Lone Wolf

by Jodi Picoult

  An alpha will put two wolves in front of the moose's shoulders, and then listen for its heart rate. The moose may stamp or snort or throw its rack around to show how mighty a foe it is, but it can't affect its own adrenal system. When the alpha cues a third hunter to the back of the moose, and its heart skips a beat, she may instruct her team to terrorize it. This may take hours; it may take weeks.

  It's not that wolves are cruel. It's that the alpha also knows, for example, that to the east is a rival pack that's bigger and stronger than her own. If this moose gets frightened, adrenaline will saturate its system--it's the emotional price of death. If her pack can then feed off that moose, those rivals to the east will smell the adrenaline in the urine and scat her pack leaves to mark the boundaries of the territory. And suddenly, her pack is less vulnerable. The wolves to the east would never come steal the food or kill the offspring of a pack whose scent is redolent with emotion, power, dominance.

  In other words, what looks cruel and heartless from one angle might, from another, actually be the only way to protect your family.

  EDWARD

  Suffice it to say I was not the most popular kid in middle school. I was the quiet one, the brainiac who always got A's, the boy you only struck up a conversation with if you needed the answer to number 4 on your homework. At recess, I was more likely to be found in the shade reading than dunking on the basketball court. That was long before I discovered the benefits of circuit training, so my biceps back then were about as thick as rigatoni noodles. And obviously, I didn't stare after girls with skirts so short that their panties peeked out from behind--but every now and then, when no one was looking, I stared after the guys who were staring.

  I had friends, but they were like me--kids who would far rather spend their days blending into the scenery than being noticed, because being noticed usually meant being the punch line to some popular kid's joke. Which is why, on my thirteenth birthday, I know I did the right thing, even though it wound up netting me a week of detention and a month of being grounded.

  We were lining up to head to the cafeteria for lunch, and had to wait for other classes to march out first. I had this part of the day down to an art; I was never at the front of the line (popular kid territory) or the back of the line (troublemaker territory), because either spot would make me an easy target. Instead I sandwiched myself in the middle, between a girl who wore a full-body brace for her scoliosis and another girl who'd recently transferred from Guatemala and hardly spoke English. In other words, I was very busy making myself invisible when something awful happened: my teacher, who was old and sweet and fairly deaf, decided to pass the time by drawing attention to the fact that it was my birthday.

  "Did you all know that today is Edward's thirteenth birthday?" Mrs. Stansbury said. "Let's sing to him while we're waiting. Happy birthday to you . . ."

  I turned crimson. We weren't five, after all. We were eighth graders. Having the class sing to you went out of vogue about the same time we stopped believing in the tooth fairy.

  "Please stop," I whispered.

  "You going to do something special to celebrate?" my teacher continued.

  "Yeah," said one kid, loud enough for me to hear but not for the teacher to notice. "He's going to have a gay old time, right, Eddie?"

  Everyone laughed, except for the girl from Guatemala, who probably didn't understand.

  Mrs. Stansbury peered into the hallway to see if it was our turn yet. Unfortunately, it wasn't. "How old are you now," she started singing. "How old are you now! How old are you, Ed-waaaaard . . ."

  I balled my hands into fists, and shouted, "Shut up!"

  That Mrs. Stansbury heard.

  So did the principal, moments later. And my parents. I was punished for being rude to a teacher, who was only trying to be nice to me by making me feel special on my birthday.

  A month after my dad grounded me (as he put it in wolf terms, a subordinate would never act that way to a pack leader), he asked me if I'd learned anything. I made sure not to answer. Because I'd have done exactly the same thing all over again.

  This is just my way of pointing out that we people who leap without looking are not stupid. We know damn well we might be headed for a fall. But we also know that, sometimes, it's the only way out.

  The interrogation room is freezing cold. I'd cynically assume it's a secret police tactic to get people talking, if not for the fact that the officers have been really kind--bringing me coffee and a slice of sponge cake from the staff room. Many of them are fans of my dad's, from the TV show; I happily trade on his fame for food. I honestly can't remember the last time I ate; this tastes like manna.

  "So, Edward," the detective says, sitting down across from me. "Why don't you tell me what happened today."

  I open up my mouth to respond, and then snap it shut. Years of Law & Order reruns on Thai TV have taught me something after all. "I want my lawyer," I announce.

  The detective nods, and walks out of the room.

  Never mind that I don't actually have a lawyer.

  But a moment later the door opens again and a man walks in. He's small and wiry, with black hair that keeps falling into his eyes; he's wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. It takes me a moment to place him, because I only met him once--two days ago when he brought my mother's twins to see her at the hospital.

  "Joe," I breathe. I don't think I've ever been so happy to see someone. I had forgotten that my mom's new husband practiced law. I've done stupid, impulsive things before, but this is the first time I've been handcuffed for it.

  "Your mother called me," he says. "What the hell happened?"

  "I didn't shove the nurse, no matter what they say. She fell back when I . . ." I trail off.

  "When you what?"

  "When I pulled my father's ventilator plug out of the wall," I finish.

  Joe sinks into a chair. "Do I even have to ask why . . . ?"

