Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  But the words haven’t reminded Aggie of the same things, she is too far distant to be reached. I want to follow her to wherever she’s gone and I also fear that place more than anything. I fear, too, the day she stops returning from it.

  She doesn’t eat the eggs I leave at her elbow, too tired, too soul-exhausted to manage anything at all. I brush her wet hair slowly, gently, and I speak more of the wolves because they are all I have left that isn’t rage.

  * * *

  Blue Cottage isn’t far from the project base camp. Both cottage and camp sit on the edge of Abernethy Forest, one of the last remnants of the ancient Caledonian Forest that arrived here after the Ice Age. These old trees belong to an unbroken, 9,000-year evolutionary chain, and it’s within them that we placed the closest wolf pen, the one containing wolves Six, Nine, and Thirteen. If they manage to form a pack, we will name them after their new home: Abernethy. There are few houses around here, but behind us sprawls vibrant green pasture for the many sheep farms dividing us from the closest town. This was not where I would have chosen to place a new pack of wolves. But there aren’t many places in the Highlands upon which you wouldn’t find sheep, and anyway the wolves aren’t going to stay put. I only hope they prefer the shelter of forest. Beyond this stretch of wintry pine woods rise the Cairngorm mountains, and there, I’m told, is the wild heart of the Highlands, where no sheep roam and no roads enter. Perhaps this will be where the wolves like it best.

  I have the heater on high in the car. The road is slippery with ice, and a light snowfall has begun, a gentle swirl of lace. The drive is beautiful; this is big country, sloping hills and sinuous frozen rivers, stretches of thick forest.

  When the black horse blazes onto the road in front of me I think at first I have imagined it. Its tail is a dark comet trailing behind. My foot slams the brakes too hard and my wheels fishtail. The car spins half a circle and comes to a stop backward in the middle of the road, in time for me to watch the horse disappear into the trees.

  My chest feels tight as I ease the car onto the side of the road.

  A truck rumbles to a stop beside me. “You okay?” a male voice calls from the driver’s side window, which is open only a pinch.

  I nod.

  “See a horse?”

  I point in the direction it ran. “Ah shite,” says the driver, and then the truck, to my astonishment, promptly heads off-road to follow it. I am horrified as it skids through the snow. I check the time and hop out of the car, following the tire tracks. It’s not hard. He’s left trenches in his wake.

  The snow picks up; the world is falling around me. I’m in a rush now, late for work, but even so. I tilt my head to look up. Flakes upon my lips and eyelashes. My hand reaching to the cool papery bark of a silver birch. The memory of forty thousand aspens breathing around me, their canopy not naked but canary yellow and as vivid as his voice in my ear. It’s dying. We are killing it.

  A shout, from somewhere distant.

  I let the memory slip away and start running. Past his truck and into thick snow only disturbed by his footprints and the hoof marks of a frantic horse. I’m sweating by the time I reach the river. A narrow, frozen stretch of ice between steep embankments.

  The dark shape of him ahead. Below on the ice stands the horse.

  Even at such a distance I feel the cold beneath its hooves. A cutting kind of cold. The man is tall, but I can’t see any more of his shape beneath his winter layers. His hair is short, dark like his beard. There’s a black-and-white collie sitting calmly next to him. The man turns to me.

  “You know this is protected forest?” I ask.

  He frowns quizzically.

  I gesture to his truck and the mess it’s made. “You don’t mind breaking the law?”

  He considers me and then smiles. “You can report me after I’ve dealt with the horse.” He has a thick Scottish brogue.

  We look at the animal on the ice. She’s not putting much weight on her front hoof.

  “What are you waiting for?” I ask.

  “I got a bum leg. I wouldn’t get back out. And that ice won’t hold forever.”

  There are tiny cracks on the surface of the river, spreading with each shift of the horse’s weight.

  “Best get my rifle from the truck.”

