Wolfish, page 7
You know the story. Once upon a time a boy left home. At some point on the road he became a man. At some point he became a “wolf.”
* * *
When I think of the girl who leaves home, I think of that story that begins in the fairy-tale village. I see squat smoking chimneys and hear a mother raising her voice, rousing the girl from her place by the fire as she asks her to run a quick errand. Unlike the boy, the girl does not leave the house to find herself, or prove herself to herself. She leaves to prove her love to those around her. She fills a need.
In the earliest printed version of the story, written by Charles Perrault in 1697, the heroine goes to her sick grandmother’s house with a homemade cake and a pot of butter. Their love language is gifts. When she steps into the trees, she is wearing a ruby cape the grandmother has made for her. Like so many future female-identifying politicians, she is defined by her dress; Perrault calls the story “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.” Later, the moral implication of her costume becomes clear: she has been “spoiled” in more ways than one, as if one sort of attention invites another. The girl does not walk far before she runs into the wolf. The animal wants to eat her, but he restrains himself because woodcutters are working nearby. If Little Red remembers her mother’s warning not to talk to strangers or stray from the trail, she does not heed it. When the wolf asks where she is going, she tells him it’s to grandmother’s house.
“Well, and I’ll go and see her too,” says Perrault’s wolf. “I’ll go this way and go you that, and we shall see who will be there first.” The girl dawdles in the forest, and by the time she reaches the house, the wolf has eaten his meal. Disguising his voice as that of the granddaughter, he had stepped into the cottage, where the older woman lay ill in bed. “He immediately fell upon the good woman and ate her up in a minute,” wrote Perrault. When Little Red knocks on the door, she hears the wolf answer, but her fear gives way to reason, as she convinces herself the cold has transformed her grandmother’s voice into something hoarser. The wolf is under the bedsheets when she walks in. Watching her approach, he tells her to put the gifts on the stool then crawl into bed. If Little Red is hesitant, Perrault does not voice it. Taking off her clothes, she crawls under the sheets.
“Grandmother, what big arms you have!”
“All the better to hug you with, my dear.”
Their dialogue continues in this pattern, the spotlight of Little Red’s skepticism slowly illuminating the wolf’s whole form: his ears, the better to hear her with; his eyes, the better to see her with; his teeth, the better to eat her with, the end. The wolf “fell upon” the girl, just as he did with the grandmother. You could say the tragedy was math. Where there had been three bodies there was now only one.
Perrault did not invent this plot, he just hammered an oral folktale with roots in the Middle Ages to the page. In the process he built something new and fossilized his own place in history. A similar story had long been told in China, Japan, and Korea, under the name “The Tiger and the Children,” featuring a tiger who entered a house of unprotected children, taking the form of a mother or grandmother, and representing not just male power but, in the words of folklorist Wolfram Eberhard, that “region of death”—the West. Unlike the Brothers Grimm version that would appear in 1812, Perrault’s initial story had no deus ex machina. There was no huntsman to perform the strange cesarean and free the girl’s pale flapping arms and the soggy raisin of her grandmother from the belly of the beast, just a pretty girl who led herself astray and died. Instead of a rescue for Little Red, Perrault’s version ends with a punch line:
“Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say ‘wolf,’ but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.”
* * *
There is the boy who leaves home and becomes the wolf, and there is the girl who leaves home and meets the wolf. But there is a third story about leaving home. It is hundreds of thousands of years old, older than the others, and though it is at the root of each, it is the least sung of all three. The story of Canis lupus, the gray wolf, begins each year in spring, when a pup is weaned by her mother and moved out of the den to the rendezvous site. This is where pack members gather to eat, play, and sleep before an evening’s hunt. When the pup’s parents leave to procure food, an older sibling watches her, and in return, she clambers over them, paws like tiny fists. As she grows, blue eyes turn to gold. The adults carry her like a rag doll when her wrestling becomes too much, milk teeth like needles in their scruff, her first attempts at a howl a high-pitched whine. By the time fall arrives, she is nearly full-size, old enough to learn to hunt. For up to a few years she will travel with her family, mapping the terrain of her pack’s territory, learning the high plateaus and forested ridges and meadows that appeal to a lupine eye. The better hunters are often the young females. A scientist will say this is because they are slimmer, smaller, faster. I want to believe there is something more.