  I shake my head. "I was going to donate my dad's organs, which is what he wanted--he was a donor, according to his license. I just wanted to carry out his last wishes, you know? The doctors had barely started when Cara came in and made a huge scene. As if this was all about her, and not my dad."

  "From what Georgie's told me, Cara wasn't in favor of terminating life support. You had to know that."

  "She told me yesterday that she didn't want to have to deal with all this stuff anymore; that she couldn't talk to the doctors about my dad, much less make a decision about what to do. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was trying to help--"

  He holds up a hand, silencing me. "What happened, exactly?"

  "I bent down and grabbed the cord of the ventilator. I didn't push the nurse, she was just standing between me and the machine. All I did was pull the plug out of the wall to turn it off. Because that's what was supposed to happen."

  Joe doesn't ask me to explain myself. He just looks at the facts and accepts them at face value. "This is a bailable offense, a misdemeanor," he says. "In this state, if you've got no criminal record and you've got family around, you can be released on your own recognizance. Granted, you haven't been a resident for some time, but I think we can work around that."

  "So what happens?"

  "I'll get a bail commissioner down here, and we'll take it one step at a time."

  I nod. "Joe?" I say. "I, um, don't really have any money to post bail."

  "You can pay off your debt by babysitting the twins so I can get reacquainted with my beautiful wife," he replies. "Seriously, Edward. Your job from here on in is to sit down, be quiet, and let me handle everything. No outbursts. No grand heroic efforts. Understand?"

  I nod, but the truth is, I don't like to be beholden to anyone. I've been forging my own way for so long that it makes me feel totally vulnerable, as if I've suddenly found myself stark naked in the middle of a crowded street.

  As he stands up to find an officer, I realize what it is that I like so much about Joe Ng. "You're the first person who hasn't said how sorry you are t
hat this happened to my father," I muse aloud.

  He pauses at the threshold of the door. "The world knows your father as a brilliant conservationist and wildlife researcher. Well, I know him as the man who made Georgie's life hell and who threw away his marriage for a bunch of glorified dogs," Joe says bluntly. "I'm happy to be your lawyer. But I'm not doing it because of any great affection I have toward Luke Warren."

  For the first time in what feels like days, I smile. "I can live with that," I say.

  The holding cell in the police station is very small and dark, and faces a wall with a few yellowing posters and an Agway calendar from 2005. I'm stuck here, waiting for a bail commissioner to arrive.

  My father used to say that an animal will only feel like it is in captivity if its home feels not like a territorial boundary but instead like a cage. What's at stake is the lack of the natural world--not the fact that the space has been limited. After all, animals have their families with them--so the only thing you're changing, by putting wolves into captivity, is their ability to defend themselves. You're making them vulnerable the minute you put up the fence.

  If you enrich their enclosures, though, a pack can be happy in captivity. If you play tapes of rival wolf packs howling, you force the males in the pack to bond together against this supposed threat. If you change their environment from time to time, or play multiple pack howls at once, the females have to think on their feet and make new decisions to keep the pack safe--should they divide the pack? Should they switch howls? Investigate around that new boulder? If you provide hunting enrichment, and avoid just sticking prey inside a fence (where it will be killed every time), you teach the wolves how to behave in the wild against a predator. If a wolf makes a kill once in every ten hunts in the wild, then in captivity you need to keep him guessing whether or not today's the day food's coming. Basically, a cage stops feeling like a cage when you can convince the wolf inside that he needs his family to survive.

  When I hear footsteps, I stand up and grab the bars, expecting to be told the bail commissioner has finally arrived. Instead, I am assaulted by fumes of alcohol long before I see their source--a drunk man being held upright by an officer. He is weaving back and forth, red-faced and sweaty, and I am pretty sure that's a streak of vomit on his checkered flannel shirt. "Brought you a roommate," the officer says, and he opens the metal door so that the man staggers inside.

  "Happy New Year," the guy says, although it is February. Then he collapses facedown on the cement floor.

  I gingerly step over him.

  Once when I was around ten, I was sitting underneath the empty bleachers near the wolf enclosure at Redmond's. Each day at 1:00 P.M. my father gave a wolf talk there to the summer visitors, but the rest of the time, it was a cool spot to hide with a book in the otherwise overcrowded, overheated park. I was not really paying attention to my father, who was in an adjoining pen digging out a pond while the wolves were relegated to another section of the enclosure. Suddenly a guy named Lark, who worked with my dad as a caretaker before he hired Walter, came back from his lunch break. He was stumbling, weaving. As he walked past the wolves, they started to go berserk--hurling themselves against the fencing, snapping and whining, running back and forth the way they did when they could smell food coming.

  My dad dropped his tools and ran for the gates, until he reached Lark and slammed him down on the floor. With his forearm against the man's throat, he growled, "Have you been drinking?"

  My father had firm rules for the people who worked with his animals--no perfumed shampoos or soaps, no deodorant. And absolutely no alcohol. A wolf could smell it in your system days after you'd drunk it.

  "Some guys took me out to celebrate," Lark sputtered. He'd just had his first baby.

