Wolfish, page 21
With a few research days in London before my train to the country, I dedicated myself to hunting wolf-related material in the archives of the British Library. Every morning I joined a swarm of other scholars to flash photo-ID badges then take a marble staircase down to the lockers where we would trade our backpacks for the clear plastic bags allowed in the archives. These bags acquired the sleek minimalism of museum cases, each of us carrying our exhibit of self: lip balms and laptops, the German notebooks and Japanese pens I immediately coveted as I opened my own helplessly American composition book, its cover so worn it looked practically edible. I had to force myself not to rubberneck my fellow researchers. They walked briskly up the stairs, unblinking scholars with round glasses and cashmere sweaters and what seemed to me a statistically improbable concentration of beauty. I was so afraid of death, and all around me were these professorial youth, with coral lipstick and Hugh Grant accents and little paper shots of espresso, telling jokes I strained to hear as they stepped outside to smoke. Had they dressed up to come to the library? I crossed and uncrossed my Levis, as if the friction of discomfort would turn my mom jeans into gold.
One day I surrounded myself with early drafts of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the English writer’s 1979 collection of macabre feminist reimaginings of fairy tales. Carter’s stories are full of women, wolves, and the contortions of power between them. There is the girl who “howled a little, in a firmer, deepening trajectory, to obtain the inscrutable consolation of the wolves’ response,” and the runaway husband who returns to his abandoned wife years later as a bloodthirsty werewolf. Her current husband attacks the werewolf, and as his pelt falls away, out comes that young man “just as he had been, years ago,” causing the woman to weep and her new husband to beat her. Now, reading Carter’s typewritten drafts scrawled with pen, I watched how her wolves crystallized on the page. In one moment, she slashed out “wolves are cowards at heart” to pen “wolves are less grave than they seem.” Surely every living thing was a coward beneath it all, but in shifting the emphasis off the predators’ own fear, Carter chided them for posturing and us for judging them incorrectly. It reminded me we all carried fear, but like one of those scarves you can twist and knot in twenty-something variations, we all wore it differently. Swaddled in our own, it was easy to miss the way it looked on others.
I had rented a room in the East London apartment of a young family, and though I had a few meetings and friends in the city, I spent most hours alone. I had imagined parking myself in the dark wood booths of pubs and the sunny tables outside them, but my solitude felt like a fluorescent spotlight I could not step away from. I longed for company, but instead I had Yolande, her ghost beside me with a pint. I didn’t know if it felt worse to walk into pubs or worse to walk out, eyes at my back as I stepped into the night and tried to find my way home. Always I told myself it was narcissistic to believe anyone cared what I was doing at all.
On the Amtrak train I had told myself nobody was watching and had been wrong. I was still searching for that man’s specter in the eyes of strangers everywhere, the same way I now scanned the faces of all who drove white vans through the crowded streets. What are you capable of? I thought, on loop. It was a hungry question, and it had no payoff; it brought me no answer and no peace. I became acutely aware of the brute logic of my own anxiety, only able to conceptualize “intellectual” anxieties if my body felt secure, a twisted version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I had learned about in college sociology class, where emotional needs are tended to only after physiological ones are met. “Worry, like attention, is a limited resource; we can’t worry about everything at once,” writes poet-essayist Elisa Gabbert in The Unreality of Memory. I tried to convince myself the world was not, in any new way, ending. Here was a city where air pollution had been so thick at the end of the nineteenth century that people had walked into the Thames, while the “acid fog” burned eight millimeters a century off the stone body of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Still, my dread about London sinking under rising sea levels pumped on, only stepping aside when I thought of the pre-departure articles saying MI5 had categorized the city at the highest terrorist threat level (“critical,” defined as “highly likely in the near future”); those worries stepped aside when I was out for a jog and a car of men stopped to heckle me. On and on this went, a Russian doll of worries encasing my pleading heart.
