Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  Roman placed his fingertips on the edges of the notebook and moved it a micrometer, aware that not making eye contact also suggested lying or evasiveness. He pressed the notebook hard enough that it bowed slightly in the middle. “Your job is in front of the computer researching the records or taking notes, not critiquing Fitzgerald’s methods. He was patterning adaptive behavior for them.”

  She “hmphed” loudly. “His pattern. Not a wolf pattern, or a coyote one either. Either he wanted to be a wolf, or he wanted the wolves to be him. Check the transmission records. He transmitted himself. It wasn’t ethical. And you can pretend to defend him if you want, but I didn’t see you spending any extra time with him the last couple of months.”

  Roman closed his eyes and counted slowly backward from five. The notebook relaxed: he could feel the edges uncrinkling beneath his fingers. “Six months is a long stay on an island. Maybe we all are a little twisted.”

  “And that’s another thing: Fitz’s ‘geo-psionic’ isolation. Nobody bought that theory in academia. They laughed at him at the university. In the meantime, I haven’t had a date since November. Wolves only go into heat once a year, but they’re getting laid more often than I am. This might as well be a monastery.”

  Wind pushed Sharon’s light hair around her face and into her eyes. A poster of canis lupus on the wall fluttered. Behind her, the sun sharply outlined the wind-warped yews bending away from the Pacific, their gnarled limbs stretching perpetually inland.

  “Well, your time is almost up now,” said Roman. “The ferry will be here this evening.”

  “You know what else? I haven’t heard the wolves since he died either. A terrible ruckus that night, then nothing. Not a howl, a bark or a whine. Nothing. It’s creeping me out. I’ll bet Fitz was right: they got tired of the limited space and tried to swim to the mainland.” She tucked her hands into her back pockets and headed toward the Quonset hut that held her quarters and the communication/computer facilities.

  Roman stepped to the door; the island spread below him. The wind beat hardest here, and almost never stopped, but he had liked the view. In front of him, the west-facing cliffs and their sentinel yews sheltered the island from the worst of the wind. On the narrow gravel beach a hundred feet below, waves ground and hissed. Roman avoided looking at the point of rock at the cliff’s edge where they’d found Fitzgerald’s abandoned equipment and the note only Roman had read. He pressed his hand to his back pocket where he felt the slight bulge of Fitzgerald’s last words. Now, every plant reminded him of Fitzgerald, every rock, the sweep of sand, the sound of wind over them all, and he wanted to apologize to them. It’s my fault, he thought, and he blinked his eyes against the weight of memory.

  “It can’t be done,” he said to himself. “It’s thirty miles to the coast, and wolves don’t behave like that.”

  Roman watched as Sharon trudged down the trail to her hut, fifty yards away, her head tucked to her shoulder to resist the wind. Beyond the hut, the research center rose out of a stand of dwarf Oregon Pine. It housed the lab and the tunnel exits from the research compound into the wolf reserve. Like the other two buildings on the island, its sides were deeply rust-streaked. On storm days, salt spray lashed over the cliffs and dampened everything, corroding the two ATV’s so badly that now the researchers walked everywhere. Fortunately, Roman thought, the northeast corner of the island, at the extreme end of the reserve, was only a half-dozen miles away.

  Roman scanned the island. Salt-grass meadows and stands of cedar, yew and pine threaded with trails dotted the sloping bowl of land, which held the rare wolf pack. As far as he knew, it was the largest collection of wolves on the planet; all the rest were relegated to zoos. Crowding had eliminated the last wilderness areas years ago. There were no free wolves.

  On an island this size, if he had to, he could hike anywhere in an hour or two. And he preferred it that way. A couple of times a week he would enter the reserve through one of the tunnels and wander, glorying in the space, the solitude. No buildings. No roads. No clatter of machinery. He’d sit in one of the meadows, a twisted pine to his back and watch the wind rush over the salt grass unencumbered.

  None of the wolves were visible, and they hadn’t been for over a week. Still, there were only sixteen of them and he rarely saw them from here. They lay in shelters during the day, avoiding the wind, and were more active at night. He dismissed the idea that they had jumped into the ocean. Even if they could smell the mainland, they’d drown long before they got there. No, they were still on the island.

