My mother folds her arms. “I’m sorry… but when did a car accident become a criminal offense?”
The officer looks up over his notepad at her. “Ma’am, we’re just trying to piece together what happened.” He turns to me. “How come the truck swerved off the road?”
“There was a deer,” I say. “It ran out in front of us.”
This is true, actually. I’m just leaving out what happened before that.
“Had your father been drinking?”
“My father never drinks,” I say. “The wolves can smell alcohol in your system.”
“How about you? Were you drinking?”
My face goes red. “No.”
Officer Whigby, who’s been pretty quiet, takes a step forward. “You know, Cara, if you just tell us the truth, this will be a lot easier.”
“My daughter doesn’t drink,” my mom says, angry. “She’s only seventeen.”
“Unfortunately, ma’am, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.” Whigby pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to her. It’s a lab report.
“Your daughter’s blood alcohol content was.20 when she was admitted,” Officer Whigby says. “And unlike your daughter, blood tests don’t lie.” He turns to me. “So, Cara… what else are you hiding?”
My adopted brothers in the Abenaki tribe believe that their lives are inextricably tied to those of wolves. Years ago, when I first went to Canada to study the way Native American naturalists tracked the wild wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor, I learned that they see the wolf as a teacher-in the way he hunts, raises his children, and defends his family. In the past it was not unheard of for Abenaki shamans to slip into the body of a wolf, and vice versa. The French called the Eastern Abenaki in Maine and New Hampshire the Natio Luporem, the Wolf Nation.
The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.
Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.
That would fit for me, I suppose. I grew up with parents who were so much older than my friends’ parents that I would never think of inviting a friend home from school; I would purposely forget to tell my parents about open houses or basketball games because I was always embarrassed to find kids staring openly at my dad’s white hair, my mother’s soft wrinkles.
Since I didn’t have a thriving social network as a kid, I spent a great deal of time alone in the woods. My father had taught me the name of every indigenous tree; what was poisonous, what was edible. He took me hunting for ducks when the moon was still high in the sky and our breath turned silver in front of us as we waited. It was there I learned to be so still that the deer would come into the clearing to feed, even if I were sitting on its edge. And it was there that I started to be able to tell the deer apart, to know which ones traveled together and which ones returned the next year with their offspring.
I cannot remember a time I didn’t feel connected to animals-from watching a fox play with her kits to tracking a porcupine to letting the circus animals out of captivity. But the most amazing animal encounter I have ever had came when I was twelve years old, just moments before the most disappointing human interaction of my life. I was in the woods behind our home when I saw a female moose lying beneath the ferns with a newborn calf. I knew the cow; I’d seen her once or twice. I backed away-my dad had taught me never to get near a new mother and its young-but to my surprise the moose stood up and nudged her calf forward, until it settled, skin and bones, in my lap.
I sat there for an hour with the calf until the most majestic moose I’d ever seen entered the clearing. His rack was colossal, and he stood like a statue until the cow moose got to her feet, too, and the calf. Then the three of them disappeared silently into the woods behind me.
Amazed, I ran back home to tell my parents what had happened-certain they wouldn’t believe me-and found them sitting in the kitchen at the table with a woman I didn’t recognize. But when she turned around, I could see myself written all over her features.
“Luke,” my dad said. “This is Kiera. Your real mother.”
He was not my dad but my grandfather. The woman I’d called Mom my whole life was my grandmother. My biological mother was their child-who, at seventeen, had been thrown in jail for selling heroin with her then-boyfriend. She found out two months later that she was pregnant.
When she gave birth to me at the local hospital, she’d been shackled to the bed.
It was decided that my grandparents would raise me. And that, rather than my having to grow up with the stigma of having an incarcerated mother, they’d move from Minnesota to New Hampshire, where nobody knew them. They’d start fresh, saying I was their miracle baby.
When the prison term ended, Kiera postponed reuniting with her family, deciding instead to get herself employed and settled. Now, four years later, she was the front desk manager at a hotel in Cleveland. She was ready to pick up the pieces of her life that she had left behind. Including me.
I don’t remember much of that day, except that I didn’t want to hug her, and that when she started talking about Cleveland I stood up and ran out the kitchen door into the woods again. The moose were gone, but I had learned from animals how to make myself scarce when necessary, how to blend in with the surroundings. So when my grandfather came looking for me, calling my name, he walked right past the copse of brush where I was hiding, where I stayed until I fell asleep.
The next morning, when I went back home, stiff and damp with cold, Kiera the impostor was gone. My parents, who were now my grandparents, were sitting at the table eating fried eggs. My grandmother offered me a plate with two eggs sunny-side up and a slice of toast. We did not talk about my mother’s visit, or where she’d gone. My grandfather said that, for now, I’d be staying put, and that was that.
I began to wonder if I’d dreamed that encounter, or the one with the moose calf, or both.
After that, I had sporadic contact with my mother. She’d send me a pair of slippers every Christmas that were always too small. She came to my grandfather’s funeral and my college graduation and two years after that died of ovarian cancer.
Years later when I went to live with the wolves, I would feel different about my mother. I would realize that what she did was no different from what any wolf mother does: put her child into the protective care of the elders, who can use their vast knowledge to teach the next generation everything it needs to know. But at that moment, sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast in an uncomfortable silence, all I knew was that no animal in my life had ever lied to me; whereas the humans, I could no longer trust.
