Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  * * *

  After work I return to the Burns ranch with a hired float and a thousand cash. Nobody comes to meet me so I start loading the horse myself. She is skittish and doesn’t want to be bridled. I almost get kicked when I try to lead her by the bit. I just need to get her home and into the front paddock where she can relax and eat and do whatever she wants, but her distress is upsetting me and it’s with a measure of relief that I hear a shout from the driveway. Stuart jogs over to grab the reins, pulling the poor beast roughly into the float and closing her in. I stroke her but she jerks at the touch and tries to escape me. Easy, girl. Easy.

  “Not just her leg that got broken,” Stuart says.

  “Maybe if you were gentler with her,” I say. I look up to where he’s parked his car and see Lainey climbing unsteadily out.

  “Shouldn’t she be in hospital?” I ask.

  “Best place to rest is in her own bed,” Stuart says. “Follow me in, Miss Flynn, I’ll get Lainey settled and we can see to our business.”

  Inside it’s cooler than I expected. I can see down the hallway, through the open bedroom door to where he is easing Lainey into bed. She’s woozy and sore, but smiles at him reassuringly. I watch as he perches beside her, strokes her face, kisses the inside of her palm. I clench my hand into a fist so as not to feel his lips.

  In the kitchen I fill the kettle.

  “Thank you,” Stuart says as we wait for the water to boil.

  “I left a thousand pounds in her stall.”

  “I thought we agreed on three.”

  “We did. I wanted to ask if you could give me some time to scrape together the rest.”

  “Of course, love.” He takes over from me, placing teabags in three mugs and pouring the water on top. He dumps four sugars into his. “To be honest it couldn’t come at a better time,” he admits.

  “Duncan said Lainey was thrown from her horse?”

  “She can break the worst of them, my Lainey, but we all get thrown sometimes.” Without warning Stuart starts to cry, a choked sort of sound.

  I swallow and look away, and then I stop looking away because that’s what I did last night. I make myself watch his shoulders jerk and I feel no pity whatsoever. I see myself crossing the space and smashing my mug into the back of his skull while he is turned away and vulnerable. I don’t know if this is a desire or just a passing thought. Saliva fills my mouth and I think very loudly, What is wrong with you, what have you become.

  “I’ll take this in to her,” I say, and the voice that comes from my mouth is so hard it’s the voice of a stranger.

  Lainey looks at me with her one good eye as I place her tea on the bedside table. Probably wondering what the hell I’m doing in her bedroom.

  “Do you want some light?”

  She nods, so I cross to the window and open the robin-covered curtains. Sunlight falls over half the room.

  “You look pretty,” I say, which makes her giggle and wince.

  “Don’t make me laugh. You came for Gealaich?”

  I nod. “Say her name again?”

  She says a word that sounds like gee-a-lash.

  “I can’t even say that. I might just call her Gall.”

  This makes her laugh again. I think she might be a bit high. “Sorry he charged you so much,” Lainey says.

  I shrug.

  “We’re struggling. These hills die off a little more each year. There isn’t much for the herd to graze on.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “This is my pa’s farm. It’s been in my family for generations.”

  “Cattle and horses, right? I haven’t seen many horses since I’ve been here.”

  “No, it’s mostly sheep around here.”

  “Was Stuart a farmer before he met you?”

  “God no. He didn’t know a thing about it, but he took to it all right, despite it not being his … speed. I’m grateful for that.”

  “You never thought about a different life?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “The world’s big.”

  She shakes her head. “I love it here. It’s my home.”

  “It’s beautiful country.”

  “The forest is where I love best,” she says, a little dreamy, definitely a little doped. “All that breathing.”

  I smile. “I used to think I belonged to a forest family and it was raising me.”

  She laughs, then stops when it hurts her face. “I love that,” she says. “I can feel that. Can I tell you a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad you’re here to save the trees. Don’t tell my husband.”

  “I’m not saving anything. The wolves will do that.”

  “You’ll never win them over,” she says, a sigh. “The others. It’s too deep in them.”

