History of Wolves(76)

I want to acknowledge, too, some of the books that inspired the writing of this one. In chapter 1, Linda quotes in her presentation from Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men. The full passage reads: “But the term alpha—evolved to describe captive animals—is still misleading. Alpha animals do not always lead the hunt, break trail in snow, or eat before the others do. An alpha animal may be alpha only at certain times for a specific reason, and, it should be noted, is alpha at the deference of the other wolves in the pack.” In chapter 8 there is a reference to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I am indebted to many sources for information about flora, fauna, and life in northern Minnesota, but two stand out: Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness and Helen Hoover’s The Years of the Forest. I was grateful to have Caroline Fraser’s excellent and harrowing book God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by my side, along with Barbara Wilson’s Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood and Lucia Greenhouse’s fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science. It should be said that Paul’s case is a fictionalized composite of many around the country, and it reflects neither a specific child nor the particulars of any one court case in any actual place or time. Caroline Fraser’s book offers an especially powerful nonfictional record of children and their families in Christian Science—including detailed religious, legal, and social histories—for those interested. I am grateful to Sharon Ostfeld-Johns for offering medical advice on the manuscript and pointing me to UpToDate, a physicianauthored online resource, where I learned about some of the symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis and cerebral edema.

This novel owes a great deal to all the time I’ve spent wandering around in the woods: thank you to my parents for this legacy of woods-haunting (to modify a phrase from Virginia Woolf), and thank you, particularly, to the establishments that fed me and put me up when I was traveling in the summer of 2012 in northern Minnesota. In addition, and though my vein of gratitude runs more obliquely than I can easily express, let me acknowledge here those who were kind to me when I was very young at Principia College.

Finally, I am grateful to my family for being there through the years, for their patience and openheartedness at every odd turn in my own story. And my most humble thanks go to Nick Admussen, who believed in the value of this project from the beginning and kept my head above water all along the way. This novel is dedicated to him.