Sister Wolf

by Ann Arensberg

  Marit buried her face in Nikolai’s coat and held him too tightly. He grunted in protest and struggled to roll away. As long as she held him she would not have to think or remember; she could pretend that she did not know the reason for the leaden weight around her heart. The dog, who was hungry and whining, broke out of her grasp, and began to push at his empty food dish with his nose. Marit got up on her knees and put her arms around his neck.

  “Lola will take you,” she said, but Nikolai shook her off, “Lola will keep you if I can’t.”

  Lola would take Nikolai and give him a loving home. She could not keep the wolves or the lynx or the two black bears. No one could keep them. Marit doubled over under the force of returning memory. She struck at her head with her fists, but the blows felt too light. She ran out of the pen and dashed her head against the side of the house. Pain blinded and staggered her, but not long enough; she could not numb her brain, or halt the deadly logic of her thoughts. She had left her white car on the road. Her car would condemn her. The Sheriff would come to get her and put her away. He would profit by her absence to enter the sanctuary and butcher the animals.

  Marit paced up and down the terrace, taking quick frantic steps, almost skipping, back and forth across the length of the terrace, until she heard the malamute howling. Then she stopped in her tracks with a jerk, like a motor run down. She straightened her back and dropped her shoulders. She found her center of balance and placed her full weight on her feet. Now she was grounded, and her mind was free to calculate and plan. There were many small tasks to perform and time was against her: enough food for Nikolai; a letter to Lola; a knapsack to pack. … She stepped forward and looked up at her house. The gutters on the second story were choked by wisteria. She might not be back to give her gardener the order to tear the vine down.

  If diagramed in time of emergency, Gabriel’s mind would be layered like the earth’s crust, with desire buried under successive levels of duty. If he relaxed his will, these layers might shift or splinter, under the impact, for example, of the sight of Marit’s car forced on his vision at a moment when he needed his attention whole. To bring himself back to the crisis at hand, he stopped pacing, turned his back to the car, and performed a simple exercise: he repeated the phrase “I am empty” until he was once more quiet and alert. Twenty-five repetitions restored him. If he had a divided mind, he could not be useful. He had no right to private thoughts until the girl was found.

  He accused himself of indifference in the face of need. For the last four days, the girl had been begging for help, coming to his room each night after curfew, her feet naked, the straps of her thin nightdress hanging off her shoulders, so harassed and unhappy that she had not taken time to put on a robe. Sunday night the straps had slipped down to bare one of her breasts. This neglect of her person should have warned him that her nightmares were a sign of a deeper problem. Every one of his actions had been perfunctory. He gave her two aspirins with a cup of water. He tucked a blanket around her, since the night air was cool and had made her nipples hard. He sat with her for a long time, holding her hand, letting her talk herself out. He listened to what she said, but with half a mind. He heard enough to think that her trouble was beyond his scope, a motherless girl whose father took her into his bed when bad dreams woke her, who could only sleep through the night if the father stayed by her until her eyes closed.

  While she talked the girl had pressed his hand, as if she sensed that he was thinking other thoughts, none to be proud of, the reasons that an old friend had given him for leaving medicine. Dick Ardery did not like to work with patients: “They don’t want you to have a life, Gabriel; why do you think they call you ‘my doctor’? They hate you to eat or take a break or treat someone else.” This urgent Dupuis girl did not want Gabriel to have a life. She wanted a robot helper that was never tired, or sick in love, or disillusioned with Meyerling; that would not notice the tyranny of sick people, or the pride with which they narrated their symptoms. His conscience worked out an equation that balanced perfectly: he had nurtured resentment toward her/she had run away. If she found herself in danger, it was on his head.

  A black patrol wagon rounded the curve with a squeal of rubber. The Sheriff was grinning and waving as if he were the lead car in a parade. Gabriel thumbed him down and rode with him back to the house.

