Wolfish, page 5
This was an ending of sorts for those of us on the train, but it meant nothing to the story of the man. A police detective asked for my number and never called. Later I searched local newspapers and police logs and found nothing. I hoped he had not been thrown off and abandoned on the platform, as had happened when a friend dropped acid on the train then panicked when the oil flares appeared. I hoped this man had gotten help, but what did that look like out here? So much brown flat. That town, the next one we pulled into after I spoke with the conductor, was Wolf Point, Montana. It had fewer than 3,000 residents and was the hub of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, not far from the banks of the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark’s expedition had passed by in 1804. Its namesake is disputed; the town website traces the most popular story to one William Bent, allegedly the nephew of the legendary Kit Carson and a Pony Express mail rider who spent the winter of 1868–1869 hunting wolves in the region. “Wolf Point got its name from the fact that one winter the wolfers killed such a large number of wolves that they froze before the skins could be removed,” he wrote. “The frozen carcasses were piled near the river to wait the coming of spring and the pile was so high, it became a landmark for all the country around.” I imagine the value of these pelts was not just in how they would be sold—fur for ladies’ coats, say—but in what their presence represented. The loss of a wolf. Those trappers were paid not just for the token of the fur but for the perceived evil of the creature that once animated it. Wolf pelt as a symbol of vanquished fear.
Crystallized in the violent history of Wolf Point’s name, then, was the idea that by eliminating the creature who threatens you, or whom you see as a threat, you have something to celebrate. This is a tempting story, but the expulsion of the man on the train revealed its shabby architecture. Sure, I wanted him away from me, but I also wanted to better understand his life, his brain, the mechanisms that led him to write such things to me, the mechanisms behind how I responded. “If you don’t punish people who do unacceptable things,” asks psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “what else can you do with them, or to them?” Punishment, he writes, is so often a failure of imagination. When I looked out the window, I pictured one pile of wolf pelts after another.
In talking to the conductor, I learned the man had not been escorted off in Wolf Point as planned. Only one officer had been free when he called in, and the conductor thought they needed at least two to remove him in case he resisted. That impulse was, at the next station, proven right. But I was still thinking about Wolf Point as the train moved west, past beached school buses with punched-out windows, aspens quaking wet in the afternoon light. That night, I got a call from a number I did not know, and when I googled it, the area code read Wolf River, Wisconsin, a town I had never heard of. This was a coincidence that felt like a sign. A day later, when the train pulled into Portland, I hugged my parents for too long, and a few days after that, I picked up the rental car and drove north to the cabin. The house was not alone in the woods as I had imagined, but at the end of a long dirt road with only one other house in sight. A sign outside read Curly Wolf Gunsmiths. I looked for the bald man everywhere, but all I saw was the wolf.
* * *
When a wolf chews a kill, it can ferry the meat in its gut. This is how a parent feeds her young if they are older than about five weeks—belly full, running through the brush to the den. The pups bump their snouts into hers, licking her muzzle, signaling their hunger. When she regurgitates the meat, they pounce, jostling one another for the best bites, eating themselves into a stupor. This is how it works: an animal is killed, a pup is kept alive. There is no morality in the wolf’s kill, only the blunt logic of animal life.
The same month a wolf killed Curt’s lambs, in April 2009, another wolf in northeastern Oregon had pups. This was B-300, that new wolf who had swum the river from Idaho. She was the one whose first litter Russ had heard the previous summer, still the only wolf known to have pups in the state in decades. She gave birth in a den her mate would have helped her dig. It would have been near water, probably on a hill or a ridge—maybe a rut under tree roots, the natural depression under a boulder, the sandy dark of a cave. The entrance to the den was probably about the size of a desktop computer monitor, leading to a tunnel that hooked to a rounded hollow some six to fourteen feet into the earth. This was where the bodies multiplied. When they were born, her pug-faced pups could barely smell. They were deaf and blind for about two weeks, unable to regulate their own body temperature or support their own weight. Crawling meant pulling themselves with their front legs as they tipped into one another, each pup a mewing, tiny thing, about a pound in weight, the size of a Beanie Baby.
Pup mortality rates can be hard to determine in those first, private months, but research suggests it could be around fifty percent. Though some of B-300’s litter likely died, many did not. One of those pups would grow into one of the most famous wolves in America, a wolf whose life would tug many into its orbit, including me—someone who had never thought much about wolves, or what learning to live with them might teach us about learning to live with ourselves. But that comes later. At first this wolf, OR-7, was just a pup. Still reliant on the kill his mother had spit up, until, somewhere after a few months, his milk teeth became strong enough to tear flesh.
* * *
Wolves may have been exterminated in America in the mid-twentieth century, but the wolf as symbol never left. The violence European settlers exercised while slaughtering the animal is now etched in the cartography of U.S. place names like Wolf Point, while the reverence still carried for its alleged “wildness” motors down the highway on RVs airbrushed “Gray Wolf.” I knew the man on the train was not a wolf, but in so many fairy tales, his part would be played by one. I did not trust my culture’s narratives about fear. I wanted to hold them up and light a match, first to illuminate and then to watch them turn to ash. At the same time, I could not ignore the thrum of panic in my own life. Not just for my own body, but for those of others, both human and animal. Little moments, like what happened on the train, were accumulating like sediment and throwing off the balance of my days. “My inner world had gone away,” says the young protagonist of Anna Burns’s novel Milkman after she is stalked by an older man. I knew growing up meant learning from the past, but it also meant choosing when to look away from it. I couldn’t figure out how to decide when to do what.