By the time my week was up, I was ready for the country. Newsstand headlines told of a spate of acid attacks perpetrated by men on motorbikes, and it had taken only a few clicks online to see the attacks were—of course!—occurring in the neighborhoods around my rented room. I loved London, and I had spent giddy afternoons browsing charity shops and drinking cider by the canals, but I had always been acutely watching, watching for who might be watching me. I was ready to surveil another kind of animal.
* * *
A village parish some fifty miles southwest of London, Beenham looked like the paper pop-up town from a storybook. Flanked by sheep-freckled fields and stands of skeletal hawthorn trees, it has one pub, one primary school, one medieval church that was rebuilt after being set ablaze by lightning, and rows of quaint brick houses with windowsills frosted in white. The resident wolves lived on a fifty-acre private estate less than a mile from the town center. Though only a few of the ten-wolf cohort I met were born at the Trust, all of them were born in captivity—mostly in other zoos and wildlife parks—and if things went according to plan, all would die in it, likely in one of the four spacious, double-fenced enclosures they now shared with either their siblings or their mate.
The conceit of the Trust was that these “ambassador wolves” could provide a sort of inoculation-by-exposure therapy to curious visitors, much as my parents dragged me through the hot-sock stench of the python room at our local zoo. Writing about the biopolitics of such sanctuaries, anthropologist Austin Hoffman describes ambassadors as “canines that are uniquely social with humans and who gain enrichment from interspecies interactions with them.” Every Wednesday, visitors paid £10 to watch wolves sleep, eat, and play, and to take photos through holes in the fence, hear volunteers share anecdotes about lupine matchmaking, and buy furry tchotchkes in the gift shop. The public would leave realizing that the wolves were not bent on killing them, and the profits would be sent to vetted wolf reintroduction and conservation projects abroad, from Bulgaria to Ethiopia to India. In a banner on their website, the Trust said they had donated £395,000 overseas. It seemed that if you wanted to believe wolves were “Government-Sponsored Terrorism,” as a familiar brand of bumper sticker in the American west liked to assert, the Trust could be an international headquarters.
* * *
Alice was worried about me from the minute I texted her from Paddington Station. We’d had a mix-up about my arrival schedule and now she couldn’t pick me up because she had to watch a Wimbledon match. Could she order me a car manned by a nice driver, a man she trusted, would I forgive her, would I be okay? I had booked a room in the converted thatched barn of the B&B she ran some miles from the Trust. On the phone a few months earlier, she had sounded plucky and optimistic. Maybe you can borrow Peter’s bicycle to reach the wolves! Her accent was pruned, the syllables tidy. I pictured the scene in the film Sylvia where Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig bicycle down an English country lane. Lovely, I told her.
By the time I arrived, Alice was far from reassuring. They had decided the bicycle was a no-go on the slim sidewalk beside the screaming M1, and though I could take a plush commuter bus a few stops, I would still have to walk a few miles through the sprawl of an industrial park and up a few steep, poorly marked dirt trails.
“It’s just not ideal,” she said, glancing me up and down. She was an empty nester with the energy of a terrier. “The weather is fussy and the walk is just a bit … wild.” As she talked I saw Yolande’s face bobbing at the corner of my periphery like a deflating balloon. Blinking it away, I summoned the brassy American confidence I had learned to fake from boys back home. “Don’t worry, I have a good raincoat,” I told her with a smile. “And I like a good adventure.” Her eyebrows skidded across her forehead.
The next morning, I let Alice drive me to the Trust. She pointed out landmarks while her rescue hound sat at my feet and watched me with heavy, sad eyes. When I asked Alice about the walking route, she paused, confused, before letting out a strangled laugh. “Goodness dear, you have to say ‘root’ here. Nobody will have any idea what you’re talking about.” For the next two weeks, I was on my own. I took a bus six minutes down the M1, and then, at an unmarked road that led into the sprawl of industrial parks below Beenham, took off on foot. From there my walk was less than two miles. It was mid-July, but the weather was often cool and damp, the sky hanging like a dark, wet towel. There were no sidewalks and no pedestrians, and the few vehicles that passed were mostly trucks and unmarked white vans that rattled to the surrounding warehouses. I wondered if it was better to make or avoid eye contact with the drivers, but mostly I tried to be economical with my nerves.