  New England is full of ponds that are used as swimming holes. On a very blue day their surface reflects the sky, but their ordinary color is brown or yellowish-brown, from the quantity of leaves that drop into them autumn after autumn. People who have never swum in the ocean or who live far from lakes do not mind sharing a pond with tadpoles, water beetles, green scum, turtles, and catfish. They do not imagine the feelers of the catfish brushing their legs, or the slimy, whiskery plants that grow on the bottom. These swimmers hold their noses, and sink down to test the depth. When their toes reach the soft, sucking mud, they do not shoot to the surface in horror and paddle for shore. Instead they drift to the top and laze on their backs for hours, swatting off darning needles.

  No one swims in Yoke Pond, because it is lost in the woods. It is as deep as a quarry and one side is scooped out of rock. Layers of rock jut under the water, which makes diving perilous. Since the water is cold, it breeds no green scum and no catfish. The color of the water is black; steely-gray in winter when the trees have lost their leaves.

  Yoke Pond is the home of turtles, some as small as the kind that children keep in boxes, some that are six or seven inches across the carapace. Their shells are decorated with concentric hexagons, like coffering on a vault, or with a random pattern of white spots. These gentle swimmers, half deaf and voiceless, live and multiply undisturbed by man, though birds and raccoons make raids on their helpless young. Turtles have no teeth, but their jaws have sawlike edges. They tear their food into pieces and swallow the pieces whole. They will eat leaves, shoots, and berries, but they like meat better, snails, tadpoles, flies and gnats, and little fish.

  Sometimes, as it had done this summer, the turtle colony outgrows its supply of food. When the girl Aimée fell into the pond, the turtles were hungry. The girl plunged to a considerable depth, choking on water. On the way up she struck her head on a jut of rock lying under the surface. The broad slab pinned her there until she had finished drowning. Her fall drove the turtles away, onto land or out to the far side of the pond. After the water had settled, they came back to explore and smell, and stayed to feed.

  Under water, human flesh becomes loose and softened, making it more pliable to a turtle’s jaws. Even then her skin was denser than the meat of their normal prey, so they had to work for their meal, massing in squadrons at the parts of the body that were unclothed, spelling each other, unit after unit, in an orderly lineup. Hundreds of turtles, grinding and eating, stirred the water, making currents that moved the body from side to side, pushing it over a stretch of time toward the end of the jut, where it floated free to the top.

  For all their numbers and exertions the turtles did minor damage. There was plenty left of Aimée when the search party found her later, enough to make a positive identification by the clothes she wore, if not by her face or the pads of her fingers and toes. She was riddled with little holes, as if she had been used as a target by a marksman firing an air gun. Skeeter Brower got sick when he saw her, and he was a big, rough man who could skin a rabbit in one motion and who butchered his own venison.

  Brower, Gabriel, and the Sheriff made up the search party, along with Conrad, Bill Weebs, and Deputy Crocker, whose business was artesian wells, with a sideline in taxidermy. Weebs was out of work for the second time that year. Anna had turned him out of the bedroom into the cellar, where he slept on a cot in the workroom, hanging his clothes on pegs and pairs of nails, over the saws and wrenches. The Deputy enlisted Weebs for the price of a six-pack, since Anna kept him on dole, a child’s allowance that did not cover tobacco and beer.

  Bill Weebs got some of his juice back fanning out through the woods with a black l
eather gun belt strapped around his waist, hearing his own voice crackle over the walkie-talkie. He was the right man for the job. Besides himself, Brower was the only able woodsman. The blond kid, Conrad, had an athletic build, but he was afraid of catching his feet and walked with his head down. The runty dark one, some kind of teacher, wasn’t good for much; the Sheriff had offered him a pistol and he refused to take it. Stoeber and Crocker were out of shape; they spent the whole day at a desk or in a car.

  Weebs had his big moment shortly after noon. On the level ground inside the virgin forest, his hawk eye detected a brown sandal, still buckled, with the bottom peeling away from the inner sole. It lay propped at the base of a maple with the toe pointing upward, as if its owner had climbed the tree at right angles, like a nuthatch or a creeper. The sandal was passed from hand to hand squeamishly, dangled by the ankle strap. The leather was damp. The sandal was an odd size, big for a young girl, but small for any rapist or kidnapper. The stitching had been done by hand, according to Conrad. There was a long debate about whether it had been wrenched off the foot of the victim, removed voluntarily, or had slipped off during a chase. The mute, ungainly article derailed the search, until Gabriel proposed that sandals are worn in pairs.