  The horse gives a snort, tosses her head. The black of her coat is broken only by a diamond of white between her wide, darting eyes. I can see the quick rise and fall of her belly.

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  “No idea.”

  “She’s not yours?”

  He shakes his head.

  I start climbing down the steep ravine.

  “Don’t,” he says. “I won’t be able to get you out.”

  My eyes stay on the horse as I slip and slide down the jagged edge. My boots hit ice and I edge my way out, watching for cracks. It holds me for now but there are sections thin enough to reveal the dark flow of water beneath. I see how easy it would be to step wrong, for that sheath to split and for me to slip silently through; I see my body dragged and tumbled head over tail until it’s gone.

  The horse. She is watching me. “Hello,” I say, meeting her deep liquid eyes.

  She tosses her head and stamps a hoof. She is fierce and defiant; I move closer and she rears, thundering hooves landing with a crack. I wonder if she knows her fury will kill her, if maybe she’s fine with that, maybe she would charge toward oblivion rather than return to whatever she fled. A bit and bridle, a saddle. Some horses aren’t meant to be ridden.

  I lower myself into a crouch, making myself small. She doesn’t rear again, keeping her eyes on me.

  “You got any rope in your truck?” I ask the man without looking up at him.

  I hear him move off to retrieve it.

  The horse and I wait. Who are you, I ask her silently. She’s a strong beast and, if I had to guess, newly broken. It’s been a long while since I’ve ridden a horse and I’m a different kind of thing than I was. I let her see me, wondering what she will make of me.

  The man returns with a coil of rope and throws it down. I don’t break from her eyes as my hands tie the old familiar knot by rote, I keep her with me and rise to my feet. With a quick motion I loop the lasso over her head and draw it closed about her neck. She rears once more, furious, and the ice will crack, I’m sure of it. I let the rope through my hands so I’m not yanked from my feet but make sure to keep a good hold. When she lands I don’t give her the chance to rear again, I pull on the rope to force her head down and then I move in close to lift her foreleg. The two motions cause the horse to bend her other front leg and almost with relief she lowers herself to the ice and tilts heavily onto her side. I drape myself over her body, stroking her forehead and neck, whispering to her. Good girl. Her heart is thundering. I can feel the rope about my own neck.

  “The ice,” says the man, because there are a thousand fine lines now.

  When she’s ready I slide my leg over her back and give her a squeeze with my knees, a few clicks of the tongue and an up, up. She surges and I slide onto her properly, getting my other leg into place and tightening my knees. The rope is still about her neck but I don’t need it, I take hold of her mane and maneuver her toward the steep embankment as the cracks shudder beneath us. This will hurt, I tell her but she leaps up the edge, tilting me back. I’m ready for it, and I move with her, legs firm enough to keep my seat. She strains upward as her hooves scrabble for purchase and the ground gives way beneath her and then we are up and over, and the thrill that runs through her burns straight through me. Behind us the icy river has cracked open.

  I press myself flat to her neck once more. Good girl. Brave girl. She’s calm now, but I don’t know for how long. She’s not standing on her bad leg. Getting free might have harmed it beyond repair. I dismount and pass the rope to the man. It’s rough in his bare palm, in mine. “Be gentle.”

  “Much appreciated,” he says with a nod. “You’re a horsewoman?”

  A quirk of my
lips. “No.”

  “Would you ride her home? She’s from the Burns farm, not far north.”

  “Why’d you come get her if she’s not yours?”

  “I just saw her, same as you.”

  I consider him. “Her leg’s injured. She shouldn’t be ridden.”

  “I’ll radio in a float then. You’re not from around here?”

  “I just moved here.”

  “Whereabouts?” he asks, and I wonder if he’s one of those people who make it their business to know everyone in a hundred-mile radius. He has a heavy brow and a dark look about his eyes; I can’t tell if he’s handsome but there is something unsettling about him. “What brings you here then?”

  I turn away. “Don’t you have someone to radio about that horse?”

