History of Wolves(35)

“What grade will you be in then, Linda?”

“Tenth,” I said. The question felt like a rebuke—of the way I ate my soup, of my childishness.

Leo pushed his plate to the edge of the table. “What college are you considering?”

“College?”

“Or, well, what subject do you like most?” He crossed his arms on the table.

“History.” I couldn’t, at the moment, think of anything else.

“Ah. American or European? What historical period do you like?”

“The history of wolves,” I said, but the minute the answer was out, it sounded foolish. I sipped the tiniest bit of broth from my spoon.

“You mean natural history?”

“Yep.”

“So biology actually?”

“Biology, I guess.”

His two elbows scooted forward, bumping his empty plate. “I had to take some molecular biology courses in graduate school. In my line of work, everyone is always looking for extraterrestrials, as if the universe matters only when endowed with a narrowly carbon-based definition of life.”

“In the Goldilocks zone,” I tried. Repeating what Paul had said—Paul, who’d just left to go to the bathroom clasping Patra’s hand.

“That’s right,” he said, surprised. He folded his hands on the table, and you could see the straight planes on his fingernails where he’d cut them. “I’m not saying the molecular biologists are wrong,” he went on. “That’s not exactly what I’m saying. But I’m a scientist, too, and I think those folks tend to hone in on an extremely limited set of questions.”

He had a way of watching me very closely, and not seeming to watch me at all. He was a teacher, of course, probably a good one. He was one of those teachers who set up hidden traps. Like all teachers, he wanted me caught, but he wanted to lead me there first; he wanted me to go on my own accord; he wanted me to feel like I’d made the discovery myself, that I hadn’t been lured in.

His chin was in his palm. “Let’s do a thought experiment.”

My parka slithered off my lap.

“A scientist always starts with premises, right?” He twisted the wedding band on his finger. “But so often they start with unsound premises and go awry, like the world is flat, or the human body is made up of four basic humors.”

I wanted to reach for my parka, but resisted.

“But of course we’ve learned that if you want to be a real scientist, Linda, you have to be more rigorous than that. You have to figure out what your premises are first, before you decide what’s true. A good biologist should always start by asking, for instance, what are the conditions we assume are required for life? And why do we assume that and not something else?”

It seemed to be my turn to speak. He was waiting. “You mean—”

“I mean, you have to ask yourself, from the beginning, what do you think you know?”


The twenty acres of land on the east side of Still Lake. That’s what I knew. That’s the one thing I’d always assumed I’d understand. I knew the red and white pine on the hilltop, the quaking aspen and birch closer to shore. I knew the honeysuckle and chipmunks and sunset views of the lake that weren’t worth very much in the end to developers. When I had to sell off pieces of the lot at last, I got less than sixty grand, even though the market wasn’t bad. We only ever had the ten feet of pebbly sand to beach our canoes. The old commune bunkhouse—under a collapsed pine by the road—had long since returned to woods. For years my dad had pilfered its decent boards to patch his shed, fence the garden, repair the outhouse. The cabin was more substantial than the other buildings at least, with its stone foundation and old-growth logs clear-cut in the twenties. We had a rocky meadow behind the cabin and, in summer, a working garden, my mom’s lettuce and potato plants enclosed in rusty globes of chicken wire. We had a cinder block smokehouse and a good well. But the acres of woods were what I knew best, the big trees with their stippled trunks, red pine bark coming off in plates, white pine gouged by age into yawning furrows. We had six perfect black ash. We had one massive cottonwood. We had sumac blanketing the roadside hill, encroaching on the garden, arching over the dirt drive, until the county required that we widen the road and we cut most of it down.


Our hotel rooms in Duluth had bay windows and views of the lift bridge and the harbor, green hills rising up behind. The carpets and walls were a uniform white, and in each room a red silk poppy stood in a vase on a lacquered desk. A mirrored bathroom connected our two rooms, with columns of creamy towels and soaps wrapped like candy bars.

I didn’t have anything to unpack. Instead, I climbed with my backpack onto one of the high, soft beds and watched as Leo and Patra moved between rooms unzipping bags. They were searching for Paul’s socks, for his panda puzzle and hat, and as they did I found my gaze drifting to a book on the bedside table. The Big Fitz it was called. A hotel book. I pulled its cool weight onto my lap, began reading about the taconite ship that sank in 1975. For a half hour, I turned the book’s slick pages, studied black-and-white photos of the ship rising up from the waves, and its eroded lifeboats recovered years later. I was especially interested in a huge diagram of the broken ship, the bow shown upright and turned the other way from the facedown stern.

A lamp clicked on—the afternoon was darkening. I could hear Lake Superior lapping the shore outside, enticing, so I slid off the bed and moved across the room to where Patra was transferring yogurts from her cooler bag into the minifridge. I convinced her to let me take Paul for a walk by promising to be back before five thirty.