  Gabriel’s statement put the Sheriff in mind of his favorite grievance. The County expected him to operate on a shoestring. He had filed an order for a copying machine and they gave him enough to buy a secondhand typewriter. He had asked for a police dog and they sent him a handsome fellow that had failed the training. One good Doberman—not Dr. Whitbeck’s, who was a one-man dog—would have saved them all this aimless tramping, with nothing to show for it but a mateless sandal.

  Weebs was geared to take this remark as a personal insult when Brower put his hand by his ear and hissed to shut him up. Each man heard what he heard, a naked drawn-out howl, repeated at a higher pitch, up the scale, then down, a dirge sung in parts, a wintry, midnight call, untimely in the noonday sun and the summer heat. The mournful sound continued in full chorus, until separate voices trailed off to a whine, or a breaking sigh. None of the men could place the sound or name the singer—owl, loon, beast or maddened human, or nothing living.

  The downhill stretch of forest began abruptly, as if the land had slid away in a glacial age. The search party formed a unit and worked in silence, heading in the direction of the cries. They filed behind the Sheriff, moving from tree to tree, using the trees to cover their approach, walking on the balls of their feet with their weapons drawn.

  The search had started as an outing, a hike for sport and pleasure, a practice maneuver like war games, rigged to provide excitement but not suspense. The Sheriff’s hopes of kidnappers had been giddy and short. Every man figured that the excursion would probably end back at the school, drinking coffee in the servants’ dining room, while a shivering runaway, who had roamed about as far as the hayloft in the stable, was being put to bed upstairs in the infirmary and given a dose of cough syrup for good measure. The howling from the bottom of the slope tolled other images, ambush and slaughter. They no longer expected to find the girl alive. Whatever had taken her life was also a threat to them.

  On the steepest part of the descent they saw a flare, a brief, unsteady light that flashed at intervals, like signals on a landing field at night. They could not yet see Yoke Pond, or the rays of sunlight glaring off the water, shining through the trees whenever the wind waved the topmost branches. They were ready to attack. The Sheriff motioned them to pick up their pace. He made them take the final incline at a run. They were more fortunate than the lost dead girl. When the trees stopped, three feet from the pond, they could see the water and rear back to keep from falling.

  At their feet, wedged between rocks, floated the body, covered with little tears, like rotten cloth, face up, but lacking eyelids, lips, and cheeks. Brower felt his stomach heave and turned his back. Conrad swayed forward and Gabriel caught him going down. Weebs, Stoeber, and Crocker moved in to study the tattered remnants.

  Across the pond an honor guard stood watching, three wolves—the old one, Swan, and the lame wolf, George, flanked by the young male, Killik, who pawed the ground to urge the others to retreat, snarling in the back of his throat at the sight of men.

  Weebs had a slow and mulish brain, but his hands were quick. He raised his gun and fired. The wolves were faster. Four shots raised clods of earth on the farther bank. The fifth hit rock and skipped back in the water. Gunfire covered the sound of trampled brush, but the men saw a streak of gray below the bank, running into sparser woods beyond their range.

  The Sheriff had lost interest in the victim. Gabriel dragged her out of the water by her clothes, gripping the waistband of her shorts and the front of her jersey. He laid her on the bank and kneeled beside her. He took her cold hands in his, and forced himself to hold them until the impulse to recoil had passed. In order to carry her back to the school, they would have to knot their shirts to make a litter. There would not be enough shirts to hold the sodden weight and have one left over to cover her and hide her.

  The Sheriff was smiling and nodding. He had been waiting for an event to tip his hand.

  “That’s the Deym place,” he said, pointing down the bank. “We’ll have to go in after them.”

