To Leave with the Reindeer

by Olivia Rosenthal

  You decide to plan your resistance to your parents’ world, to proudly neglect Father Christmas, to farm snails in shoeboxes, to shelter abandoned animals in your bedroom and to leave with the reindeer after the New Year’s Eve parties.

  The rules are: never drop to the ground and always keep your back to the fence. For man, a wolf is a wolf.

  You wonder if, in families whose closeness implies a powerful interdependence between members, introducing an individual of another species may feel like a betrayal. You would like to betray yours; you don’t know how to go about it.

  At night, my wolves will not be on display to the public, that’s what I requested. They will have two separate dens, 23 m long, 3 m wide and up to 2.5 m high, which are the regulation dimensions. We have ordered wooden wall panels and sandy flooring; it’s essential that my animals be able to relax and get some peace and quiet.

  In the world of captivity just as anywhere else, animals need to distinguish day from night if we wish to spare them irreversible biological and psychological disturbance.

  You realise that the stubbornness with which you continue to hope for a pet is viewed by those around you as an absurd caprice or, worse, a kind of disloyalty. You decide to accept, once and for all, that you are disloyal. You would like to betray, only you don’t know how to go about it.

  A system of video surveillance linked to headquarters at the castle reception will ensure the site’s constant security. HQ will be connected via a telephone line on permanent standby provided by Lynx, an organisation highly respected for its effectiveness and its expertise in the surveillance of captive animals. In case of emergency, Lynx is obliged to call on the animals’ sole owner and keeper. Ready to step in 24/7 and therefore housed close to the moats, the latter will have access to live-trapping equipment, a hypodermic tranquilliser gun, model Dist-Inject 55, as well as two lassos – equipment which they may not use except in the presence of the authorised veterinary doctor, who alone may provide the anaesthetic required for hypodermic restraint.

  When we reach the hospital with an arm half-torn off, we don’t immediately tell the nurses it was a wolf, otherwise they’d think we’re mad. Still: given the size of the wound, the teeth marks in the flesh, twenty-three stitches later and a great chunk of flesh the poorer, it couldn’t have been a dog. For the wolf, man is another wolf.

  In time, you notice that none of the families your parents frequent has a pet. This reinforces your thought that one day you’ll have to break away from those bringing you up, those who care for, cosset, fuss over, hold on to and possess you. You would like to betray them, you just don’t know how to go about it.

  The selection of trainers and handlers is absolutely crucial to the project’s success. We will proceed through preliminary interviews with a hand-picked selection of candidates. To establish their psychological stability, we’ll question them about their motivation, their background, we’ll make them draw houses, trees and sheep, we’ll ask them intimate questions about their childhoods and their sex lives. We will favour those demonstrating a sense of authority, instinct for organisation and responsibility, and those who also show a specific personal charm, able both to fend off the final efforts at resistance to officialdom and to ensure the support of the wider public.

  You are embarrassed not to play with dolls, not to like dolls, to find dolls horrifying, you hate dolls, you never let your classmates know what you were given at Christmas, you hide the truth, you’d like to be more like the other little girls, you sometimes wonder if they’re not pretending, if they wouldn’t prefer, as you do, to dress up like Indians and ululate around the fire, you’re not sure they’re so different from you; nonetheless you envy them, you wish that, despite your revulsion, you could take a doll in your arms and rock it but you can’t do it, you did try once, it was impossible, it’s not that you’re cold-hearted, you don’t think you are, you’re sure for example that you’d know how to look after a little animal, a warm, wriggling, living, breathing ball of fur. If you’re not to get what you want, you’ll leave with the reindeer after Christmas.

  From now on, all these provisions form part of the programme to introduce wolves into the castles of France and Navarre. The head office of the veterinary services is responsible for a public awareness campaign aimed at defusing any negative reactions or occasional outbursts from sections of the population. Its role is that of arbiter between the local council and the different pressure groups active in the regions. It is particularly wary of shepherds, cattle farmers, hunting lobbies, committees of parents and local people, dog-grooming companies, societies for animal protection, circuses and museum conservationists, all of whom, with their various priorities, may be concerned by the presence of wild animals. With such a major project, anger, fear, jealousy, unthinking compassion and also the spirit of competition must be kept in check. For men, a man is a man.

  For as long as you belong to your mother, you will not obtain what you want. You don’t yet know how you’ll go about it but one day you will betray her.

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  Every trainer begins their career by taking the newborns from their mother.

  You wake before everyone else and usually go to spend the last hours of the night in your parents’ bed. You are not sent back or scolded, you feel loved, you are strengthened by this love, you forget your childish wishes, you take up with your old teddy, you hesitate to abandon or torture it again, you’re not yet ready to betray your family.