Liana Zanette is a Canadian biologist who studies the ecology of fear, and whom I later interviewed for her research into dynamics of predator and prey. “Fear is not an emotion in my lab,” she told me. “We think about it in terms of behavioral responses to life-threatening events.” I knew an elk getting charged by a wolf was incomparable to one person being threatened by another, and I was wary of the metaphors that often conflated them. At the same time, I couldn’t help acknowledging the wedge at the center of the Venn diagram: that in each case, a body can be transformed by its stress response to a perceived threat. Zanette studied psychology as an undergraduate, and her research now applied biomedical definitions of human PTSD to animal contexts. Everything changed after trauma, even plants, she told me. Responses to chronic stress were basically the same across species. “If you experience something life-threatening, you are a different animal the very next day,” she said.
I doubted my life had been threatened on the train, but I felt something like validation from the other end of the phone. I appreciated visualizing my fear not just as a feeling—I could deal with those!—but as a set of responses, a row of dominoes that tipped outward into different spheres of life. “We need to form fear memories instantly to survive another day,” Zanette said. “They are extremely difficult to get rid of because they have to be instant, and you can’t afford to lose them.” A fearful experience changes how a body moves through the world. She found that in high-predator environments, birds will forgo food. A recording of a barking dog was enough to scare raccoons off from searching for food on a beach. Audio of an English actor reading The Wind in the Willows—textbook terror—made nearby badgers forage more quickly, less frequently, and with increased vigilance.
During my time at the coastal cabin, I surprised myself by cutting afternoon hikes short, too jumpy of what might lurk behind the old-growth trees. In scanning for the man’s giant shoulders in the grocery store and on the beach, I conjured him, again and again. Quand on parle le loup. When you speak of the wolf, you see its tail. I wanted my old self back. Describing a recurrent dream of home invasion, memoirist Melissa Febos writes that because she has never experienced such an assault, nor has she been raped, the feeling is “not a reenactment of such a trauma but a preoccupation with the threat of it, with the problem and necessity of refusing without ever saying no.” The man had not violated me physically, but the tenor of his attention had reminded me the world and its inhabitants were, at the end of the day, unknowable. The word “fear” comes from an Old English word connoting sudden danger and ambush. As my sister Annika pointed out to me one day, maybe we try to defang the feeling by anticipating it. We cannot be ambushed by the threat we have been waiting for. And so I started looking differently at all strange men I encountered, expecting the worst. I no longer entertained Meriwether Lewis’s words that it was a good smooth road ahead.
The man on the train would not leave me, but I did not want to imagine the man. The wolf would not disappear, so I began to imagine the wolf.
* * *
I read that in a corner of western Russia, wolves were killing dogs. They used to eat wild boars, but then there was an outbreak of African swine fever. The government implemented a boar-hunting program, and maybe, say the locals, that’s when the predators grew bolder. A news article from 2018 reported wolves walking town roads as if they were in forests. Multiple villagers described searching for missing dogs but finding only their heads remaining. No humans had been hurt, as far as I could tell, but people were afraid. They built backyard cages for domestic animals. When summer passed, they abandoned the unpaved streets around five p.m., when the sun went down. Because the changing climate had made winter unseasonably mild, with little snow, there were few tracks for hunters to follow. If you do not know where a wolf has stepped, you imagine it could have stepped everywhere. In the face of this uncertainty, villagers created rules for safety. One town kept Christmas lights blinking in the streets from October to May, believing the flashing to be a deterrent. Another town’s residents scattered pitchforks along its footpaths, for walkers to use in case of an attack. One schoolteacher invented her own ritual. “I walk to work in bright red mittens,” she told the reporter. “I hold flashlights inside to produce a sort of red flare. Maybe that will frighten them.” She does not have to say: maybe it will not.
Because many of our stories about wolves have been inflated for so long, it is a challenge to separate the being from the belief. But if it was a leap, at first, for me to imagine the reality of a twenty-first-century town haunted by fear of wolves, it was not hard for me to imagine how the schoolteacher felt. We invent rituals to shield ourselves: wear this, shout that. The systems become our stories. The stories become our lives. I am less interested in the villagers who are killed by wolves—there are so, so few in this age, especially in North America—than in how it feels to be the one who believes they can be killed. Who puts on their red mittens, takes a deep breath, and steps out the door. This book does not unfold in the aftermath of rape, or murder, or attempted murder, or any of the other horrors that constellate our world. It is not about waking up in the gut of the wolf. It is about the stone in the belly of the person who knows these outcomes are possible, who has experienced—haven’t we all?—some shade of confrontation before, and now lives in the twilight zone between the anticipatory anxiety of what could be and the memory of fear that screamed what now. It is the story of a journey through entre chien et loup, that hazy hour where we not only evaluate our fear, but learn to question it, deny it, walk beside it.