  In the distance, skimming the white-topped waves, a hovercraft oil tanker thundered southward toward San Francisco or Los Angeles. Sometimes at night the lights of returning fishing boats blinked in the mouth of Desperation Bay where the Columbia emptied into the Pacific. The packed lights of the heavily populated coast were too far away to see but brightened the horizon when the fog wasn’t heavy.

  Roman put on a jacket and trotted to the research center. The April wind was bitter and damp, smelling of the deep ocean and winter storms. It cut through his clothes. He didn’t understand how Sharon could walk around wearing a flannel shirt but no coat, and Fitzgerald’s nudist tendencies had been baffling.

  Roman struggled to open the research center’s door, and he pictured the last time he’d seen Fitzgerald in this building. Fitzgerald had been scribbling into his notepad, a heavy blanket wrapped around his thin shoulders. He hadn’t turned around when the wind snapped the door out of Roman’s hand, slapping it against the metal-sided building. He sat with his back rigid, one hand a fist on his thigh, the other tight around his pen. Every line of his posture said “anger” to Roman, and the anger was at him.

  “Coyotes,” said Fitzgerald, still writing, his thick, dark hair hiding his eyes, “will ambush prey. That’s one way they survive. I have a story here from Wyoming about a coyote that lured a Labrador Retriever out of its yard by appearing to play with it. The Lab followed the coyote to a gully that ran through the town where a pack of them tore it up.” Fitzgerald had a melodic voice, very smooth. Roman leaned toward him to listen, then caught himself and drew back.

  Roman sighed. “Coyotes trick, but don’t hunt as a pack. That’s wolf behavior.”

  Fitzgerald looked up. His eyes matched the darkness of his hair, but he was squinting, and his breathing was shallow. A long smudge of dirt marked one cheek. “In the old stories, coyotes are tricksters, while the wolf in myth is the dullard. The wolf gets tricked. Coyotes adapt. Something different in their brains allowed them to change. That’s why they still thrive while the wolf has died out. Wolves pursue prey and pull it down. They need to comprehend the coyote way. The coyote even moved into suburban environments. I have stories here of coyotes in playgrounds, parks and alleys. The key is to look at the coyote. We learn from the coyote to make a trickster wolf.”

  Fitzgerald put his bare feet up on the chair by his desk. He turned on his hip to face Roman. His right knee came up; his left dropped. Right hand on the desk. Left one on his thigh; the notebook balanced in his lap. The body language was suddenly open, inviting, nonthreatening. A sarcastic invitation. Insincere body language. Roman grimaced and resisted the urge to cross his arms on his chest.

  “The wolf is not a wolf if you turn it into a coyote. I still say the answer is in controlled breeding programs in the zoos. That’s the only way wilderness animals can survive human encroachment.”

  Fitzgerald had stared at him a long time after that, his high cheek bones red from the wind, but the rest of his face was pale almost to transparency. Roman knew that Fitzgerald slept during the day, going out at night when the wolves were most active.

  Finally Fitzgerald said, “They’re not wolves if you control them either.”

  Roman pulled the door shut against the wind, shaking the memory of Fitzgerald out of his head; his ears popped as the door closed. He sat in Fitzgerald’s chair and opened the top notebook in a pile of notebooks that reached from the floor to the top of the desk. Insi
de, filling the page from one side to the other without a margin, was Fitzgerald’s crabbed, dense handwriting. Most of it philosophical. Fitzgerald mixed his research and theories with musings about the wolves’ role in the environment. Several pages in, Roman found a section on wolf mythology. Each story ended with an aphorism. One story told of a wolf who, while passing by a cottage in the forest, overheard an angry mother scolding her baby, “If you cry once more, I’ll throw you to the wolf.” The wolf, figuring such a small child would surely cry again, waited under the window, tongue out and tail wagging. Though the child cried many times over the days while the wolf grew hungrier and hungrier, the mother never tossed the child to the wolf. The aphorism after this story was, “Enemies’ promises were made to be broken.” Fitzgerald had underlined this several times.