Soon the road narrowed to gravel and the hedges on either side grew taller, forming a sort of chute. Here I tried to think of cheery explanations for why a soggy ballet flat was in a bramble-filled ditch. Don’t think of Yolande, don’t think of Yolande, my brain croaked. After a few minutes I veered onto a path that climbed above a pasture of big-eyed cows and into a thick, damp grove of trees. “The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws,” wrote Angela Carter of one nameless Little Red–inspired heroine in her short story “The Company of Wolves.” I had always loved hiking alone, but something in those hills—or in Alice’s anxiety, Yolande’s story, or my summer brain—unnerved me. One day I heard the staccato of feet behind me and turned just as two horses galloped by, spraying dust as their suited riders disappeared down the hill. Had I fallen into some distant feudal era? I was used to seeking forests as refuge, and though I thought Carter’s simile seemed too easy, I recognized the sense of stepping into some dark place you only hoped would spit you out.
Because I did not first arrive on a Wednesday, the “public” visit day when interns splayed sandwich-board “Welcome” signs on the street, the Trust itself was easy to miss. Hidden among Beenham’s narrow neighborhood roads, its entrance was just a car-shaped pause in a hedgerow marked by a small plaque reading “Butlers Farm.” A quarter mile or so of driveway wound past fields of perfectly shorn grass, a wooded stream with a sign for “frog and toad habitat,” a side road pointing to the founders’ stately brick manor house, and, finally, the one-room visitor center that flanked the towering chain-link fence of the first wolf enclosure. Reaching the Trust felt less like entering a zoo than entering a fairy tale. Here I let the trappings of the genre amuse me. I had ignored the mother’s warnings, walked through the woods, and arrived at the wolf.
* * *
My days at the Trust were blissfully unstructured, a luxury of observation where my biggest concern was figuring out where to put my eyes. I was expected to stay on-site between nine a.m. and four p.m. with the interns and staff—later if there was something like a “Howl Night” for the visiting public—but within this window, I blocked my own time. Unlike my first weeks of summer, where the academic hangover faded into bright formless days that spread like a field for anxiety to bolt, the Trust grounded me in present tense. Walking down the concrete path that skirted the enclosures, I squinted at the wolves and tried to memorize their names. Mosi and Torak; Mai and Motomo; Sikko, Pukak, and Massak; Tala, Tundra, and Nuka. Everyone spoke to them, so I did too. Hey Mai, I whispered to the quartz-colored wolf with the sooty streak on her nose, mother to Tala, Tundra, and Nuka. Where’s Mr. Motomo? My questions would hang dumbly in the air, the wolves’ names melting like strange candy on my tongue.
I liked the Arctics best. Sikko, Pukak, and Massak were siblings, and they were the biggest wolves. Unlike the others—European wolves whose fur fell on a spectrum of dirtied snow to cookies-and-cream to the gray brown of a sparrow—these three were white tinged with gold, the color of milk gone sour, with sandalwood eyes lined in black that beaded in teardrops toward their snouts. Each enclosure carried a photo and profile for each wolf, written in first-person like a dating profile. “I am the smallest with a very pretty face,” said Sikko’s. Also: “I get very excited with my handlers and I become submissive by making squeaky whimpering noises.” Both hers and her brothers’ signs explained that they had been born into a snowstorm in a Quebecois wildlife park in 2011, trapped in their den and found barely alive. When they were flown to England ten weeks later, they were the first Arctic wolves to arrive on the island.
