who had once reported on wolves interacting with horses, with bears …
On other questions, I sent him to the telephone armed only with the name of someone I knew slightly (or not at all, save by reputation) who could tell him everything he might ever want to know about, say, the dietary habits of grizzly bears in Montana.
And it didn’t stop with reading and with questions. I suggested with some hesitation that Gordon join the Animal Behavior Society and attend the annual meeting, which in 1988 was held at the University of Montana in Missoula. Many of the researchers whose work and thinking I was reporting to him secondhand would be there, and he could talk to them personally. Since he wanted to scout the territory where most of the action in the story would occur, he did.
Nor did it stop with wolves. Gordon takes an intense and detailed interest in everything he writes about. A call from Gordon could lead me into a description of the organizational structure of a university or an overview of current theory in behavioral ecology—or send me scurrying to the pages of
Certainly, what appears in the book represents only the tiniest fraction of what Gordon read, what went into our conversations, exchanges of letters, and—eventually—our appropriately science-fictionesque transmissions from computer to computer. I recall once reviewing several hundred pages of material on one minor issue in a scientific paper I was writing. These hours of work were ultimately represented by only a single sentence in the paper. This is typical in the world of scholarship, but I would imagine it is rare in the world of fiction. Scholars must be productive, but their livelihood is only indirectly tied to the absolute volume they produce, and the positions they advance must be supported by a broad understanding of previous work. This is the nature of the peer-review system. Professional, working writers have neither the mandate nor the luxury of exhaustive research and judicious, deliberative selectivity.
Nevertheless, the passages involving wolf behavior in
Virtually every one of the scenes in which Wolf is an actor has its precedent in either published research or in unpublished reports by scientific observers.
The explanations presented for Wolf’s behavior are a different matter. Explanations are essentially theoretical in nature, and theories do not exist in the real world. They exist only in the mind of the scientist. Consequently, the actions that Wolf (or any wolf) performs can often be explained in many ways, and the explanations can be quite different from one another. Sometimes this is because the question why can mean different things. In other cases, different explanations are based on different sets of assumptions and are just plain contradictory.
When Gordon asked me to sketch an explanation for one or another of Wolf’s actions, I was guided by two things: First, I generally tried to go with an explanation based on theory that has fairly widespread currency in the scientific community. If this left me choices, I tried to offer the explanation that was most consistent with plot development. To do otherwise would be to have the wolf wagging the tale.
CHAPTER 1
A man, failed and unfit, moved west and north. Jeebee had made it safely this far on the electric bike—a variation on the mountain bicycle with an electrically driven motor—moving at night through northern Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. Partway across South Dakota, however, the heavy skies that had been with him since yesterday moved lower; and a late April rain began to come down, cold and bitter on the north wind.
His outer clothing, of a breathable, but waterproof fabric, kept the wet from reaching most of him. But even with the long brim of his baseball cap and riding gloves, the rain laid an icy mask on his face and icy chains around his exposed wrists.
He stopped at the first abandoned building he could find—a recently burned and partly fallen-in farmhouse. There was a way among the charred and fallen timbers, however, into a part of it where he could shelter from the rain.
He moved in, accordingly, after covering the motored mountain bike with a plastic tarpaulin from his backpack. He ate some of the cold canned stew he had found in another ruined habitation only a day or so earlier; then lay for hours, waiting for the rain to end.
Eventually, he slumbered. But his dreams were bad, about the running and hiding in a world bankrupt and collapsed. He woke groggily and shifted; and sleep came again, at once. This time he dreamed the old nightmare that he had carried with him out of Michigan and westward. He dreamed that he was back working in the study group; and that the computer screen in front of him was full of the symbols of his equations.
Suddenly a darkness, just a pinpoint at first, appeared near the middle of the screen to obliterate some of the symbols. The blackness grew, spreading and wiping out all his work. It was, he had long since realized, his awareness of the inevitability of the coming Collapse, even though he juggled symbols to prove that it need not come. Now, the inevitability of it invaded his dreams, in retrospect coming to interrupt and destroy all that he had tried to do—he and the others in the study group at Stoketon, Michigan.
His dream shifted. The darkness came out from his screen and became a black shape that pursued him. He found himself in one situation after another, backed into a corner, with no place to go and the darkness approaching; growing enormously to blot out everything as it came closer and closer, to blot him out also.
He woke, sweating. In the lightlessness of his sleeping place, he felt like a naked animal; like a shelled creature stripped of all its normal protection. After a long time, he fell asleep again. This time he slept steadily, the sleep of exhaustion. He did not wake until early afternoon of the next day.
Outside, he found the day scene hardly brighter than the night had been. The thick cloud cover had broken finally, here and there, to let down occasional beams of sunlight. He was so unreasonably cheered by seeing the sun that, since the surrounding territory seemed to be as clear of people as he had found it to be the last week, he took a chance and moved on for a change in daylight.
Slightly after midafternoon, however, the clouds closed down once more; and the rain began again.
Jeebee pulled the visor of his cap down against the falling moisture. Although this plains country, with its sparse patches of timber and only an occasional devastated farmstead, seemed deserted enough, nothing could be certain. His outer clothing, made for camping, continued to keep him dry underneath. Also, today’s rain was not as cold on his face and hands, so he was not uncomfortable.
But as the afternoon wore on, the darkness of the clouds increased, the temperature dropped and the rain turned to sleet. It whipped against the naked skin of his face as the wind strengthened from the north.
Like an animal, he thought again of shelter and began to cast around for it. So that, when a little later he came to another pile of lumber that had once been a ranch house, before being dynamited or bulldozed into a scrap heap, he gave up travel for the day and began searching for a gap in the rubble.
He found one at last, a hole that seemed to lead far enough in under the loose material to indicate a fairly waterproof area inside. Laying the bike on its side under an overhang of shattered timbers that would shield it from the rain, he crawled in. He pushed his backpack before him as he went, bracing himself for the possibility of having stumbled on the den of some wild dog—or worse.
But no human or beast appeared to dispute his entrance; and the opening went back farther than he had guessed. He was pleased to hear the patter of the rain only distantly through what was above him, while feeling everything completely dry and dusty around him. He kept on crawling, as far in as he could; until suddenly his right hand, reaching out before him, slid over an edge into emptiness.
He stopped to check, found some space above his head, and risked lighting a stub of candle from the bike pack. Its light shone ahead of him, down into an almost untouched basement garage; with no car in it but walls of cinder blocks and a solid roof of collapsed house overhead.