  “You with the wolves?” he asks, and I stop. “We got told to expect an Australian lassie. Now how does that come about? Aren’t there enough koalas for you to be cuddling?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Most have died in bushfires.”

  “Oh.”

  That shut him up.

  After a moment he asks, “They free yet?”

  “Not yet. But they will be.”

  “I’ll alert the villagers to lock up their wives and daughters. The big bad wolves are coming.”

  I meet his eyes. “If I were you I’d be more worried about the wives and daughters going out to run with the wolves.”

  He gazes at me, taken aback.

  I turn in the direction of my car. “Next time you’ve got an animal to track, call someone who’s up to the task instead of bulldozing your monster truck through protected undergrowth.” Prick.

  I hear him laugh. “Yes, ma’am.”

  When I glance back it’s at the horse. Bye, I bid her. And, I’m sorry. Because that damaged leg might mean freedom of a different kind.

  3

  For the first sixteen years of our lives, Aggie and I spent a couple of months each year visiting our father in his forest. Our true home, the place we belonged. A landscape that made sense of me. As a child I believed the trees of this forest our family. The tallest and widest had branches that began high above the ground: this was how you knew they were very old. The red cedars had stripes, almost, straight vertical grooves in their bark that ran up the lengths of them, but otherwise they were smooth, and their gray turned silver in the afternoon sunlight peeking its way through the canopy above. Elegant, the cedars, with their fern-like leaves. The hemlocks were different, darker in color, earthier, and the patterns in their rough bark were wriggly. Both had spatters of paint-like moss so green it was electric. There were many other trees here, too, littlies that wrapped around the bigger ones, these were younger, teenagers, maybe, and unruly. Some that snaked fingers along the ground for us to trip over, these were the cheeky ones, while some were bushy and fat, others thin and spindly. There was not one the same; they were unique and strange and varied, but they all had one thing in common: they spoke.

  “The forest has a beating heart we can’t see,” Dad told us once. He lay flat on the earth and we copied him, placing our hands on the warm ground and our ears to the underbrush, listening. “It’s here, beneath us. This is how the trees speak with and care for each other. Their roots tangle together, dozens of trees with dozens more in a web that reaches on forever, and they whisper to each other through their roots. They warn of danger and they share sustenance. They’re like us, a family. Stronger together. Nothing gets through this life alone.” He smiled then, and asked, “Can you hear the beating?” and we could, somehow we could.

  On the day we turned ten Dad led us somewhere we hadn’t been before. We’d camped in these woods all our lives but he hadn’t ever brought us this far. For five nights we’d been sleeping out here in the green, five days we’d been walking. Aggie liked to wait for the deepest silence and then shout something so loud it shook the world. I liked the quiet better.

  Dad would carry Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours everywhere with him; he believed it was a book to live by. Aggie and I took turns poring over the pages, running our fingers over the little squares of color and their descriptions, learning them all by heart. For each hue was an animal that shared the color, plus a vegetable and a mineral. It was, my dad would say often and with pride, the very book that Charles Darwin used to describe the colors in nature that he saw while on his HMS Beagle voyage. It always struck me as wonderful that “flesh red,” which to my eye looked a pale, brownish pink, was the color not only of limestone and larkspur flowers, but also some shades of human skin. Or that “Prussian blue” was the beauty spot on the wing of a mallard drake, the stamen of a bluish-purple anemone, and deep blue copper ore.

  “It connects things, this book,” Dad told us. “It makes everything the same, all just different shades of color. It makes us part of nature.”

  But Dad went quiet that day and we followed suit until instead of stepping over a rise into another copse of lush forest, we stepped out into an empty valley. The ground before us had been scoured, every tree hacked down and carried away.

  “What happened to it?” Aggie asked, but Dad took it all in silently, took it upon himself and grew older as he did. His eyes fell on something in the distance. Hard to miss. A lone tree, the mightiest I had ever seen. A staggering Douglas fir, reaching right up into the sky, at least 80 percent of its trunk naked of any branches. It stood steadfast amid the wreckage.