One morning I heard growling then watched as one Arctic put its head on the rump of another, stretching its neck like a saddle blanket across its sibling’s body. I couldn’t yet differentiate between the wolves, all scraggly without their winter coats, so I struggled to suss their social dynamics, but I wrote in my notebook that I had seen a snarl evolve into a tender moment. Later I realized that what I had witnessed was not an affectionate lupine hug but a show of reasserted power: that a dominant wolf will rest its head on the back of a submissive one as a reminder of hierarchy. A volunteer who had been at this a while shared it offhandedly, and when I heard it, I blushed. I felt like a foreign tourist in the land of the wolves, only capable of mumbling “Bathroom?” in their language. Aware I had much to learn, I steeped myself in the Trust’s library, in the collection of wolf books and the archive of the Trust’s quarterly Wolf Print magazines. I learned that like penguins, the Arctics had “countercurrent heat exchangers” in their paws, which circulated blood and kept their feet from sticking to the frozen tundra. Everything I read was a reminder of how unnatural their current situation was: that these wolves—whose nails grew faster than any other subspecies of gray wolf because they had evolved to dull on permafrost—were now penned “ambassadors” in the dewy pastureland of southern England, scratching their paws against a food-filled chrome tube in a concrete base.
My instinct was to look to the wolves for my mirror. When two siblings circled one another, I longed to call my sister. When two mates nuzzled, I longed to call my boyfriend. Philosopher Suzanne Cataldi writes that respect for non-human animals means letting them “live a life fitted for [their] species-specific nature,” and not, in other words, mapping a wolf onto how it reminds me of a human. I didn’t want to anthropomorphize this creature that had so long dragged the baggage of human fantasy and fears, but to studiously avoid the comparison was “to risk falling into the related fallacy of mechanomorphism—the assumption that animals are machinelike creatures,” as critic Amitav Ghosh writes, citing the work of ecological sociologist Eileen Crist. I was not a biologist nor a real academic; I had no real lens. I was just one animal watching another in the heat.
I propped my gaze on simile. Sometimes the Arctics walked with tails raised like scorpions; other times they dragged them like old rope. After the rain, their fur lay matted in creamy spikes like fresh meringue. When they rolled into the grass, their bodies fell like Slinkies, first front and then back-half lolling into the sun. In these moments they reminded me of my family’s old Australian shepherd, but later, when I stepped through the outer fence to join the other interns and researchers for the afternoon feeding, lifting a bleeding hunk of cow from a plastic bucket and holding it against the fence for one to grab, I could feel a quick bump of tooth against the blue plastic of my glove and hear the clamp of jaw through another creature’s bone. These weren’t your average house Fido. The noise of a crunched femur sounds like rockfall, and always sent a zing of awe shooting up my spine. What big teeth you have, I would think, instinctively running my tongue over the smooth row of my own. The wolf, of course, would not respond. He was just a carnivore being a carnivore. Those teeth were not for eating me.
* * *
With so many blank hours to fill my notebook, my eye turned to the humans I shared my days with. Mike, the Trust’s site manager and wolf keeper, was in his early thirties, smiley with scruffy ginger facial hair and a rain-or-shine uniform of khaki shorts and a forest-green staff polo marbled with indistinguishable stains. He reminded me of Winnie-the-Pooh, if Pooh gave impassioned lectures on predator mating rituals and stashed roadkill for the wolves in his car before work. Tsa, the wife of the Trust’s late founder and its current director, was his aesthetic inverse. Short blond hair as straight as her spine, Wellingtons and pearls and crisp Oxford shirts. She lived on-site at Butlers Farm in the stately brick house that, Google Maps showed me, abutted tennis courts and an outdoor pool. Her companion was a Jack Russell terrier, Parsnip, a squirt of a dog who took unmistakable pleasure in peeing at the edge of an enclosure then kicking bark chips at the chain link while a wolf lunged and whined at the metal. Tsa, like her dog, expressed herself freely. “I’m not particularly obsessed with wolves,” she told me when we sat down one afternoon. I knew Mike would echo the statement—he had told me that for an animal behaviorist, any creature that shows interesting behavior is interesting—but Tsa’s reasoning didn’t seem intellectual, just blunt. She liked to go foxhunting with dogs and wished England had not outlawed it. She thought the country had become too politically correct; she told me there were still mixed messages about the reality of global warming. “I’m not really a conservationist. I’m a watcher.”
