The Wolf Border(2)

In sleep, Rachel has stopped breathing. Snow is falling on the cabin roof, through acres of blackness; the computer in the office is winking slowly, storing emails and data; elk season is open. The Chief Joseph den has been abandoned and the pack is moving single file through the Bitterroot terrain, winter nomads. Her British passport is in her jacket pocket and her mother, no longer hale or able, is dying, a long way away. Go on, my girl. In the dream, the wolf stands looking at her. Yellow-eyed and sheer. A mystic from the Reservation once asked her to describe the feeling of communion seeing a wolf that first time. What did her heart feel? There was money in it for him he’d hoped – she had only just arrived, maybe she would buy one of his sachets of fur, a leather charm, a tooth. I don’t believe what you believe, she’d said.

How does it feel? Pre-erotic fear. The heart beneath her chest jumps, smells bloody. She unclutches the wire and steps to the ground. Its head lowers: eyes level again, keen as gold, sorrowless. Then it releases its extraordinary jaw. Inside is a lustre of sharpness, white crescents, ridges, black pleated lips. A long, spooling tongue. In her brain an evolutionary signal fires. What a mouth like that means. She steps back, turns and walks carefully along the fence, her hands clenched. The wolf crosses paws, folds round, and walks parallel behind the wire. A blur of long grey, head tilted towards her, one eye watching. She stops walking, and it stops. She turns slowly and walks the other way. It crosses paws, turns, and follows. An echo, a mirror. She stops. What are you doing? Its ears prick up, twitch forward. She begins to run along the wire, over the slippery forest floor, needles and branches. She is fast. But it is there, running at her side, exact, switching direction when she does, almost before she does, running back the other way. It turns as she turns, runs as she runs. She runs hard through the Setterah woods, along the fence, and it runs with her. Through the trees. To the very corner of the cage, where she stops, breathing hard, and it stops and stands looking at her. What are you doing? she says.

But already she knows. The layers of sleep are falling away. The radio alarm is blaring, KIYE station, a rock song from the eighties. Her shoulder is cold outside the heavy covers. Her brain is restarting. That creature of the outer darkness – of geographic success, myth and horror, hunted with every age’s weapon, stone axe, spear, sprung-steel trap, and semi-automatic – was playing.

5 a.m., Mountain Time. Kyle will drive her to the airport before daylight to catch the hopper to Spokane. She lies under the blankets and listens to snow dispatching softly from the roof and the branches. Setterah Keep: a lost world. She had loved going there for birthdays as a child. Until, in 1981, the Licensing Act brought an end to many of the parks and it closed down. Even a century before, they must have known the enclosures were too small, pens, dementing places. After coffee and a shower, when she is properly awake, she phones Binny and reminds her what time she will be arriving. Yes, Thursday. Yes, by dinnertime, if the traffic isn’t bad. Then, unusually, she tells her mother about the dream. No, Binny says. No. That wasn’t a dream. There were wolves in the park for a while. Don’t you remember? You kids used to torment them. One of them got out, created havoc.

*

The Earl is not at home when Rachel arrives at Pennington Hall. She was warned by his secretary that he is unreliable, that he keeps only some of his appointments. The prerogative of wealth and eccentricity. The drive from London has taken eight hours: congestion around the airport and the north orbital, an accident south of Kendal, all lanes halted until the air ambulance could set down on the carriageway to collect the shattered motorcyclist. As ever, the county’s interior routes move sluggishly: compact dry-stone lanes and dawdling sightseers. A landslide on one of the mountain passes has resulted in road closure, so she must turn back at the barrier and take the longer lakeside road into the western valleys. The fells rise, carrying dead bracken on their slopes the colour of rust. Granite juts through, below gathering cloud. She sets the wipers to intermittent, but the rain is either too heavy or too fine; the rubber blades screech or the screen blurs. The GPS recalculates, asks her to turn round, go back the way she has come. She switches it off and buys a map from a village shop. This is not a part of the district she knows – her home village is on the other side of the mountains.

She is extremely tired by the time she reaches the gate into the estate, nauseous with jetlag and service station coffee. But she’s alert enough to notice the beauty of the place – September’s russet fading in the trees, wet, glistening light on the hills – and to note that the lake would be a good territorial boundary, were this still wilderness. It has not been wilderness since the primeval forest was felled. The gate into the estate is an elaborate wrought-iron affair, bearing a coat of arms. She pulls up next to the intercom, lowers the window, and inhales. Moorland, peat, ferns, water and whatever the water touches: the myrrh of autumn. She’s become used to spruce and sagebrush, the rancid vegetable smell of the paper mill downriver from the Reservation. Cumbria’s signature aroma is immediately recognisable: upland pheromones.

She reaches out to press the button, but the gate opens silently. She is being watched on the CCTV. The drive is long and newly gravelled, oak-lined. She passes a tree so old and obese with bark that its lower branches are sagging almost to the ground. Wooden struts have been built underneath to prop them up. Beside the drive a handful of roe deer graze. They raise their heads as she drives by and do not move. In the rain, the red-stone manor looks patched and bloody. Ivy is growing shaggily up the facade, but for a building of its size and age it is far from dereliction. The crenellations are intact; the windows expensively replaced. Thomas Pennington has not suffered hard times, death duties, or insurmountable taxes, it would seem. The building is clearly not a casualty of democratic change like so many of the countryside’s aristocratic behemoths. Perhaps the garden and house are open to the public, or a lucrative tearoom is hidden somewhere behind the maze, bulbs and plant cuttings for sale, wedding hire, the usual schemes. Or perhaps the Earl’s business portfolio has been skilfully updated and he has accounts offshore. Rachel parks at the side of the tower, next to a little blue MG and a utility van, gets out, and stretches. The air is damp and cool. Rooks clamour in the nearby trees. The mountains behind could have been built for aesthetic purposes – it is an incredibly beautiful view.