“They’ve been here for half a million years, Mrs. Slone. They walked over the Bering land bridge. They live here.”
They live here. And Core knew they helped rule this continent until four hundred years ago. Inuit hunters learned to encircle caribou by watching wolves. Hunting-man revered another hunter. Farming-man wanted its existence purged. Some set live wolves ablaze and cheered as they burned. Wolf and man are so alike we’ve mistaken one for the other: Lupus est homo homini. This land has hosted horrors most don’t care to count. Wolfsbane. But we are the hemlock, the bane of the wolf. Core said nothing.
“I don’t understand what they’re doing here,” and she gestured feebly in front of her, at the very space on the rug where her son had no doubt pieced together a puzzle of the solar system. Or else scribbled a drawing of the very monster that would one day come for him, stick-figure mother and father looking on, unable to help.
“Why is this happening to me, Mr. Core? What myth has come true in my house?”
“They’re just hungry wolves, Mrs. Slone. It’s no myth. It’s just hunger. No one’s cursed. Wolves will take kids if they need to. This is simple biology here. Simple nature.”
He wanted to say: All myths are true. Every one is the only truth we have.
She laughed then, laughed with her tear-wet face pressed into her hands. He saw her fingernails were gnawed down to nubs. He knew she was laughing at him, at his outsized task here before her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and looked at his boots. “I don’t know why this is happening to you, Mrs. Slone.”
He could name no comfort for this. His face warmed with the foolishness of his being here.
More quiet. And then: “Does your husband know?”
She seemed startled by the word, unready to recall her husband. “Men were supposed to call him there, to call the ones who could tell him. But I said I would do it, that I should be the one to do it. I never did, though. I can’t tell him while he’s there. He’ll see for himself.” She paused and considered her gnawed fingertips. “He’ll see what has happened. What we’ve done. What no one here was able to stop.”
“They’re hungry and desperate,” he said. “They don’t leave for the fringes of their territory unless they’re desperate. They avoid contact with humans if they can. If we’ll let them. The wolves that came to this village must be rabid. Only a rabid or starved wolf does what happened here.”
He looked beyond her, looked for the language but it was not there. “The caribou must have left early,” he said. “For some reason.”
He could have told her more. That wolves have a social sophistication to make many an American town look lagging. That the earliest human tribes were identical to wolf packs. That a healthy gray wolf’s yearly requirement of meat can reach two tons, that they’ll cannibalize each other, kill their own if the hunger hones to a tip. He’d seen this in the wild. A six-year-old boy would have shredded like paper in the teeth of any adult male. It killed the boy at his throat and then rent through the clothing to get at the belly, its muzzle up beneath the ribs to eat the organs it wanted.
“If I can ask,” he said, “why wouldn’t anyone here hunt the wolves after what happened?”
“They’re afraid. And the ones who don’t have fear have respect. They respect the thing. They probably think we deserve it, we deserve what happened here.”
“I don’t understand, Mrs. Slone.”
“Stay here long enough and you might. Can I refill your tea?”
He indicated no. His tea was finished now and he felt the first shadows of sleep drop across his shoulders. Somewhere in the village a brace of sled dogs barked up at constellations stretched across a bowl of black. Both he and Medora Slone turned to look at the sheeted window. Where were the sled dogs when the wolves came? He remembered a Russian proverb: Do not call the dogs to help you against the wolves.
He remembered a story he’d been told and could never say if it was parable or fact but he told it to her anyway: “In Russia, during a winter of the Second World War, a food shortage was on. No meat, no grain. The fighting decimated the land. The wolves rampaged into villages and mauled at random. Like they were their own invading army. They killed hundreds of people that winter, and not just women and children. Drunk old men or crippled men too weak to defend themselves. Even dogs. There was nobody left to hunt the wolves. All the able men were at the war or dead. Somehow aware of that imbalance, the wolves came and left scenes of carnage almost as bad as the bombs. Doctors said they were rabid, but the villagers said they were possessed by demons hell-bent on revenge. Their howls, they said, sounded like hurt demons. It was revenge, the old people thought. Revenge for something, for their past, maybe, I don’t know.”
She stared at him—she didn’t understand. She looked insulted.
“I mean you’re not alone,” he said.
“Yes, I am. What’s done can’t be undone, can it? Just look what we’re capable of, Mr. Core,” and she held up her palm for him to see. But he did not know why and was too frightened to ask.
She lowered her hand and said, “Come, I’ll show you outside where the children were taken. Are those your boots?”
He looked at his feet. “These are my boots.”
“You’ll need better boots.”
This stolid village remained gripped in snow and stillness, and over the hills lay a breadth without end, an echoing cold with a mind that won’t be known. Yellow-orange squares burned in the sides of log and frame homes, stone spires exhaling wood smoke. From the hook on a cabin hung a fish chain with two silver salmon. Core saw overturned dogsleds and toboggans, canoes and aluminum boats, ricks of exposed wood, pickup trucks with tire chains. Adjacent to some cabins were plywood kennels for sled dogs. Unlabeled fifty-five-gallon drums, rust-colored, most with tops torched off. Shovels and chain saws and snow machines, Coleman lanterns dented and broken. Gas-powered auger to drill lake ice. Blue tarp bungeed around a truck’s engine on sawhorses. Vehicles mugged by snow and stranded. The church an unpainted A-frame beside the schoolhouse. And all around, those hills with howls hidden within.
He’d been deep into the reaches of Montana, Minnesota, Wyoming, Saskatchewan, but no place he could remember matched the oddness, the otherness he felt in this place. A settlement at the edge of the wild that both welcomed and resisted the wild.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said, his words in a cloud. It was a lie, and he knew she heard it as a lie.
She looked to him. “You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand, Mrs. Slone?”
She neither tensed against the cold nor appeared to feel the freeze on her naked face and hands.
“This wildness here is inside us,” she said. “Inside everything.”
She pointed out beyond the hills at an expanse vaster than either of them knew.
“You’re happy here?” he asked.
“Happy? That’s not a question I ask myself. I see pictures in magazines, vacation pictures of islands, such green water and sand, girls in bathing suits, and I wonder about it. Seems so strange to me, being there. There’s a hot spring not so far from here, a three-hour walk, a special place for me, hidden at the far end of the valley. That’s as close as I get to warmth and water.”
“A hot spring sounds good right now,” he said.
“Good to get clean,” she said, and he did not ask what she meant by that.
“I’ve come to help you if I can, Mrs. Slone. Nothing’s a novelty to me here.”
She wouldn’t look at him now. “Mr. Core, my husband left me alone here with a sick child.”