Later, and for many nights after, Roman dreamed of Fitzgerald standing on the edge of the unknown, half twisted around, beckoning. Sometimes, in the dreams, Roman joined him on the hill, and he’d wake up panting, scared so deeply that once he wept. He didn’t accompany Fitzgerald on a night trip to the reservation again although he was often invited.
Roman stowed a sandwich, a bottle of water and binoculars in a day pack. He considered leaving a note for Sharon, but decided that would be melodramatic. Besides, he thought, with the ferry coming soon, she’d probably never see it.
In the tunnel, green light panels every thirty feet cut the long walk into moments of sickly, pale illumination that turned his skin to weak lime, interspaced by green instances of near total darkness. It was like walking through the endless interior of a many segmented worm.
At the exit, he passed by the case with the tranquilizer guns without taking one.
But the top of every low hill revealed nothing. He swept the landscape through the binoculars, peeking under the trees, studying each rounded back of rock for sign of the missing animals. He found fresh scat and broke it open with the toe of his boot. It was filled with grass. He thought, are they ill? After an hour of crisscrossing the south end of the island and visiting an abandoned den, he hiked to the eastern beach and headed north. Rough gravel crunched on each step. He was below the hills now, and couldn’t see farther inland than the sandy crests only a few feet away, but he figured that here, at least, nothing would smell him, and he could poke his head above the dunes every once in a while to scout the land.
The night they learned the grant would not be renewed, and at the end of the current study period the wolves would be returned to their zoos, they met in the communications hut, where Sharon broke out two bottles of scotch from her bags and proposed a party. After they were all a couple of drinks down, she said, “Damned Philistines think original research is an oxymoron,” then she turned up the music and twirled into the middle of the room to dance by herself. Her blonde hair swirled around her face like a nimbus. She danced with her eyes closed, not really moving to the music, but to some unshared rhythm of her own.
Roman took a long pull out of the bottle, and the heat flowed from mouth to gut in an unbroken line. He was deep into a melancholy, and he pictured the end of the wolves. For decades now their numbers had declined. There were probably too few of them left for a viable genetic pool. The bottle felt cool against his chest; he hugged it close. He pictured the wolves as he’d seen them that night with Fitzgerald, and the dozens of trips that he’d made on his own, and he saw them as a symbol. Wolves were primordial in man’s imagination, he thought. They had stalked cottages deep in primitive European woods, long before the great cities arose and every square mile was tilled and touched and owned. How families must have trembled when the wind rose and the wolves howled. Nothing between them and the savagery of the forest but their prayers and their homes’ thin walls. The fairy tale of the wolf at the door, huffing and puffing and blowing houses down had meaning. Little Red Riding Hood had reason to be frightened, and in real life, no hunter could bring the little girl and her grandmother back alive from the stomach of the beast. There must have been a time, he thought, there must have been a time when it looked as if the forest might win. The wolves would take back what was theirs, and the broken down walls would melt back into the forest floor.
Sharon turned slowly round and round in the middle of the floor. Music filled the hut, and Fitzgerald threw a towel over the desk lamp that gave the only light in the room so that Sharon spun wraith-like in the shadows. After a while, Fitzgerald rose, and they both danced in the darkness of the communications hut.
Drunk, Roman only half watched their body language until he realized that he was seeing all the signals of a mating ritual. Sharon moved slowly, hands open and head back, her throat exposed, and she rolled her head around, kept her heavy lidded eyes half open as she swayed to the music. Her tongue touched her lip, and every turn his way she slowed, holding his eyes for a second before moving away again, every lean a tease and retreat. Her dance said, come and get me, I’m running until you catch me. She was dancing to Roman.
Scotch thrummed like a bass chord in his throat and forehead, and he wished he could write it all down. Of all his time studying gesture, posture and behavior, he’d never felt as if he understood it so well. Sharon might as well be talking to him. He could see it in the tension in her arms, the curl of her fingers, the bend of her knees. She was asking him to dance, in all its metaphorical ways, and he found it interesting. An academic exercise. He felt no urge to stand or to join her, but it fascinated him like a good book, like a successful experiment.
In the concentration of the moment, Roman realized he hadn’t paid attention to Fitzgerald, so solemnly Roman shifted his gaze. He almost giggled; his head felt heavy, and changing his point of view was a ponderous undertaking until he saw Fitzgerald dancing a few feet to Sharon’s side. More of the light fell on him; his face was less shadowed. He too danced as if he heard other music than the tune that poured out of the speakers. A bottle in one hand, Fitzgerald advanced and retreated within a self-imposed box, never moving beyond it, but his dance said he recognized the boundary, and to Roman, Fitzgerald suddenly looked noble and tragic.
A part of Roman recognized his own drunkeness, but even drunk, a little part of him watched from afar, commenting on the moment, and right now the little part said that he was reading too much into what he saw. However, Fitzgerald sliding back and forth on the floor, drinking to hold back the misery of the lost wolves touched him, and he wanted to hold the man. All of Fitzgerald’s theories were to be taken away when the wolves left. They’d never again get a chance like this to study the wolves. Fitzgerald would never again get a chance to reintroduce the wolves to the rural landscapes where they might survive if he could just change their eons old behavior patterns a little bit.
Fitzgerald danced, and his eyes met Roman’s. For a second, Roman felt a cold connection, as if he were reading Fitzgerald’s mind, but the feeling passed, and Fitzgerald was just dancing. Roman watched Fitzgerald gathering himself in movement, speaking volumes of himself and betraying himself as he danced.
And then a little barrier snapped in Roman’s mind. Fitzgerald’s dance was a mating one too. His shoulders rocked back and forth on the fulcrum of Roman’s face. His head wove side to side, always returning his gaze to Roman’s gaze. Fitzgerald’s lips were parted, and Roman could see the glistening tips of the teeth behind them, and when he looked into Fitzgerald’s uncharacteristically shy eyes he could see that Fitzgerald knew what Roman knew. The dance was for him. The invitation was for him. Roman, the dance said, will you move with me in the night?
Shaking, Roman rose; the bottle slid off his chest and shattered on the floor. He could feel the disgust forming on his face. The message he sent wasn’t just a refusal; it was revulsion and fear. Without thinking, he rushed to the door and out of the hut. A hundred feet up the trail, the wind punishing his face with salt spray, and the waves growling on the beach below the cliff, Roman fell to his knees and retched. It all surged out, all that good liquor, and as he coughed against the muscles’ iron hold on his gut, he heard a howl behind him that rent the air. But not a wolf. The howl came from the hut, and it was pained and sick and betrayed.