  Roman read the pages carefully. The clues to Fitzgerald’s progress, and maybe an explanation of the wolves’ current whereabouts might be buried in the notebooks, but this book was filled with minutia, and of little help. Most of the middle looked like a rough draft of an explanation of his work. Several paragraphs attempted to illustrate how memories and behaviors form, and the multiple techniques he was using to induce behavioral changes in wolves. Roman frowned, it looked as if Fitzgerald used his own brain configuration as a pattern. Sharon was right. For months he’d been using the radio-telepathy equipment to broadcast his own problem solving abilities into the wolves. He was supposed to be using the coyote recordings.

  The last few pages contained an elegiac description of the wolf in the wild. Fitzgerald had been fascinated by wolf stamina. He’d written, “No other animal can sustain as steady an effort as a wolf. They have been known to trot without rest for days. If they have a goal, no distance will defeat them.”

  After a half hour, Roman put the notebook down and opened the next. He stared at the first page, perplexed. Then the door rattled, and Sharon entered, holding the door firmly against the wind. Roman’s ears popped again.

  Sharon threw her hip into the door to latch it. “There’s nothing in the computers, just his stuff on biochemical strategies to convert transient signals into lasting changes in the neurons. And there’s the DNA work. Most of his graphs are a couple of months old. Just when he looks as if he was getting somewhere with it, he quit entering data. Oh, yeah. He’s got about a third of the computer tied up in ongoing analysis of the hippocampus CAT scans we took on the alpha couple five weeks ago. I’m locked out. Do you know his password?” She pushed hair out of her eyes. It was a coquettish gesture.

  Annoyed, Roman put his finger into the notebook to mark the page. She always seemed to be flirting, and he bit back the impulse to say something. “I don’t think what we want is in the computers. He didn’t like them. You could be more useful if you hiked north and found out where the wolves have gone to ground. I’ve only got a week before the funding’s done, and they’ll split the pack between Ottawa and Anchorage in the spring. If I’m going to salvage any of his work, I need some answers.”

  “Thank you very little. I’ll stay behind the fences. As I came up, I saw the deer you released last week. The wolves aren’t eating. I’ll try the binoculars again.”

  “Wear a coat.”

  “Did you check the transmission records?”

  Roman shook his head, leaned across the desk and punched up the records on a display. They listed time of initiation, length of transmission, band widths and content. The display confirmed Fitzgerald’s notebooks. For the last weeks he had abandoned the coyote recordings, and instead had hooked himself into the powerful radio-telepathy array to broadcast himself at the pack. Hour after hour of it. Roman tasted bile on his tongue. What behaviors had he sent? What inadvertent parts of his personality went with it? What emotions? He turned the display off, the switch a noisy click in the small room.

  Sharon paused at the door. The wind murmured around the opening, pushing her hair back into her face. Roman caught a whiff of salt water. The weather prediction was for a storm, and evidently it was beating the waves into spray on the rocky western side of the island. “You were such friends. What happened at the end? He really hated you. I could see it.”

  Roman shrugged.

  Sharon looked at him compassionately. “Come off the island. The wolves don’t need you here. They’ll be rounded up in a month whether you’re supervising or not. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

  Roman looked away. I’m being evasive, he thought. I’m lying with my eyes. “I have work to do yet.”

  After she shoved the door tight, Roman opened the notebook. Instead of more of Fitzgerald’s brain-numbing handwriting, the first page had just two words written on the upper left corner, like the salutation of a letter, “Dear Roman.” No comma, no other text, just “Dear Roman” and the rest blank. Page after page the same, until the last page, where under the two words was another of the myths, but this one wasn’t about wolves. It told about a scorpion that wanted to cross a river and asked a frog to give him a ride. The frog said, “I can’t let you on my back. If I do, you will sting me, and I will die.” The scorpion said, “If I sting you, then you will drown and so will I.” The frog thought about that for a minute, then agreed to give the scorpion a lift. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and as the paralysis started to reach the frog’s limbs, he said, “Why did you do that? You’ve killed us both.” The scorpion shrugged and said, “It’s my nature.”

  The story was signed, “Yours in nature, Fitzgerald.”