  Wolves are frauds, and the language abets them. A lewd man is a wolf; greedy feeders have wolfish appetites. The wolf at the door is poverty, cold and starvation. Liars cry wolf; lone wolves are unsocial and ominous. A famous murderer was nicknamed the Wolf of Buxton. The popular image of a wolf is a false face painted with bloody fangs and pointed ears, and a ring of black outlining its slanted eyes. There is no one around to puncture their bad reputation, although a man in Colorado once taught some wolves to sing, and another man claimed that they subsisted entirely on mice. Marit Deym never tried to defend them. She locked them up and appointed herself their guardian. An optimistic person might have handed out leaflets explaining the place of the wolf in the ecological scheme, or the ability of wolves to form emotional attachments. Marit knew that her neighbors preferred the homicidal image, the way the people of Salem preferred to believe in witches. The Sheriff did not look beyond the wolves for the cause of the lost girl’s death, or stop to reason that her wounds were much too small to have been cut by teeth, that wolves do not like to swim, that they will never attack a man unless they are rabid. The wolves played into the Sheriff’s hands: they were found at the scene of the crime; they belonged to someone who had treated him like a servant; they were molting, because it was summer, and their ragged fur had made them look ugly and vicious.

  The next morning, Wednesday, a workday, the village of Niles declared a celebration, or so it would have seemed to a traveler passing through, who could not otherwise explain the cars lining up on the main street, and the people milling in among the cars, pounding a drumbeat on the hoods, reaching in and leaning on horns (after a friendly tussle with the drivers), loading cases of beer into the trunks. The cars sat with their engines idling, as if they were ready to go and waiting for a signal. Some of the women were carrying baskets packed with food, and the general store was doing good business in cold cuts and rolls. There were no flags flying and no bunting draped on the storefronts. There was no one rigged out in knee britches, or shouldering muskets, so it was not a national holiday or the town centennial.

  The traveler, waiting in his car for the crowd to let him through, might have wondered why a man dressed in the blues and boots of a state trooper was passing out shells, by handfuls or in square green boxes. None of the men, old or young, was carrying shotguns, and the legal hunting season was months away. Looking closer, since his wait was going to be a long one, the traveler would be bound to notice that almost every man did hold some object in his hand—an axe, a cane, a jack handle, a crowbar, or, in some cases, thick dowels or heavy sticks. Two boys had finished coiling a length of rope. On the porch of the general store, a woman in a dirty butcher’s apron waved at someone in the street and held up a metal ring in both
hands. It was a spring trap, the kind with close-set, jagged teeth.

  Lola knew that Marit had contempt for the telephone. It was nothing to her to let the bell ring if she did not want to hear a voice from the outside world. Marit did not scowl at the instrument or take if off the hook; she ignored it and went on working or reading. Lola always answered her phone, but she waited two rings so that the caller would not think she was overeager. Lola wrote thank-you notes the morning after a party; she had been known to send a note after a half-hour visit. The difference in their styles caused many quarrels. Lola had begged Marit for a private code: ring once, hang up, then ring again. Lola found the idea that Marit would not make an exception in her case more provoking than the fact that she could not reach her. It did not do to go knock on her door when she was not answering. Marit felt no more obligation to doorbells than she did to telephones.

  Marit’s rules of privacy might apply in normal times; they did not hold when a student at Meyerling had been bitten to death and the whole town was raving that a pack of wolves had killed her. Mrs. Gilliam’s black cook, Vyselle, got the news from the delivery market in East Niles when she called in the day’s order for groceries. Lola left a message for Mrs. G., who was still asleep, and drove off without eating breakfast or doing her face.

  The road was clear, and the speedometer kept creeping up to seventy. Lola’s mind was not on the road. When she was not trying to suppress a connection between Marit’s silence, her abandoned car, and the death of the student, she was counting the entrances to Marit’s house, front door, kitchen door, side door, cellar, conservatory. There were seventeen windows on the ground floor, probably locked up tight because Marit checked the fastenings more than once before retiring at night. If the doors were locked, Lola was ready to smash a window.