  Dad led the way down into the valley and across to the tree; it grew more enormous the closer we drew to it. With my back to the ground I watched distant leaves caress the sky.

  Then Dad told us a story. “I wasn’t always the man you know,” he began. “A long time ago, long before you two were even a thought, I was a logger.”

  * * *

  He told us of his walks through forests, so much like the walks he takes now and so very different. It was his job to show his colleagues where to fell and where to stop, using brightly colored tape to mark the trees and value their timber. Once he’d done his job the loggers would come in and start up their chain saws, and a place alive when he’d entered would be left dead.

  One day he walked this land. It looked different in those days. He came up from the river we crossed this morning, measuring his distances and marking his trees. And he reached this one. This Douglas fir, which was to be the tree that would change his life.

  He knew straightaway that it was special. Larger than any tree he’d come across, it would be worth a fortune. He marked it red, and carried on.

  Only to return to gaze up at it, again and again throughout the day. It stirred something in him. Alexander Flynn, at twenty-five, got out his green tape and he marked the tree a second time, this time to “keep.” And so ended his career.

  * * *

  “I left work that day and I never went back,” Dad said. “Too late. Far too late.” He gazed out at the stumps. “It’s a threatened species now. Ninety-nine percent of old-growth Douglas firs have been cut down. Which makes this one of the last of its kind.”

  “Is it lonely?” I asked, aching for the roots that must be reaching to find nothing to hold.

  “Yes,” Dad said. Then he rested his forehead against the Douglas fir, and he did something Aggie and I had never seen him do, not before that day and never again after, he wept.

  * * *

  It was a long journey from Vancouver to Sydney and Aggie and I knew it well. A long journey from logger-turned-forest-dwelling-naturalist father to city-bound-gritty-crime-detective mother. Life with Mum a different world altogether. But even once I returned home to the concrete apartment building and the treeless sandy beaches and their crashing oceans I still dreamt of the lonely Doug fir, and I would wake certain its roots had been my own, reaching to find no others, not even Aggie’s.

  * * *

  Mum didn’t ask us how the trip went—she never did. In fact she never asked us much at all. It was usually me doing the questioning, wanting always to know more, no answers ever feeling like
enough, a parrot who’d been taught the word “why” solely to send her mother insane, as Mum declared.

  Most of my preoccupation was with my parents and why I’d never seen them in the same room, let alone together, together. Why do you and Dad live so far apart? Someone’s gotta fund the airlines, she’d say, or something along those lines. So I’d ask Where’d you meet? In Canada. Why were you in Canada? Because sometimes people go to other countries, Inti. How old were you? Can’t remember. Did you fall in love? When you’re grown up that word means something different. Was he happy when you got pregnant? I’d never seen him happier. Were you? What do you think, you nut? Why’d you break up then? Because I wanted a career, and he didn’t want to leave his forest. Why? Why what? Why couldn’t he leave? I don’t know, Inti, it’s something I’ll never understand, Mum would say, and then she’d pretend to tie a gag around my mouth which would make us both laugh and that would be the end of the interrogation for one day.

  After the latest visit to Dad’s, when the nightmares about dead trees had been going on for a while, she called me into her study and this was strange enough to make me nervous. Mum’s study was a place of bruises and blood and death. Not entirely unlike Dad’s shed. We weren’t usually allowed in there.

  “Sit up here,” she said, pulling a second chair beside hers at the desk. I sat, glancing at the crack in the door where Aggie was eavesdropping. “What did you do with Dad this time?” Mum asked.

  “Just camping and stuff.”

  “What unsettled you both so much?”

  I considered the question. “There’s all these trees got cut down.”

  She studied my face for what felt an age. “Inti,” she said clearly. “You need to toughen up.”