History of Wolves(12)

Once, as I was helping Paul slide off a boulder, we came upon a mallard nest so far from shore that the ducklings could do nothing but waddle in yellow, panicked circles to get away. Paul reached down to touch one. The brown mother winged a few feet back, then waited empty eyed for the disaster to play itself out. Her feathers gleamed with a faint hint of purple, unruffled and smooth as scales. She did nothing to intervene, and so neither did I, as Paul grabbed at one of the ducklings. He had good intentions: he was a gentle enough kid. At the last minute, though, he pulled his hand back as if spooked—as if he’d felt something horrible beneath all that fluffy down, something brittle and hard and unexpected.

“Oh!” he said.

“What?” I asked, newly impatient with him.

His squeamishness goaded me somehow, made me a little angry. I wanted him to take the duckling and do something heartless and boyish, so I’d have to remind him to be kind. I don’t know. I wanted to be the one to stop him when he discovered the fragile contraption of bones beneath that halo of down. I wanted to intervene on behalf of animals. It irritated me that he was so careful and afraid. We stood and watched as the duckling waddled off to its mother, and the troop reconvened in a huddle under a pine.

For a strange instant, I found myself longing to lift a rock and throw it at them. I wanted to show Paul something, maybe, make him scared of the right things.

Or another time, in early evening. As Paul and I were cresting the last hill, as I was squinting into the darkening woods to make out the path, a couple of deer lifted their heads at once and differentiated themselves from the trees.

We stared at them, and they at us, for a full thirty seconds without moving. They multiplied as we looked at them. There were three at first, then there were four, then there were five. They were the exact color of the bark and leaves—gray brown—but the skin around their eyes was red. I felt the breeze on their backs lift the braid from my chest and set it down over my shoulder. “They’re going to get us,” Paul whispered. He reached for my hand.

“They’re a herd,” I reminded him. “They’re afraid of us.”

Two more appeared. Paul shivered.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. They’re prey,” I soothed.

The deer silvered under the wind. Their pink ears twitched. I knew they would take off in an instant; I could see their haunches tense. But even I had the irrational thought they were about to run right for us. They seemed ready to bear down.

Then off they went over the far ridge, white tails lifted. Hopping with that mechanical grace animals have—grasshoppers and birds—as if nothing, save death, could interrupt the repetitive beat of their movements. Branches rattled old rain down on us. We were alone.


Fee-fi-fo-fum. Soup from a can, lettuce from a bag. Cat hair on my sweater. The cats creeping from the windowsill to the rug, where they rolled religiously, unlatching their claws on each other. A video of a talking dog, book after book. “Slow down, Paul,” who was gulping apple juice so fast it seeped down his chin. My hunting jacket hung from a hook, still holding the shape of my hunched-up shoulders. On the roof, squirrels scampering. In the ground, maple seeds and bearberry, leeching down hairy new roots. Across the lake—across the lake and beneath the pines—dogs. The dogs dragging their chains, getting hungry, waiting for me to come home. Across the lake my mother, too, forgetting to turn the light on in the evening and maybe, or maybe not, watching everything.


Patra, after Paul went to bed. She came out of the back bedroom with her hair stuck to her face, as if she’d been sleeping. She’d given me a hundred-piece puzzle of an Appaloosa horse to work on while she gave Paul a bath, and when she came out, blinking, she seemed surprised I was still at it. “Oh, Linda!” she said when she saw me at the table, surrounded by the scattered debris of the puzzle. I put my hands under the table, found a thread on my sweater’s cuff to unravel and tug. “Hey,” I told her.

She felt bad about forgetting me I guess, because she got busy fast fixing snacks: microwave popcorn and hard-boiled eggs. She put them into two Baggies for me to eat as I walked home—everything white and warm, one light as leaves, the other steaming up the plastic. I put them in my two jacket pockets.

“Is it too dark to walk in the woods by yourself?” she wondered then, but only idly as she glanced out the window, where a branch clicked the glass. She fished a ten-dollar bill from her wallet and handed it over.

“Nope,” I said, rolling the bill into a tube, which I pretended to survey her through, like a miniature telescope. “There you are!” I said.

“Ha,” Patra replied. But she wasn’t really laughing.

I folded the tube in half. And then, just like that, a gust of humiliation shot through me—as if I were Mr. Grierson making the telephone joke, as if Patra were Lily humoring me to get done with things. Ha. Even her laugh was saying good-bye.

Why didn’t I just leave? All I had to do was blink. All I had to do was lift my mind away from her, and I could already see all those old trees blowing overhead as I walked along the lake, the same old moon scraping open some clouds and laying down a path of light. Oh, I liked night. I knew it well. For some reason, though, I was finding it hard to open the door. I stashed the folded bill in my pocket with the egg and spent a long time on my jacket zipper.

“What’s your husband writing?” I said, at the last minute.