Sharon paused at the door. The wind murmured around the opening, pushing her hair back into her face. Roman caught a whiff of salt water. The weather prediction was for a storm, and evidently it was beating the waves into spray on the rocky western side of the island. “You were such friends. What happened at the end? He really hated you. I could see it.”
Roman shrugged.
Sharon looked at him compassionately. “Come off the island. The wolves don’t need you here. They’ll be rounded up in a month whether you’re supervising or not. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”
Roman looked away. I’m being evasive, he thought. I’m lying with my eyes. “I have work to do yet.”
After she shoved the door tight, Roman opened the notebook. Instead of more of Fitzgerald’s brain-numbing handwriting, the first page had just two words written on the upper left corner, like the salutation of a letter, “Dear Roman.” No comma, no other text, just “Dear Roman” and the rest blank. Page after page the same, until the last page, where under the two words was another of the myths, but this one wasn’t about wolves. It told about a scorpion that wanted to cross a river and asked a frog to give him a ride. The frog said, “I can’t let you on my back. If I do, you will sting me, and I will die.” The scorpion said, “If I sting you, then you will drown and so will I.” The frog thought about that for a minute, then agreed to give the scorpion a lift. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and as the paralysis started to reach the frog’s limbs, he said, “Why did you do that? You’ve killed us both.” The scorpion shrugged and said, “It’s my nature.”
The story was signed, “Yours in nature, Fitzgerald.”
Sadly Roman recalled coming to the island six months ago. He and Fitzgerald had spent hours sitting in this room discussing their work, and Fitzgerald often talked of “nature.” One evening he said, “It is the wolf’s nature to mark its territory. It is man’s nature to push back the wilderness, to wipe out the marks.”
Roman had paused in his notetaking, his pen poised above the page and said, “But man can control his ‘nature.’ He’s not hardwired to behaviors. There’s no instinctive component in man.”
Fitzgerald tilted his head after that statement, a very wolf-like posture that meant the same thing in the animaclass="underline" puzzlement. The sides of the Quonset hut shook with the wind that now Roman was used to, but then he had glanced around as if he expected the metal walls to crumple at any moment. Fitzgerald wrapped both hands around his coffee cup, brought it to his lips but didn’t drink. “That’s an odd thing for a behavioralist to say. What do you think of Sharon?”
“What do you mean?” They hadn’t been on the island long, and Roman had found much about Fitzgerald to admire: his ease with himself, the liquid transitions from thought to thought, and his genius for connecting them. “Umm… Sharon. Well, she’s competent enough. She might get a little lonely out here. It’s a long haul for a grad student in the field.”
“You don’t think she’s good looking?” asked Fitzgerald. He put his cup down, ran his fingers through his hair, and then cleared his throat.
Roman automatically cataloged the gestures—all indicated nervousness. “I hadn’t noticed. I suppose she is.”
Fitzgerald grinned. “She showers with her drapes open. Her window faces your hut. Notice that?”
“No, I haven’t. It wouldn’t be appropriate. She’s a grad student for crying out loud.” Roman clicked his pen several times in a row, noticed the action and quelled it. Playing with objects was also a sign of nervousness.
Fitzgerald leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands on his chest. “You make it sound like she’s a child. You’re not ten years older than she is. Maybe it’s not your nature to notice.”
Roman laughed. “Maybe not. Maybe not. But it keeps me professional too.”
Fitzgerald shook his head, then moved into a lengthy explanation of the combined techniques he was using to change the wolves’ behavior. “If we nudge their learning curve just a bit, we can establish stable populations outside of the zoos.”
“You’re quixotic. They range too widely. Too much of their diet is big game, and they won’t stick to park lands and green belts. Even if people will leave them alone—there’s no guarantee of that—they won’t flourish on limited range.”
“But they have to. That’s all there is to it. They have to!” Fitzgerald’s face darkened in abrupt vehemence, and he looked down to his hands resting in his lap. “Wolves are part of what’s best about being human.”
Abashed, Roman didn’t know how to respond. They hadn’t known each other long, and the mercurial switch in moods startled him. Finally, he reached out and touched Fitzgerald’s wrist. “It’s all right. I’ll help… do what I can.”
Fitzgerald screwed up his face tightly for a second as some complicated emotion wrestled behind it, but then he relaxed and smiled wanly. “Promise?”
Roman nodded.
Later, after Fitzgerald cheered up, he said, “Do you want to see the animals in the wild? I mean, really see them?”
They walked through the long access tunnel that emptied onto a screened observation platform hundreds of yards into the reservation. Fitzgerald held a finger to his lips as they neared the exit, and they crept the last few yards until they were in the open.
Here, the island screened much of the wind, and the rustle of pine filled the night gently, like a steady background of rain in the distance. An almost full moon behind hazy clouds cast a delicate light on the hills around them, the sand glowed albino bright between clumps of salt-grass. Roman started to speak, but Fitzgerald pressed a hand to Roman’s shoulder and shook his head. “They’re just upwind,” he mouthed without sound.
They were only twenty yards away. Dark movement against the sand. It took a moment for Roman to pick out the details in the soft light, the long legs, lean chests, ears up, alert and relaxed. Posture revealed all. He identified the dominant alpha as it stalked through the pack: larger, a lighter gray than the rest with an almost black chest. Lesser males dropped their heads, turned away slightly, tails down, ears dropped. A whole grammar of rank and position in their stance. Roman held his breath. It was his first time this close to wolves outside of a zoo. All of his studies had been on wolves in captivity, on the other side of the glass. Here, nothing separated them but a thin camouflaged netting and a couple of good bounds through the night air.
Suddenly, they all looked toward the platform, their eyes picking up the filmy glint of moon. Roman froze. Fitzgerald’s hand tightened on his shoulder. The tableau remained still for long, long seconds until the alpha trotted to the top of the hill and the rest followed him. The others flowed out of sight, but the big wolf, silhouetted against the horizon’s clouds, gazed back at the netting as if examining the men inside, and, after the evaluation, dismissing them. He followed the pack.
“I’m going with them,” whispered Fitzgerald. He rolled onto his back, stripped off his shirt, unbuckled his pants and removed them and his shoes before Roman could say anything. To Roman’s astonished look he said, “You haven’t done a thing until you’ve run naked with the wolves.”
He raised the bottom of the netting, slipped out and loped up the hill. Roman rose from his crouch until his head brushed the top of the blind. The hazy clouds broke, and the moon light brightened Fitzgerald’s path. For a moment, he paused at the hill’s top looking back, a disturbing vision of white marble poised on the brink. Roman caught himself fingering the top button of his coat.