After a year or so, around the time the pups are ready to breed, some will choose to leave. These become dispersers. They are both male and female, and they are looking for independence. Not just for a mate, but for land free enough for them to start their own pack. This was why B-45 braved the Snake River crossing, and why B-300—mother to Oregon’s first twenty-first-century wolf pups—did too.
Wolves have scent glands beneath their toes; they leave olfactory breadcrumbs wherever they go. A wolf who travels alone is always constellating the paths of those who came before her, traveling the buffer zones of overlapping territories. Dispersing is risky: it is harder to catch bigger prey, and besides the increased chance of malnutrition and meeting territorial wolves, there are those regular risks of hunters and bears and illness and roads. Anyone she meets is a potential foe. But a disperser walks despite the danger. Not because it is an adventure, but because it is simply the thing she knows to do. Nobody knows what makes an animal a long-distance traveler, but it’s probably best understood as a personality trait. There is some evidence that the behavior might run within bloodlines. That some force tugs her from her family, and there she goes.
* * *
I wanted only to go far. All but one of the colleges I applied to were closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific. I cried when I thought about leaving Oregon, but angst was welcome. I did not want to sustain comfort, which gave me no excuse when the inevitable anxiety showed up, and I had nothing to blame but myself. I wanted to be somewhere so strange it would distract from myself. I wanted to stand out enough to be seen. Mostly I wanted to feel slightly unmoored, and blame that on my surroundings not the voice that whirred somewhere above my ears, telling me even when I was laughing with friends that I was still alone, ringed by some moat of unease that could never be breached. I was ready to shake the gray sky, the giant old-growth firs that seemed perpetually wet, sticky with either rain or sap, their green branches like shaggy claws. I craved brick buildings flanked by well-pruned shrubs. The tidy silence of snow.
My parents had met as freshmen in the laundry room at the University of Oregon, my mother having arrived from a small town near Missoula, Montana, and my father from a sheep-filled farm less than a hundred miles from their dorm. Two years in, he dropped out to teach himself to code. By their midtwenties, they were married, and then a few years later, I was born. My father did not talk much about regrets, but he felt strongly that my sister and I not only enroll in college but stay. I did not know what to do with the privilege of their support but fly as far as I could. Neither of my parents had applied to school on the East Coast, and as the oldest of all my cousins, I was first to look that way. I was ready to blaze the trail. I knew how to bushwhack, that if you kicked through the bramble you could figure it out, legs scratched but everything fine.
“I guess we’ll let you go east,” my maternal grandfather told me with a wink the summer before I did. He was splayed on a lounger on their Montana porch, a beer snug in the crook of his hand as the sprinklers tossed themselves back and forth behind him on the lawn. “You just have to come back when you’re done.” He squinted at me, set down the bottle, and grabbed my arm—Gotcha. He had recently given up his karate studio, and the man I had known growing up—a ski racer and instructor with a PhD in botany, a black belt, a marathoner who often started the morning doing crunches while hanging upside-down on a basement machine—was dimming. His opinions softer, drawn in pencil not in pen. Still, his calloused hand was iron. I wriggled out of his hold and told him I couldn’t imagine it any other way. His lip curved beneath his baseball cap, as if trying to decide whether to believe me. I smiled. A few seconds later, he did too.
