History of Wolves(23)

It would not. She was right.

“Listen, you’ll like him,” she promised. “He’s one of those people you can hear think. You can see him making all these calculations when he talks. He’s that smart.”

I wondered. I wondered if I could hear him thinking right now all those miles away, up in the air, in his plane, making his calculations, keeping track of his baby stars and their magnetic fields, charting galaxies so far away they were billions of years old before we knew they existed, and arranging the movements of Patra and Paul and me and this car, which, I’d noticed, Patra had rinsed clean of salt for his arrival.

“Sure,” I said.


Patra was nervous about having left Paul asleep in his bed. But when we got back to their house, he was up and making himself a sugar sandwich, which he wanted to pack in his Tonka truck and take to his cabin in the woods. His cabin was a chair overturned, so I suggested we set up a real tent—one from their garage they’d never used—on the living room rug. Only a grayness in his skin made me think of how he’d been the day before, with that engorged drip of sweat on his chin. Patra was thrilled. Before she left, she kept kissing his head, rubbing her face in his hair, taking in his scent, like a dog. “Your dad’s going to be so proud!” she gushed. “So happy to see you. Good job, hon.”

We spent the day setting up camp. I’d promised Patra not to take him out of the house, so to kill the long hours indoors, I taught him everything I knew about fighting off bears, about surviving on bark and berries, about living with just a knife if you had to. Never follow a creek expecting it to lead to civilization, I told him. That’s a myth. Be sure to find a clean water source before two days are up. If you have to, tie your jacket sleeves around your ankles and walk through tall grass to gather dew on the sleeves. Suck it off. (We practiced this, Paul dragging his jacket across the rug.) Don’t be afraid to eat grasshoppers. Avoid plants with milky sap. Avoid white berries.

I taught him how to crawl across the ice when it was thin, how to distribute his weight, how to go like a soldier on his elbows.

“Here comes a bear after you!” I told him.

He crawled for a minute, took a rest.

“Here comes a wolf!”

“Nothing to worry about.” He was panting. His cheeks were bright red. “They’re. Nice.”

“Good,” I said. I lay down on my stomach beside him.


At five on the dot, I gave Paul his tuna on toast. Just exactly that: tuna from a can, the brine squeezed out, beige meat mushed with a fork over a dry field of bread. Paul scarfed this down, then went in big for a dessert of broken animal crackers. Crumbs caught in the folds of his shirt and sprinkled to the floor when he stood up.

At seven, I gave him his bath. I filled the water first with stirred-up shampoo, making a boatload of frothy bubbles. Then I pretended to examine a bug bite on my ankle as he tugged off his pants and droopy diaper. Absentmindedly, I pulled the cap off my scab, which let out a trickle of blood like a brand-new wound. I took my time swiping my skin clean. Eventually, I peeked over at Paul in the bath, where he was briskly stacking two towers of bubbles on his knees. We did not talk. Only after I set out his pajamas, only after I’d tossed away the awful diaper and handed him his underpants, did he initiate a conversation. “Are you an explorer?” he asked.

The farthest I’d been on a bus was to Bemidji on a school trip to the Paul Bunyan statue. The farthest I’d been in a canoe was a six-day trip up the Big Fork River to the Canadian side of Rainy Lake. “Not really,” I told him, regretfully.

“Oh. Are you married then?”

I put my chin in my collar. I thought I knew what he was asking now. He wanted to know what category to put me in, whether I was adult or child, whether I was more like his dad or his mom or himself—or something else, some novel discovery. My fingertips felt heavy on his pajama buttons as I did them up. “No. Not really.”

At that, he looked so unreasonably dismayed.

I thought of Lily then. I thought of how she went from being seen as a stupid girl to being treated like a possible threat, how she did it in two months flat, and as I did I stole a look into Paul’s dark eyes, which seemed sometimes gray, sometimes green, sometimes almost black. I shrugged at him. “There was a guy once. Named Adam.”

“Was he an explorer?”

“He was from California,” I said, expecting to impress him a little. “He was an actor. Well, no. Actually, a teacher.”

“Sounds like my dad. He was a teacher to my mom in college.”

I would have liked to hear more about that, but Paul—now dressed, wet hair dripping down his neck—ran off to slay a bear and drink some dew and start the campfire.


At eight, Patra was still gone, so we crawled in the tent we’d set up on the rug and zipped the fly.

“Shoes off?” I said.

“Check.”

“Hatchet by your head for defense?”

He touched the wooden handle of the hatchet. “Yep.”

He made a ball of his body in his sleeping bag, tucked his leather glove up under his head, and then, like a stone tossed in water, sank straight into sleep. I lay down on the other side of the tent: it was very warm and quiet in there, it had an underground feeling. I meant to stay awake until Patra and the husband came back, but the tent inside the house muffled all the regular night sounds, so I couldn’t hear the crickets or the owls or anything. All I heard was Paul’s breath against the nylon, a very hushed sound. And I heard the black cat leaping off the windowsill, bell jingling across the room.