2
Girl v. Wolf
The month before I began my senior year of high school, a teacher named Candice left her home near Pittsburgh and flew to Alaska. She took a photo from the airplane showing a silver creek dripping into a hilly green valley, and then a few days later, posted “The Journey begins…” on her blog. After an orientation with fellow teachers near Anchorage, she flew west again, this time south down the peninsula on a wobbly ten-seater bush plane, heart whacking as they soared across water-threaded forests down into the fishing village of Perryville, some five hundred miles south of Anchorage, along the sea.
Alaska was nothing like home, but she was good at starting anew. After graduating college in 2000, Candice had packed her beat-up Chevy and driven to California, living in her car and grooming at the local community center until she wrangled a job, her father later told reporters. Now, about a decade later, after getting a master’s in special education, she’d found this gig at a job fair. Based in Perryville, she’d fly from one remote island village to another and teach a patchwork of special-education students, many of them Alutiiq, many of their parents subsistence hunters and fishermen.
Perryville was founded in 1912 as a refuge for the Alutiiq displaced after the eruption of Mt. Katmai, the largest volcanic eruption in twentieth-century North America. If Candice was homesick in that place born of disaster, she did not share it on her blog. She baked cookies for the bush pilots; she caught her first salmon then ate it grilled on the deck of the boat the same afternoon; she threw sea urchins into a campfire and waited until the spines cracked to start eating; she learned that bear grease made a pie crust sing. She befriended village dogs on her morning runs, feeding them milk bones so they would run beside her and chase off the ravens and foxes. The whole time she gripped her bear spray, like the hand of a friend, in her palm. There are so many brown bears in this part of Alaska that government biologists classify it as “high density,” with approximately one bear for every ten square kilometers, like one bear wandering an area the size of three Central Parks. Candice knew about the bears. When they hibernated in December, she relished the chance to go farther on her morning runs through the moonlit bush. Nights in Alaska felt brighter than in rural Pennsylvania. Darkness was not real dark, just a monochrome glow lit by everything bright that hung above. Candice’s ponytail swung as she ran, a gold flare beneath the moon.
Alaska delivered Candice her own heart—so human, so fragile—as if on a silver platter. Rarely had she been so aware of its thump. So much of life must have felt like the hike she went on one day through bear country with the friend who carried a .44 Magnum for protection—“a little nerve wrecking [sic], but exciting,” as she summed it on her teaching blog. Still, she was against trophy hunting, even for a creature that made her jumpy. “I personally do not like the bears being shot,” she wrote. “I think they’re beautiful and amazing animals to watch.” She knew that a bear who had been shot could still attack. There was no such thing as immunity, just head and luck and fist. So much of her life in Alaska could, suddenly, tilt into survival mode. You could leave for a walk on a mild day and find plummeting temperatures and forty-mile-an-hour winds on the way home. “At one point it was so windy, that I thought of waiting in the ditch for someone to find me, but then I realized there was no one around to look for me, so I got up and kept walking,” she wrote. What else was there to do? Experience had taught her snow could blow on the carburetor and gas could freeze in the tank and she’d just have to walk home, extremities numb, only a small bubble of vision around her face. She knew she could surf a glassy twenty-second ride on those Gatorade-blue waves but if she hit trouble there was no lifeguard watching, no rescue plane waiting. “I hate to see nice waves wasted, but I’m not sure how safe the waters are,” she wrote. One day, on a sunny Sunday back at her base in Perryville, a couple of students asked if she wanted to go for a hike. They climbed a mountain that jutted above the rock-strewn shore, watching the sun splay its last golden beams across the sea. Coming down she was acutely aware of what it would mean for a foot to slip. “Careful!! I must have said that a thousand times, it was a steep descent!” she wrote later. “To be a kid again with no fear…”
One of the towns she taught at regularly was Chignik Lake, population ninety-one. This was a place you could only reach by air, or, hypothetically, boat. Landing there meant wind tossing the plane, a captain searching for caribou bulls, a runway just a long smudge of dirt. When they didn’t crash Candice remembered to exhale. The one road out of town led to the large blue swath of Chignik Lake, which led to the Chignik River, which fed Chignik Lagoon and Chignik Bay, and then you were in the Pacific, miles of salty blue so cold it would make you gasp like a trout off the line. The school mascot at Chignik was a wolf. There was a taxidermied one in the lobby, coat the color of Oreo ice cream, jaws swung open, who, through its blue-glass eyes, watched the twenty-some students pass in and out. “It’s a great reminder of what lurks outside in the wilderness and to be on the alert at all times,” Candice wrote on the blog. She spent Thanksgiving that year helping a fellow teacher with his trapline, piling halibut carcasses for bait beside the metal snare traps. “Next week we’re hoping for a wolf,” she wrote. She had seen the tracks, big ones, and converted them to pelt in her mind. She was learning this was how locals stayed warm in the minus-20-degree weather, but also that this was money and livelihood.