  Sadly Roman recalled coming to the island six months ago. He and Fitzgerald had spent hours sitting in this room discussing their work, and Fitzgerald often talked of “nature.” One evening he said, “It is the wolf’s nature to mark its territory. It is man’s nature to push back the wilderness, to wipe out the marks.”

  Roman had paused in his notetaking, his pen poised above the page and said, “But man can control his ‘nature.’ He’s not hardwired to behaviors. There’s no instinctive component in man.”

  Fitzgerald tilted his head after that statement, a very wolf-like posture that meant the same thing in the animal: puzzlement. The sides of the Quonset hut shook with the wind that now Roman was used to, but then he had glanced around as if he expected the metal walls to crumple at any moment. Fitzgerald wrapped both hands around his coffee cup, brought it to his lips but didn’t drink. “That’s an odd thing for a behavioralist to say. What do you think of Sharon?”

  “What do you mean?” They hadn’t been on the island long, and Roman had found much about Fitzgerald to admire: his ease with himself, the liquid transitions from thought to thought, and his genius for connecting them. “Umm… Sharon. Well, she’s competent enough. She might get a little lonely out here. It’s a long haul for a grad student in the field.”

  “You don’t think she’s good looking?” asked Fitzgerald. He put his cup down, ran his fingers through his hair, and then cleared his throat.

  Roman automatically cataloged the gestures—all indicated nervousness. “I hadn’t noticed. I suppose she is.”

  Fitzgerald grinned. “She showers with her drapes open. Her window faces your hut. Notice that?”

  “No, I haven’t. It wouldn’t be appropriate. She’s a grad student for crying out loud.” Roman clicked his pen several times in a row, noticed the action and quelled it. Playing with objects was also a sign of nervousness.

  Fitzgerald leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands on his chest. “You make it sound like she’s a child. You’re not ten years older than she is. Maybe it’s not your nature to notice.”

  Roman laughed. “Maybe not. Maybe not. But it keeps me professional too.”

  Fitzgerald shook his head, then moved into a lengthy explanation of the combined techniques he was using to change the wolves’ behavior. “If we nudge their learning curve just a bit, we can establish stable populations outside of the zoos.”

  “You’re quixotic. They range too widely. Too much of their diet is big game, and
they won’t stick to park lands and green belts. Even if people will leave them alone—there’s no guarantee of that—they won’t flourish on limited range.”

  “But they have to. That’s all there is to it. They have to!” Fitzgerald’s face darkened in abrupt vehemence, and he looked down to his hands resting in his lap. “Wolves are part of what’s best about being human.”

  Abashed, Roman didn’t know how to respond. They hadn’t known each other long, and the mercurial switch in moods startled him. Finally, he reached out and touched Fitzgerald’s wrist. “It’s all right. I’ll help… do what I can.”

  Fitzgerald screwed up his face tightly for a second as some complicated emotion wrestled behind it, but then he relaxed and smiled wanly. “Promise?”

  Roman nodded.

  Later, after Fitzgerald cheered up, he said, “Do you want to see the animals in the wild? I mean, really see them?”

  They walked through the long access tunnel that emptied onto a screened observation platform hundreds of yards into the reservation. Fitzgerald held a finger to his lips as they neared the exit, and they crept the last few yards until they were in the open.

  Here, the island screened much of the wind, and the rustle of pine filled the night gently, like a steady background of rain in the distance. An almost full moon behind hazy clouds cast a delicate light on the hills around them, the sand glowed albino bright between clumps of salt-grass. Roman started to speak, but Fitzgerald pressed a hand to Roman’s shoulder and shook his head. “They’re just upwind,” he mouthed without sound.

  They were only twenty yards away. Dark movement against the sand. It took a moment for Roman to pick out the details in the soft light, the long legs, lean chests, ears up, alert and relaxed. Posture revealed all. He identified the dominant alpha as it stalked through the pack: larger, a lighter gray than the rest with an almost black chest. Lesser males dropped their heads, turned away slightly, tails down, ears dropped. A whole grammar of rank and position in their stance. Roman held his breath. It was his first time this close to wolves outside of a zoo. All of his studies had been on wolves in captivity, on the other side of the glass. Here, nothing separated them but a thin camouflaged netting and a couple of good bounds through the night air.