And from the bottommost members of the pack, I learned about submission. The belly presented to the sky, the eyes directed downward, the lowering of one’s whole body to look small.
Every day, the lowest wolf, a sickly thing with a running eye, was reminded of his place. He was snapped at, pinned to the ground, forced to eat last. I thought that being the lowest would be bad, but there was something worse: being ignored.
There was a white wolf who hovered on the edge of the pack. She was invisible. She wasn’t invited into games, even by the gray-brown joker of the pack. He would even play with birds and he wouldn’t play with her. She was a non-presence during hunts, untrusted, ignored. But the pack’s treatment of her wasn’t entirely unjustified: Like me, she didn’t seem to know how to speak the language of the pack. Or perhaps I was being too kind. Really, it seemed like she didn’t care to use what she knew.
She had secrets in her eyes.
The only time I saw her interact with another wolf was when she snarled at the gray wolf and he attacked her. I thought he would kill her.
But she was strong; a scuffle through ferns ensued, and in the end the joker intervened, putting his body between the fighting wolves. He liked peace. But when the gray wolf shook himself and trotted away, the gray-brown joker turned back to the white wolf and showed his teeth, reminding her that though he’d stopped the fight, he didn’t want her near.
After that, I decided not to be like her. Even the omega wolf was treated better. There was no place for an outsider in this world. So I crept up to the black alpha wolf. I tried to remember everything I’d seen; instinct whispered the parts that I couldn’t quite remember. Ears flattened, head turned, shrunk down smaller. I licked his chin and begged for admittance to the pack. The joker was watching the exchange; I glanced at him and cracked a wolfish grin, just fast enough for him to see. I focused my thoughts and managed to send an image: me running with the pack, joining in the play, helping with the hunt.
The welcome was so boisterous and immediate that it was as if they’d been waiting for me to approach. I knew then that the white wolf was only rejected because she chose it.
My lessons began. As spring burst out around us, unfurling blossoms so sweet they smelled of rot, turning the ground soft and damp, I became the project of the pack. The gray wolf taught me how to creep up on prey, to run around and clamp down on a deer’s nose as the others swept up its flanks. The black alpha taught me to follow scent trails at the edge of our territory. The joker taught me how to bury food and mark an empty stash. They seemed to take a peculiar joy in my ignorance. Long after I’d learned the cues for play, they would prompt me with exaggerated play bows, their elbows down to the ground, tails high and waving. When, hungry to the point of distraction, I managed to catch a mouse on my own, they pranced around me and celebrated as if I’d caught a moose. When they outstripped me on hunts, they’d return with a bit of the kill, like they would for a cub; for a long time, I stayed alive because of their kindness.
When I curled on the forest floor, crying softly, my body shaking and my insides ripped to shreds by the girl that lived inside me, the wolves stood watch, protecting me, though I wasn’t sure what I needed to be protected from. We were the largest things in these woods, barring the deer, and even for them we had to run for hours.
And run we did. Our territory was vast; at first it seemed endless. But no matter how far we pursued our quarry, we circled and returned to the same stretch of woods, a long sloping stretch of ground broken by pale-barked trees. Home. Do you like it?
I would howl, at night, when we slept there. Hunger that could never be filled would well up inside me as my mind snatched at thoughts that didn’t seem to fit inside my head. My howling would set off the others, and together we’d sing and warn others of our presence and cry for any members of the pack that weren’t there.
I kept waiting for him.
I knew he wouldn’t come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images to me of what he’d looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf by the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn’t know how to begin to look.
And it was more than his eyes that haunted me. They were a doorway to other almost-memories, almost-images, almost-versions of myself that I couldn’t catch, more elusive prey than the fastest deer. I thought I would starve for want of whatever that was.
I was learning to survive as a wolf, but I hadn’t yet learned how to live as one.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GRACE
I shifted early one afternoon. “One” afternoon because I had absolutely no concept of time. I had no idea how long it had been since the last time I could fully remember being me, at Ben’s Fish and Tackle. All I knew was that when I came to, I was in the little overgrown patio area near Isabel’s house. My face was pressed against the damp dirt that covered the colorful mosaic I’d first seen several months ago. I’d been lying there long enough that the tiles had left a lined pattern in the side of my face. Down below me, ducks on the pond held terse conversations with each other. I stood up, testing my legs, and brushed most of the dirt and sticky wet leaf bits off me.
I said, “Grace.” The ducks stopped quacking.
I was incredibly pleased by my ability to recall my own name. Being a wolf had drastically lowered my standards for miracles. Also, saying it out loud proved that I was sturdily human and could risk going up to the Culpeper house. The sun found me through the branches and warmed my back as I crept up through the trees. Checking to make sure that the driveway was empty — I was naked, after all — I made the run across the yard for the back door.
The last time Isabel had brought me here, the back door had been unlocked; I remembered commenting on it. Isabel had said, I never remember to lock it.
She’d forgotten again today.
I cautiously let myself in and found the phone in the spotless stainless-steel kitchen. The smell of food was so tantalizing that, for a moment, I just stood there, the phone in my hand, before I thought to dial.
Isabel picked up at once.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s me. I’m at your house. No one else is here.” My stomach growled. I eyed a bread box; a bagel wrapper poked out the bottom.
“Don’t move,” Isabel said. “I’m coming.”
A half hour later, Isabel found me in her dad’s hall of animals, eating a bagel, dressed in her old clothes. The room was actually fascinating, in a horrifying way. First of all, it was huge: two stories high, dim as a museum, and about as long as my parents’ house was wide. It was also full of dozens of stuffed animals. I assumed Tom Culpeper had shot them all. Was it legal to shoot moose? Did they even have moose in Minnesota? It seemed like if anyone would have seen them, it would have been me. Perhaps he’d bought them instead. I imagined men in jumpsuits unloading animals with styrofoam taped to their antlers.