The Russian language has different forms of the verb “to leave” depending on whether one intends to return. In truth, I was skeptical I would. Oregon felt both too socially restrictive and too geographically wide, like standing before packed bleachers in an otherwise empty field. I believed that to enter a place where nobody knew me was to take full responsibility for how I would be perceived, and that—narrative control, free from the hieroglyphic of the past—was what I craved. I did not want to be shadowed by the frizzy pyramid of my seventh-grade haircut or the way my parents danced after margaritas at the block party. Though I told myself I did not want to follow in their footsteps, deep down, I hoped I too might meet a man in a strange dormitory laundry room. That he would see me in my entirety, and ask for my number, and transform me into something whole.
* * *
In one way, the now-infamous story of roaming wolf OR-7 began when he was born into Oregon’s second litter of wolves in over sixty years, not long after wolves killed Curt’s sheep. On the other hand, the story we know is not the story of OR-7’s life but of how we witnessed it. That story began when we were able to track him, a day like a second sort of birth. The day he got his name.
It happened in early 2011, the winter of my first year of college. The wolf, B-300’s offspring, was just under two years old, and tensions around wolves in Oregon were running high. Two pregnant cows had recently been killed by wolves in northeastern Oregon, and in the eyes of the rancher who owned them, the loss included their two unborn calves as well, wrote Aimee Lyn Eaton in Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country. Advocating for government biologists to hunt down and kill the wolves, the head of the Oregon Cattle Association described the cattle depredations like murder. Bodies ripped open, fetuses dragged across the ground. Ten days later, ODFW employees followed the signal of a wolf’s radio collar to the nearby Imnaha pack. Their goal was to collar more adults so they could keep watch when the pack neared livestock.
The temperature that late February day was below zero, Russ Morgan later said in an interview. He was the ODFW wolf coordinator who had howled into the night. Now the chopper’s blades would have shaken skeletal branches as the team zeroed in on the wolves among the trees. Russ leaned into the cold, sky whipping him from all sides, and pointed his tranquilizer at the wolf’s hip. Telazol, the drug in the darts, could take five to twelve minutes to hit, longer if the wolf exerted enough energy to metabolize it faster. In that time, it was easy to lose the wolf in the trees, and hard to figure out where to descend to safety. And that’s assuming you hit the animal. A dart gun needed a trajectory. A moving plane, a moving wolf, the swirling rotor wash of chopper blurring the sky. Everything could affect a dart’s path. You didn’t want to hit the animal’s lungs or head or spine or belly, so you aimed for the hip and hoped you made it before the wolf was in the trees again. A shot, a stagger, a wolf on the ground.
By the time they located the two darted wolves through the deep snow, Russ and Roblyn Brown—then his assistant, later his successor at ODFW—could see they weren’t the adults they were expecting, but a pair of pups just under two years old. Still, they did the dance. Drew blood, measured the bodies and paws, hoisted the wolves onto the scale, placed the tracking collars around their necks. The male, the seventh wolf collared in Oregon, thus OR-7, weighed ninety pounds. Later, when reporters asked, the answer would always be no: they hadn’t taken any photos of him that day, it was too hand-numbingly cold, all they could think about was doing their job and motoring on.
Wolves often wake fifty to sixty minutes after being tranquilized, but they can be slow to resume activity—one biologist told me he sometimes referred to their behavior after capture as “sulking”—but eventually both pups began to move. Every few hours, OR-7’s GPS collar tagged his location and stored it in a black box about the size of a computer mouse. Each day it beamed those signals to a satellite orbiting the world, which bounced them to a computer in Germany and then back to the ODFW office, all in a few minutes. If the collar had been stationary for more than eight hours, a sign that the wolf wasn’t moving, it sent a mortality signal, alerting biologists that the wolf had likely died. If, as sometimes happens, the wolf had been poached and its collar destroyed, no signal would come. The silence was information too.