  In order to prove their maternal competence, after five years’ sustained fieldwork, the trainer must qualify for a certificate known as the competence certificate. This certificate allows them to be formally qualified as competent and to begin the adoption procedure with regard to one or several animals. To complete this procedure, a competent handler must fill in a multitude of coloured forms, have the animals they hope to own tagged, or have the tags of those animals already so marked registered on their incipient motherhood record.

  You are beginning to wonder if you belong to your mother. You don’t yet know how you’ll go about it but you’re determined to run away from her.

  Tagging consists of the subcutaneous or intramuscular implantation of a glass micro-cylinder containing a radio wave transponder that meets the ISO 11784 standard. Upon activation of a transceiver, a portable electronic two-way radio, the transponder answers by transmitting the animal’s ID code, a unique, permanent and strictly individual code. The system’s advantage lies in the reliability of its readings – which can, moreover, be taken remotely, thus allowing customs officers to avoid touching the animals. The implantation must be done at neck level (beside the jugular) on the left side.

  You insisted, you begged, in the end your parents realised that your determination must find some outlet, they agreed to allow a living, wriggling, breathing animal into the household, but not the one you wanted.

  The animal must also carry a passport, a green card and a CITES certificate (if it belongs to a species at risk of extinction and comes under the Washington Convention), certificates and cards that are issued by the regional environment agency and include details of the animal’s origins, its identity, its date and place of birth, the ID codes of its biological father and mother, its date of entry into French territory if it comes from another country, the date of its acquisition by its current owner, height, weight, sex, identifying features. For man, the wolf is no longer a wolf.

  Your parents’ concession is not a major breakthrough, it’s not a complete concession, only a partial climbdown; of the whole hierarchy of the animal world you do not receive the companion you were hoping for, yet you hadn’t asked for the impossible, not for a horse or a panther, nor a zebra, nor even a wolfhound, you’d asked for something entirely ordinary but this has not been granted, you realise that if you didn’t go about festooned in feathers, bows and arrows, if you weren’t always ululating around the fire, if your tunic of skins could look something like a skirt, if you didn’t go driving yellow plastic lor
ries, if you never bounced cars off the living room wall, if you hadn’t ignored the magnificent doll you were given, if you hadn’t left her to gather dust, if you hadn’t at some point removed one of her arms and poked out her eyes, if you’d been less cruel to her, you might have had a claim on what you wanted, but you do not have that claim. If things don’t look up, you will leave with the reindeer after Christmas. You will betray them.

  Once the process is at an end, and the adoption concluded, the wolves’ mother, by which we mean their keeper, may set up fixed or mobile animal accommodation, may own animals, transport them from circus to circus, from film shoot to film shoot, from one demonstration to another, from one show to another, from one town to another. When moving around or outside the region, the keeper will show all their charges’ identity papers to the police, customs officers and border authorities. These papers guarantee that they are indeed the owner and master of their stock and may legally pursue commercial ends by displaying them to different audiences.

  Having no claim upsets you, you’re very angry at your parents, little by little you are distancing yourself from them, the absence of any pet allows you temporarily to cancel your belonging: for the moment, you no longer belong to your parents.

  During each of their trips, the trainer must carry their own competence certificate, a special driving licence that the local council will provide for a fee and which authorises them to transport wild animals in the back section of their dispatch van. In any case, furnished with a microchip embedded for life behind one ear, each wolf can be identified everywhere; its traceability in European airspace and beyond is almost flawless.

  When your parents are away, if only for a night, a chasm opens inside you, sleep won’t come, fear rises, abandoned to your own devices you have no willpower, no wishes, no capacity for action, you’re completely under their sway, in their power and possession, in their control, in their hands. Your betrayal makes no difference. You belong to your parents.

  A certified competent handler’s role is to educate their young, to manage this without upsetting or mistreating them, in short to establish their wolves in a captivity that is both delightful and decisive, knowing also that they will be making a living out of their captives.

  You belong to no one, at least that’s what you tell yourself, what you persuade yourself, what you think. You belong to no one. But there are many moments when doubt creeps in, when you weigh up the pleasure you can feel being possessed by someone, being in their hands, in their control, in their power, under their thumb, by someone who cares for you, fusses over you, nourishes you, advises you, leads you and guides you, in short, who loves you; you sometimes imagine love in this extreme form, as unreciprocated, unrestrained dependence, and the very thought of this love makes you tremble. But the trembling weakens your fighting spirit and your desire for independence. If you’re going to betray them, you can’t be trembling.

  Certainly, it’s hard to resign ourselves to making money out of those we love, to making them climb on stools, leap through flaming hoops, climb on top of shiny cars, lick the hands of make-up-caked actresses with morsels of meat hidden in their outfits for rewards. But living as we do in a mercantile society, in which parents may sell their children, their organs or their blood in order to meet life’s basic requirements, we may assume that the market in wolves represents a lesser evil and stop fruitlessly resisting it.

  Your parents have done the minimum, they’ve acquired the least bothersome creature they could find, one that demands minimal autonomy indeed. A yellow canary in a wrought-iron cage has appeared in your bedroom.

