The Wolf Border(81)

There’s laughter down the line.

Yeah, I remember that stage.

Shit. He’s awake. I have to go.

Alright. Call me back if you need rescuing. Or if you want to talk dirty.

The snow begins to melt and the ice beneath reveals itself like broken glass, the weapons in a Saxon hoard, instruments of havoc. The country begins to move slowly, to right itself again. Then, more snow. Huge white floes, like a nineteenth-century dreamscape. Everything stops.

In the middle of it, away from the malady of humans, the wolves sit watching the red deer moving across the moor, high-stepping daintily, testing each foothold. They assess the prospects of the hunt, judge the expenditure of energy, the resistance, the lack of traction. The herds keep to the best routes, ground where the snow is thinnest, where they will not have to flounder to escape. Since autumn, their behaviour has changed rapidly. A new nervousness has arrived; the running past has caught up with them. Ra and Merle watch from a high vantage point, ready to accelerate down the slopes and across the valley bottom, muscling through the drifts, bipartisan hunters of the mountains and the plains. But there is a refractory quality to their watching. Below, the deer pass by, single file, ears twitching, eyes glimmering black. They move safely on. A carcass lies close to the entrance of the den; another hunt is not yet necessary. Several times during the month they’ve been locked in a tie, rear to rear: their season of cold union.

When the weather lifts, it feels as if a dire, convulsive event has passed: miscarriage or seizure. There is a sudden upswing in temperature, ten degrees and more, alarming in its own right. Meltwater flows over the measled remnant snow. The earth is left slack and raw, streams trickle in the road, downhill, into culverts and under cattle grids. Pools of water all over the landscape flicker like poured metal. Rachel brings the baby outside again, a woollen blanket hanging around him like a holy robe. She turns slowly, holding him against her chest, a ritual figurine, showing him all the angles of the sacrificial world. He is the prize of all agonies. A strange little god, incapable and testing, who has taken over her life. She kisses the back of his neck softly, and he squirms and barks. How unlike herself he has made her. That night, reading in bed, she turns to look out the window. The skull of the moon glows, internally, as if tallow-lit, its surface cracked and pitted. A symbolic relic, reminding those beneath that not everything survives. Her mother has been dead for more than a year. She gets up and goes into the baby’s room, watches him sleep for a few minutes, something she has not done since he was newborn. One morning soon after the thaw, a giant toad presents itself on the doorstep like a muddy gift, a messenger. Spring is arriving.

She drives to the office, most days, weekends also, trying to recover something of her role. She brings Charlie, sets him on a blanket on the floor with a contraption of mirrors and swinging toys above him. He kicks, tries to grab things. She works in efficient bursts. She goes into the enclosure with Huib again, but the wolves are much more reclusive, a good sign, and the decision is made not to disturb them again until later in the year. She studies their transmitter signal patterns. They have been staying near the den site, returning to carcasses more frequently, picking them clean. Biding. Merle’s movements especially are becoming conservative. When Gregor returns from Nepal, he will leave a discreet, motion-triggered rig by the den, and they will know for sure.

Work is difficult. Charlie demands time; he demands love and energy. Keeping him is fascinating and acutely boring. There are slow, torturous hours in the middle of the night when he screams dementedly, his face hot and wet, the ridges between his eyes and ears lined with salt, his body taut as a drum. Extreme tiredness begins to wear her down. She wishes she were still breastfeeding; there was comfort in it for both of them. She wishes he would shut up. Shut up, she thinks, and then says it to him, almost shouting, actually shouting. Immediately, she feels wracked with guilt. He cries so much, he vomits. His shit is green. She calls NHS Direct, Jan, Alexander. She takes him to Frances Dunning. He is not sick. It is a stage, then: growth, or an experiment in anguish. He throws his bottle away, knocks things out of her hand, so furious, so inconsolable, his tongue beaking out of his mouth. What, she says, what’s wrong! A malevolent changeling has been exchanged for Charlie, like the gurning, earthen toad on the doorstep. In his face, hatred, scorn, or is she imagining it? She is being punished, of course, for everything she has done wrong, every sin. She takes hold of herself – such thoughts are pure, fatigued irrationality. She walks with him in her arms, backward and forward across the floor, shushing, cooing. He exhausts himself finally, and she collapses back into bed. He wakes in the morning, contented and smooth, smiling, giggling, as if nothing was ever wrong. The following night, the same bawling demon possesses him.

And then he does get sick. Every week it seems he has a new virus, a cold, or gastric upset, some germ picked up from nowhere, from spores arriving in his cot. An oozing eye infection, yellow crust around the lid. Diarrhoea, evil-coloured and noxious, which brushes through her too, leaving her green-feeling, her insides churning. Then a cough that sounds lethal, hack, hack, choke. She has had the whooping cough vaccination, and Charlie has, too, but she panics. She goes to the doctor again, collects more medicine, antibiotics, which she knows will give him thrush. Frances Dunning administers to him expertly, and Rachel feels like a failure. The doctor is sage.

Try not to worry; it’s just the way it is. He has to create antibodies. Childhood is about illness, that’s what they don’t tell you.