Most wolves survive the hangover stress of capture, but some do not. Biologists train themselves to steward a population, not an individual. They try not to get attached. Russ and Roblyn could tell from the signals that OR-7 had rejoined his pack, but his sister had not. A few days later, just five miles from where they had released her, they logged it: the rapid beep that meant a collar was working but a wolf was dead. Later Roblyn told me that while a “live” signal registers as forty to fifty pings per minute, death sounds twice as fast. With a collar registering eighty to one hundred beeps per minute, they knew the journey of the female pup was done. OR-7’s, though, was just beginning.
* * *
How does a disperser know which way to go? In the end, I saw two paths. One was a college in Maine, with a quad full of Frisbee players and a dining hall that felt like a ski lodge. The other was in the Midwest, and it had Jack.
I met him during a campus visit a month after I was admitted, in the twenty-some hours I stayed to shadow a high school acquaintance. All her friends were beautiful and hip, like extras in an indie film I would have never known to see. I felt like an anomaly, though I wondered if I might be acquiring shine by proxy, if this was the place that would finally deliver me to full potential. That first Friday afternoon we stopped by the track to cheer him on. Jack was a few years older, a friend of my friend’s, running toward us in a shimmering uniform. He was tall, with a dark aura of hair flapping above his cheekbones, arms loping beside his chest like two golden dogs. Was he winning? It didn’t matter. His face wore, beneath the ache of fight, something else. Some curiosity that found my eyes, hooked me behind the knees and tugged. And then he was gone. For hundreds of yards, he would be a smear, and then our eyes would meet, and for a second, he would be crystal, and then he’d be gone. My face was a white flag, an open door. After the race, we held our hands out for him to slap. His attention was a heat lamp. I didn’t want to turn away.
When we ran into Jack again, it was night, and he was wearing a plaid shirt and a cape someone had given him at another party, flapping toward us through the shadowy quad, a ghost flanked by a dark wing.
“You again,” he said, matching his stride to mine. I glanced at my friend, and she grinned, peeled off to talk to someone else. Jack’s words felt like a kind of miracle. On a campus of beautiful strangers, someone was seeing me. Unlike the high school acquaintance I shadowed, Jack had no obligation to talk to me. He was wry and self-deprecating and teasing and smart, and he had picked me on his own. “Tell me about my beloved school,” he said, offering me a sip from the red cup that suddenly appeared from beneath his cape. “What do you think?” How did I answer him? I had just watched as my friend talked one of her friends down from swallowing too many pills; someone else she knew had just been carted away in an ambulance because she’d had a bad reaction to the afternoon’s LSD. I was thoroughly overwhelmed by the prospect of making this place my life, but I was also swaying drunk, the first time I had been like this around strangers, the first time I realized doing this made them not into strangers at all.
By the time we kissed, we were on a makeshift dance floor in some wood-paneled house. My friend was long gone when Jack pulled the cape over our heads and socked us in black nylon. It was the first time I had met and kissed someone in the same day; the first time I kissed someone whose last name I did not know. As he pulled me into a back room and tipped me into an armchair, I began narrating our meeting to my friends back home, and then to Jack’s and my future children, the way my parents had told us about theirs. We couldn’t have been kissing for more than a few minutes, his hands up my shirt, when he started asking me to go down on him. Was this the normal college thing to do? Already? In this weird public room? My skin prickled, as if someone had opened a door, let in a draft, and walked away. I shook my head in a way I hoped was coy.
Describing her adolescence, Katherine Dykstra writes that she was “afraid of being beautiful, afraid of what it might inspire in a man … but … equally afraid not to be beautiful, to be a disappointment.” I felt a rush of each at that moment, both the acute vulnerability of my situation—drunk and unmoored in a foreign place with an older man I did not know—but also the power that came from having been selected. For the first time in my life, a stranger had made his night about me. When I looked at my bare arms, they seemed to glow with the residue of his choice. “Victimized and seductive … is it disordered, in a sexually disordered world, for a woman to feel something of both?” asks critic Jacqueline Rose in her book On Violence and On Violence Against Women, swiftly deciding it is not. Each feeling brought a head rush; I could not disentangle them.