  Gradually, the wolves calmed down. I'd never seen them act so crazy around a person, especially one of their keepers. If a human was being upsetting, like the annoying toddlers who waved and screamed from the security fence, the wolves would just lope into the rear of the enclosure, disappearing between the trees.

  My father released his hold on Lark, who rolled away, coughing. "You're fired," he said.

  Lark tried to argue, but my father just ignored him and walked back into the enclosure where he'd been working on the pond. I waited until Lark cursed a blue streak and stalked up the hill to the trailer to collect his belongings. Then I let myself through the safety gate and sat on the grass outside the enclosure where my father was working.

  "I don't care that he had a few drinks," he said bitterly, as if we had been in the middle of a conversation and he needed to defend himself. "But he should know better than to do it on the job." He dug his shovel into the ground and upended a heavy chunk of earth. "Think about it. A drunk guy staggering around. What's that look like to you?"

  "Uh . . . a drunk guy staggering around?" I said.

  "Well, to a wolf, it looks a hell of a lot like a calf that's been wounded. And that triggers the prey drive. Didn't matter that the wolves know Lark, or work with him every day. The way he was moving was enough to make him lose his identity to the pack. They would have killed him, if they could have."

  He jabbed his shovel into the ground so that it stood upright like a soldier. "It's a good life lesson, whether or not you ever work with wolves, Edward," my father said. "No matter what you do for someone--no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he's not hungry--make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable."

  That comment, of course, would become personal years later. My father had made one wrong move at the wrong moment. I realize, with a start, that after this morning he might accuse me of the same.

  The drunk at my feet begins to snore. A moment later, a police officer walks in. "Showtime," he says. I look up at the clock and realize I've spent three hours in here, most of it in the quicksand of memories about my father.

  It just goes to show you: you can put nine thousand miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life.

  And still, he'll haunt you.

  We are back in the same interrogation room I was in before, except now, in addition to the detective and Joe, there's a guy with a very bad comb-over and eyes so red I would assume he was stoned if I didn't think that was particularly risky behavior for someone who routinely works in a police station. "All right," the bail commissioner says. "I've got a doctor's appointment to get my conjunctivitis diagnosed, so let's make this snappy. What've you got, Leo?"

  The detective hands him a piece of paper. "This is a pretty serious case, Ralph. It's not just second-degree assault; the accused also interfered with the duties of hospital personnel and adversely affected the health of a patient."

  What does that mean? I think. Is my father worse off than he was before?

  "We're asking that bail be set at the amount of five thousand dollars with surety," the detective finishes.

  The bail commissioner reads the paper the detective has handed him. "Pulled the plug?" he says, looking at Joe. "Mr. Ng? What do you have to say?"

  "This is my stepson we're talking about," Joe begins. "This is the town where he grew up, and he's surrounded by family and friends. He's got ties to the community, and no funds with which to flee. And I give you my word I will personally not let him out of my sight."

  The commissioner rubs his eyes. "The purpose of bail is to secure the accused's attendance in court. We don't practice preventative detention in Beresford, Mr. Warren, so I'm going to set bail in the amount of five thousand dollars personal recognizance. You'll be released on your own promise to appear in court tomorrow morning, to keep the peace, and to be of good behavior. You won't be able to leave the state of New Hampshire while this matter is pending. I'm going to make it a condition of your release that you have a psychiatric evaluation, and I'm going to issue a no trespass order in and around the hospital."

  "Wait a se
cond," I say, already breaking my promise to Joe to be silent. "That's not going to work. My father's in there, and he's dying--"

  "Not quick enough for you, from the sound of it," the detective says.

  "I will not let my client be harassed," Joe argues.

  The bail commissioner holds up his hands. "Shut up. Both of you. I've already got pinkeye; I don't need a migraine. You'll be arraigned tomorrow in district court."

  "What about my father?" I press.

  That's when Joe stomps hard on my foot.

  "What did you say, Mr. Warren?" the commissioner asks.

  I look at him. "Nothing," I murmur. "Nothing at all."

  LUKE

  A kill is a scary place to be, six inches away from the snarling, snapping jaws of a wolf on the other side of you. It's feast or famine for wolves, and most of the time during a kill they haven't eaten for several days, so this is a battle for survival. If you move too far to the left or turn the wrong way, they'll let you know, growling and biting at you, and yet even in all that tremendous energy and frenzied excitement and hot anger, they pull their punch, so that the discipline you suffer isn't nearly what the prey animal has coming.

  Most of the time, the wolves knew I couldn't keep pace with them and would be more of a hassle during a hunt than an attribute. In a straight chase, I couldn't move fast enough; I didn't have the same weaponry to bring down prey, I couldn't even defend myself with my thin skin. But after the snows came, the hunting technique changed to an ambush. For the few months that two feet of snow covered the ground, I was not only invited to participate in the hunt, I was expected to be there.

  In an ambush, the pack needs the weight of the big males. Sometimes they need a prey animal to turn and run into some brush, where other wolves jump out and surround it while the hunters make the kill. I was settled in a little bowl dug out of the snow with the youngsters in the pack and the alpha, waiting for the big black wolf and the other adult female to run the quarry toward us.