral versions of Little Red Riding Hood, both walk free. “All fairy tales are about survival,” says fairy-tale scholar Kate Bernheimer. In those oldest tellings, it is not just the girl who survives, but the wolf too.
The first storytellers of Delarue’s iteration were likely peasant women, clustered in France and northern Italy through the late Middle Ages. In Europe, the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries were a time of skepticism and fear, a place where people were tried as witches and werewolves, where anyone’s neighbor might one day be accused of eating children. Early tellings have been traced to regions where trials most proliferated. The stories passed on to young girls were meant to imbue resilience and strength in a world often inexplicably cruel. Perrault, though, was not a peasant. Life was easier for him. He was a civil servant, a staple at literary salons, a full-hearted proponent of King Louis XIV’s absolutist regime to colonize the continent. In penning the story, he followed the established tradition of men hijacking a female-centered oral folktale long spun by rural women and stylizing it for a bourgeois audience, portraying both forest and girl as unkempt and in need of civilization. Characterizing Perrault’s mindset, scholar Zipes writes in The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: “Inner and outer nature must be brought under control, otherwise chaos and destruction will reign.”
In rehashing Little Red, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm codified the male Western imagination of female victim. She is the girl who so often dies in horror movies, adored and innocent but streaked with a coyness and curiosity so often made to be her downfall. Someone who needs to learn a lesson. This male-sewn archetype was, admitted Charles Dickens, his first love. “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.”
* * *
When I think of my first flight from home, I think of Jack, and when I think of Jack, I think of Anna. I worry that to dwell on her death without knowing her life is to co-opt a tragedy, stitching her story to my side like another stolen shadow. In an op-ed written after Anna’s murder, a journalist pled with readers not to co-opt her death to derail prison reforms. Her words made me think of one of the final sentences in the report on the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife investigation into Candice’s death. “In spite of the findings in this report,” the biologists wrote, “wolves are no more dangerous than they were prior to this incident, and people should not be unnecessarily fearful.” Whether about wolves or men, the takeaway was the same, and I agreed with it heartily. Do not become irrational. Do not make these deaths about your fear.
I never wanted to dwell on fear, but I was not sure how to stow it either. I knew I was unlikely to die in a freak accident or a random murder; statistically, I had to be living one of the safest lives in history. The thing I could not accept during those years as I was leaving home was that so many others who died too young were, until their last minutes, also unlikely candidates. Someone is always about to become a statistic. Sometimes there is a moral, like wear your seat belt or be careful hitchhiking alone or carry bear spray, but sometimes there is very little. A man is suddenly violent. Wolves suddenly, improbably, attack a human. To draw a lesson from death is to milk a moral from it and make it something useful. A moral, by definition, teaches us how to live, but it never gave me what I wanted—a tonic to help me face the fact that I could, on any given day, die. As Anne Boyer wrote in The Undying, her memoir about being diagnosed with breast cancer in her thirties: “Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
That night after I graduated high school, the night after Jack wrote me the long message about Anna’s birthday, my classmates and I stayed up until dawn. We signed yearbooks and cried into one another’s necks at the rec-center party our parents organized to keep us sober. When I finally got home and fell asleep, I dreamt I had been attacked. I entered the dream from above, as if my body were a corpse and I the spirit coming back to greet it. Lifting myself off the ground, I walked to a bathroom mirror and ran a finger across my forehead, stopping at a slash of claw marks. Somehow I knew what animal had done it. The wolf’s cuts weren’t fresh, but they were deep, a rake of red flesh already starting to scab. In between, my bangs sprouted through my wounds. My skin was growing over the claw marks and over my hair, the way a tree grows through the fence that restrains it. My body’s resilience had made me into some sort of monster.
Overwhelmed by the gore, or by the sense of having survived something I shouldn’t have, I woke up. “Wolf-bangs,” I wrote the next morning in my journal. “Crazy.” And then, a few lines later: “I am always anxious, worrying, scared.” I felt haunted, but it wasn’t from having narrowly escaped. It was from understanding that to be lucky enough to grow older is to learn how to be one of the ones who is, for now, still alive.
* * *
By my second semester in Maine, I felt rounder. I had stopped texting Jack on Friday nights and missed home a little less on Sunday mornings. I hadn’t met a potential husband yet in the laundry room, but I no longer expected to. I had friends I loved. On the weekends we sometimes crawled into one another’s twin beds and giggled until we fell asleep, dressed in the costumes of whatever theme party we had attended, bodies side by side, warm as dogs. It was exhilarating how quickly we became one another’s harbors. Because the sun was usually down when I got out of class, I was often walking campus in the dark, and I grew used to my shadow stretching in and out of pools of lamplight. I learned to trust the groups of young male athletes who walked toward me would, a few seconds later, pass. That I would not flinch when they did.
I did not then know about dispersing wolf OR-7, so I did not see when, in early November of my sophomore year, the two-and-a-half-year-old walked into the eye of a trail camera outside the southern Oregon logging town of Butte Falls. A deer hunter had placed the camera on a forest tree. The black-and-white footage showed him with his nose to the ground and a cape of dark fur across his shoulder blades as he stepped through fallen logs. It was the wolf’s first known time on film.
When people called in reports of OR-7, as a hiker on the Pacific Coast Trail did one day, ODFW biologists confirmed sightings by matching the rough coordinates received from his collar. As word of sightings grew, so did the aura of potential awe. “Wandering Wolf Inspires Hope and Dread,” read one local headline. OR-7 wasn’t the only wolf in Oregon, but he was becoming the most well known, and media coverage of his long-distance journey was stoking conversations. Seeing a wolf—which had been near impossible in so much of the northwest for decades—began to feel increasingly possible. As if the clouds had been scrubbed away, and now you might walk outside and glimpse a shooting star where before there had been nothing at all.
And then, one day, it looked like OR-7 walked very near where the state’s last wolf had been killed for a $5 bounty in the mid-1940s. An endling; a startling. The thing about being a wolf was that this information did not and could not land. It was outside the realm of grief. It meant nothing at all. Whether the path of this new, young wandering wolf inspired “hope” or “dread” in Oregonians, that last wolf would always be by his side. Less a ghost than a shadow. If fear had led settlers to slaughter American wolves en masse, the reminder of that legacy—embodied by OR-7’s return—was now, for many onlookers, alchemizing grief. A shame and awe. A hope for the wolf that was coming back.