  After cinema, we’d hoped to go into fashion shows but the main problem was that, teetering on their stilettos, the models couldn’t keep them to heel: wolves pull too hard, the spotlights, the heat, the noise, the blaring music, it was making them jumpy, it wasn’t working, we had to call time.

  You haven’t much affection for this canary, living, moving, almost-talking thing that it is, you can’t catch it or hold it, you can only look at it and, from time to time, you open its cage door and let it flutter around in your room. To console yourself, you consider that your parents could have bought you a goldfish, in which case you wouldn’t even have had the pleasure of giving it, for a few seconds, the feeling of freedom, except by dunking it in the bath like your grandmother’s carp.

  Wolves do sometimes succumb to heart attacks during demonstrations, and they can be diagnosed with incurable illnesses. In such cases, the certified handler will contact the vet who will take charge of euthanising the sick animal by means of lethal injection.

  The day I copped it, I made a mistake, I dropped my guard, I barely had time to react and there she was, already hanging from my arm, but I’m not bitter about it, she was a wolf I knew well, I hand-reared her, we did all kinds of things together, I didn’t want them to give her the shot, that would be too easy, it’s always very tough when that’s what we conclude, we have shared memories, we played together, took risks together, the animal really has to be suffering too much for us to go down that route, we watch them go, they look at us, they know perfectly well they’re off to the abattoir, the way they have of saying goodbye by staring at you, you swallow the pill but it’s not easy. Afterwards they use ovens, they put the whole animal in along with other dogs, other things, I haven’t really looked into it properly, they don’t burn the animals one at a time.

  From an early age, you knew that you belonged to no one. Sometimes you are sorry.

  The remains or cadavers must be clearly labelled. The vet will put the waste products out for the public knacker’s service which is responsible for the collection and disposal of animal by-products that are unfit for human consumption. This disposal is carried out at a locally accredited incineration plant. To guarantee the waste’s complete combustion, all such facilities are obliged to maintain the temperature of all resulting gases at a minimum of 850˚C for at least two seconds.

  One morning, you got up, the canary was lying motionless inside the cage. You tried to stand it upright, get it moving, you supported it with your fingers but it was neither breathing nor moving nor talking. It was the first time you held a dead body in your hands.

  All this precaution, information, risk prevention and cadaver management must nonetheless not allow us to lose sight of what matters. The wolves’ resettling in town is imminent. The municipality in question, a pioneer in this field, the veterinary services’ departmental heads, the council, the office for regional amenities, have all given their green light. The file has just been passed by domestic security and by the insurers, who recognise that all precautions have been taken to ensure that no accident occurs on site. The request will shortly be ratified by the Ministry of the Environment, which will codify the potential coexistence, within a legal framework, of humans and wolves.

  You went to school thinking about that small, motionless, yellow body between your fingers, that now-deceased living thing gained value in retrospect, you decided to give it a farewell ceremony in order to mark the trace of its existence, but when you got home your bird’s corpse had disappeared.

  Before, I used to parade with my animals, I had them all on leads, but since a young tiger scratched a kid during a street show they don’t allow it any more. And people don’t like us going around with cages, makes us look a bit like slave drivers, so we gave up doing that.

  You’d have liked to throw the canary into the kitchen food bin yourself, wrapped in a white shroud. That would have let you give some weight to the shape of the small creature’s life.

  The parents have warned their children so they don’t go jumping into the trenches, the locals have tightened security in their houses and apartments, there’s been a spike in purchases of reinforced doors, CCTV and alarm systems of all kinds, the public–private partnership group that manages the castle moats has modified the reception area to permit bulk printing of tickets and the sale of related products. In short, the town is preparing to have its heart
and soul settled by non-native specimens whose well-being and control we will ensure simultaneously. For man, the wolf is a man.

  You’re a child, we want to protect you, you are delicate, sensitive, we want to spare you strong emotions, you’ll have plenty of time later on to discover the truth, to be horribly exposed to it. We don’t want you to be exposed to the horrible truth. Determined to have your revenge, you vow to mount a reindeer after Christmas and go East with the herd.

  Some condemn the monetisation of wild animals, others the irrevocable transformation of the castles into animal parks, still others would like to carry out in-depth studies of this project’s impact on the local population. The authorities try to be reassuring. Information campaigns are in the pipeline ahead of the new occupants’ arrival. Their installation in the town centre will change nothing about its long-term inhabitants’ lives, should not cause any increased risk, will not disturb the balance between the different local communities, will not set people against each other, will not incite hostility or condemnation by the aforementioned associations. The traditions of hospitality are deep-rooted in this city.

  We can say what we like but there was once a time when wolves and men lived together, so it would surprise me to find that wolves have copied humans, it must be that man has copied the wolves, the family, the tribe, all in tune, a pack leader, a clan leader, it’s the same system. For men, man is a wolf.