History of Wolves(6)

Inside: European History, American Civics, Trigonometry, English.


Life Science came last. It was taught by our old eighth-grade gym teacher, Liz Lundgren, who trudged over from the middle school at the end of the day in her Polartec parka and camouflage snow bib. Ms. Lundgren had a tic. Whenever she got irritated or inspired, she switched instantly to whispering. She thought that would make us listen better; she thought it would make us pay attention to protists and fungi; she thought we would try harder to understand meiosis if we couldn’t quite catch all the words in her sentences. “The spores … in absence of water or heat … maneuver in great quantities,” she would murmur, and it was like hearing some obscure rumor that, due to over-telling, no longer held any relevance we could make out.

In that class you could always hear the clock tick. From every window, you could see snow blow away in gusts, then drift back the next day in piles as high as houses. One day near the end of Evolution, a late-season storm brought a huge poplar branch down in a wumff of ice. Through the window, I watched it cascade to the ground and narrowly miss a small blue car pulling out from the grocery store across from school. At the board, Ms. Lundgren was chalking out the pros and cons of natural selection in squeaky cursive. The window fogged as I leaned toward it. I leaned back. Someone in a huge hooded parka got out of the blue car, dragged the branch from the road, got back in. Then the Honda drove a wide arc around the perimeter, crunching a few twigs beneath its tires.

Minutes after that the sun came out: brilliant, stunning us all. Still, it was no surprise when we were let out of school a half hour early due to the windchill. I made my way home from the bus stop at a rigid trot. I crunched along the snow-packed trail, felt the wind come off the lake in blasts, heard the pines groan and creak overhead. Halfway up the hill, my lungs started to feel raggedy. My face changed into something other than face, got rubbed out. When I finally got to the top of the hill, when I slowed down to brush ice from my nose, I turned and saw a puff of exhaust across our lake. I had to squint against all that white to make it out.

It was the blue Honda hatchback from town. A couple was unloading the car.

The lake at this point was extremely narrow, not much more than eight hundred feet straight across. I watched them for a few minutes, nursing my fingers, scrunching them into inflexible balls.

I’d seen the couple once before, in August. They’d come to oversee the construction of their lake house, which had been built by a team of college students from Duluth. The crew spent the summer clearing brush with backhoes, arranging plywood walls, stapling shingles to the vaulted roof. The house, when it was finished, was unlike anything I’d seen in Loose River. It had split-log siding and enormous triangular windows, a broad blond deck that jutted out over the lake like the prow of some ship. From their hatchback, the father had hauled Adirondack chairs and docile cats: one black and fat, the other white and draped ornamentally over his arm. I’d seen them out on their new dock one late August afternoon, bundled head to toe in towels. Father, mother, tiny child. The child’s towel dragged on the wooden planks, and the mother and father had knelt down together, at once, arranging the folds. They were like attendants to a very small bride, doting, hovering. They seemed to be saying something very sweet to the child, who had a high, frightened voice that carried across water. That was the last I’d seen of them.

That winter day, though, they returned. I saw the father in the evening whisking away at the snow on his deck with a pink broom. Smoke drifted from their chimney. Out came the child and mother the next afternoon, waddling in their boots and snowsuits. The boy moved unsteadily across the fresh crust of snow, walking on the surface of it for a few steps before breaking through. When the mother lifted him under the armpits, he was plucked clean from his boots. As I watched, the mother dangled the poor kid helplessly aloft, unsure whether to set him down or carry him like that, suspended in socks over a universe of snow.

I thought, scornfully, what the hell had they expected? But I felt sorry for them, too. Almost nothing on the lake moved or breathed. It was the worst part of winter, a waste of white in every direction, no place for little kids or city people. Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. They did not try to swim, or do anything that required effort. They hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely beating their hearts.


We were prepared for another month of winter at least. Each night, I fed the cabin stove before climbing the ladder to my loft, and each black morning I scraped the embers together again and, with sluggish fingers and some cedar shavings, coaxed up a new flame. We had a cord and a half of wood stacked against the cabin that I was parceling out very slowly. We stuffed more rags in the window casings to hold in heat, kept big pots on the stove for morning meltwater. My dad had drilled a fresh fishing hole through ice that was close to eighteen inches thick.

But then, in the middle of March, the temperature shot up to fifty and miraculously stayed there. Within a couple of weeks, the south slope drifts had eroded to stalagmite pillars. A wet sheen appeared across the surface of the ice, and in the late afternoons you could hear the whole lake pop and zing. Cracks appeared. It was warm enough to gather wood from the pile without mittens, to unfreeze the latches on the dogs’ chains with the heat of your fingers. Across the lake, the family set up a telescope on their deck—long and spear-like, pointed to the heavens. Beneath the tripod was a footstool where the child sometimes stood in the evenings clasping the eyepiece to his face with two mittened hands. He wore a candy-cane scarf and a red pom-pom hat. Every time the wind started up, his pom bounced on the air like a bobber.