When my father rescued the pups that Mestawe rejected-the brothers of little Miguen, who died on the way to the vet-he had to somehow teach them to act like a family without the help of their biological mother. There was Kina, the shy one; and Kita, the smart one; and then Nodah, the burly tough guy. But for all of Nodah’s bravery, he was terrified of lightning. Anytime a storm came, he would start freaking out, and the only way to calm him was for my dad to pick him up and cradle him against his chest. It was easy, of course, when he was a four-week-old. It was a little more challenging when he was fully grown. I used to laugh, watching this brute of a wolf clamber up my father to hear his heartbeat.
It turns out that it’s not so funny anymore; not now, when I’m in the middle of the storm.
I close my eyes and picture my father, back when he was the nanny for these pups, when I used to stand at the fence and watch him. You have to teach them to play? I said. Don’t they already know how to do that?
My dad would stick his bum in the air, front half crouched in a prey bow-from that position a wolf could spring six feet in all directions. Every time the tussles and tumbling got too rough for the wolves, he’d collapse into this prey bow and everyone would stop and mimic him. A family can have a mock fight, my father said, but they need to know when it’s time to stop.
I’m teaching them balance, my father used to explain.
I’m teaching them how not to kill each other.
I know I was a curiosity for my wolf family. Sometimes when I was asleep, I’d wake to a hundred pounds of wolf pouncing on me, to see what my reaction would be. When we went out on a hunt and they chose to bring me along, they’d zigzag in front of me, trying to see if they could trip me up, as if they wanted to catalog all my flaws before an enemy did. In retrospect I realize that my role for them was akin to an alien abduction of a human: they wanted to know what they were up against, now that our worlds and our territories were bleeding into each other.
One summer evening at dusk, the alpha had taken the hunters out on a journey somewhere to the south. I was left behind with the young male wolf and his sister, who was on patrol around the perimeter of our territory. It was blisteringly hot; I kept making trips to the stream to douse my head with water; then I’d come back to our clearing and doze, drifting off to the gossip of mosquitoes and the belly laughs of bullfrogs. Even though I knew I should have been keeping a wary eye like the young male, the heat and the humidity had softened my edges and instincts.
I woke with a start and saw the young male sitting beside me. The female was still gone. In other words, nothing had changed. So I hitched myself upright, intent on cooling down once again at the stream. No sooner had I reached the water, however, than the young male tackled me, knocking all the wind from me. He growled and snapped at my face, eyes blazing and teeth bared, in full attack mode. I immediately rolled over, asking this wolf for trust, stunned by this behavior. It was the first time since I’d been accepted by the pack that I truly believed my life was in danger-and, worse, at the hands of one of my wolf brothers.
He continued to snarl at me, his ears flattened, as he backed me away from the stream and into the twisted skeleton formed by several enormous trees that had been felled during a thunderstorm. I lay with my face pressed into the earth, breathing in twigs and soil, sweating and shaking. Every time I tried to move, the wolf leaned closer and snapped his powerful jaws centimeters from my face.
You can imagine what went through my mind during that time. That the biologists were right: that I could never infiltrate a wild pack; that the wolves were wild animals and would never consider me one of their own; that this young male was only waiting for the rest of his pack to get back to kill me because the alpha had told him I wasn’t necessary anymore. I thought of all the lost knowledge I’d accumulated about these remarkable creatures, how no one would ever learn what I had. I wondered if anyone would ever find my body, given that I wasn’t even sure how far away from civilization I was at this point. And for the first time in a long time, I thought about Georgie, and my kids. I wondered whether they would grow up hating me for leaving them. I wondered if they even thought of me anymore, after all this time.
As night fell, the sounds in the forest changed. The symphony of crickets gave way to the violin-cry of an owl; the wind picked up, and the earth began to cool beneath my cheek. After four hours of aggressively trapping me in this makeshift cave, the young wolf suddenly sat down, leaving room for me to crawl out. He glanced back at me, his yellow eyes calm.
I thought for sure it was a trick.
The minute I came out of that hole, he was going to go for my throat.
When I didn’t emerge, he leaned in again. Instinctively I reared back, but instead of snapping at me, he began to lick my mouth and cheeks, the way he might welcome back the wolves in the pack when they returned.
Still terrified, I crawled into the open, making sure I kept my body lower than his to show submission. He turned and trotted toward the stream, stopping to look over his shoulder at me. It was an invitation to follow him, so I did, still keeping my distance.
When he reached the stream, he lifted his leg and scented the matted grass where I’d been kneeling earlier. Glancing down, I saw a pile of scat that did not resemble that of any animal I’d ever encountered. Beside it, in the soft mud, was a perfectly preserved paw print from a mountain lion.
Cougars are rare here in eastern Canada, but there have been sightings in New Hampshire and Maine and New Brunswick. They are solitary hunters, and the summertime is when the juveniles leave their mothers to search out their own territories. They compete with wolves directly for prey. A solitary mountain lion is more powerful than a single wolf, but a pack can bring down a mountain lion.
The only other fact I knew about cougars is that they kill by ambush, by jumping onto the back of the prey animal and breaking its neck with a bite.
I did not have the safety of the pack surrounding me, the strength in numbers. I had been kneeling at the stream by myself, ripe picking for a cougar in the vicinity to leap onto me and deliver a death blow.
The young wolf had not been trying to kill me. He’d been trying to save my life.
There isn’t love among wolves. It’s an unconditional commitment. If you do your job, a lifetime tour of duty, then you are part of the family. You need the others in your pack to complete you. The young wolf had protected me not because of any emotional bond, but because I was a valuable member of the pack-a makeshift numbers wolf who bolstered the ranks at ambush hunts, or against rival packs; but also an individual from whom they could learn more about the humans with which they were increasingly forced to share territory.
Yet deep down, in the part of me that was still human, I wished he’d protected me because he loved me as much as I loved him.
The day after I was nearly killed by a mountain lion, I knew it was time to leave my pack. I put some meat from the previous night’s kill in my coverall pocket and started to walk east. The wolves let me go; they probably assumed I was headed to the stream or out on patrol; there was no reason for them to believe I wouldn’t return.
The last I saw of my family, the young male and female were play-wrestling under the watchful eye of the big beta wolf. I wondered if I would hear them howling for me that night.
People assume that the reason I walked away from the pack that day was because the harsh conditions had finally become overwhelming-the weather, the cold, the near starvation, the constant threat of predators. But the real reason I came back is much simpler.
If I hadn’t left at that moment, I knew I would have stayed forever.