  I sit down on the end of her bed. “When the wolves begin to hunt the deer, the deer will return to what deer are meant to do, they’ll start to move again. Everything underfoot will have a chance to grow. Life breathed back into the land. You’ll see your hills turn green. The shape of the earth will begin to change.” I meet her swollen eye and ignore the tingling of mine. “I’ve seen wolves change the course of rivers.”

  She smiles. “Then maybe they’ve got a chance here after all. Maybe they’ll survive.”

  “Maybe. If you ever need somewhere to stay, you’re welcome at my place. It’s safe.”

  She looks confused. “I have a home. You’re in it.”

  I nod.

  Her confusion clears and the softness in her that was enjoying this, us, turns brittle. “I need to sleep now.”

  “Sure, sorry.” I stand and head for the door. “Feel better, Lainey.”

  “Thank you.”

  Stuart is waiting for me outside the door. “She has everything she needs here,” he tells me. “I’ve taken care of my wife since the day I met her.”

  I consider replying but find I can’t. I walk for the door. Under the sky I can breathe again.

  5

  There are languages without words and violence is one of them.

  As a teenager Aggie was already a language genius. She spoke four fluently and was learning several more. But it was not only spoken languages that she understood; Aggie knew, too, that there were some that did not need voices. By the time we were ten there was the sign language she’d invented so we could communicate privately. She’d built a world for the two of us to live within and we would each be perfectly happy never to leave it. When we were sixteen she started learning the language of violence; she broke a boy’s nose, and she did it for me, as most of the things she did were for me.

  * * *

  “‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse,’” I read aloud one sunny afternoon in the school grounds. “‘The red plague rid you / For learning me your language.’” I looked up at Aggie, baffled. “What the hell does that mean?”

  She sighed and flopped onto the grass, shielding her face from the sun. Her cheeks were pink; I looked at them and felt the gentle burn on my skin; I looked at her head pressed to the ground and felt the itchy blades of grass on my neck.

  “Caliban was wild, and they tried to tame him, and he hates them for it.”

  I reread the passage and had no idea how she managed to get that. But as I sank back onto my elbows beside her I thought I understood. It took me to Dad’s yard and the hooves and the snorts and the knowing those mustangs would rather be free, however much they might have loved my father.

  “Maybe if we did something without so many made-up words…”

  “All words are made up,” she said, which was a good point. “Let me be Caliban.” Aggie snatched the heavy book from me and jumped to her feet. With a theatrical flourish she called out the passage, loudly and ferociously, not caring that most of the kids in our vicinity turned to stare.

  “‘The red plague rid you!’” Aggie snarled, like a witch’s curse.

  I laughed. “Your natural savagery is
finally appropriate.”

  Daniel Mulligan and his friends were under the trees in a cluster, talking in hushed tones, no doubt concocting some prank to humiliate their next victim. I felt their uniforms on their skin, the stiff itchiness, the ever-present desire to rip that fabric off in exchange for their normal clothes. One boy broke away to juggle a soccer ball; I could feel the thud thud thud of it against the top of his foot. Behind us girls were playing netball on the court, their tread on the cement quick, skidding, a little jarring on my ankles, while to our left there were girls braiding each other’s hair and the slip of this through my fingers was silken. I was lifted away by all this sensation, carried somewhere bright and vivid, and also somehow centered more firmly in my body.

  Aggie was watching me. “What does it feel like today?”

  “It’s like electricity,” I offered, even though it wasn’t quite right. It was gentler than that. I took her hand, wanting to pass the sensations through me and into her, wanting to share them as we shared everything else. “Here,” I said, willing her to feel it. “Take it from me.”

  She clasped my hand and peered around at the other kids, at the world of sensations. But it didn’t work like that, it never had and no amount of yearning for it would help. She sighed in frustration.

  My eyes were pulled back to Daniel and his friends gathered beneath the weeping willow, because one of them was staring at us, at me. John Allen, the quiet one, who looked directly at me and, very deliberately, touched himself. I don’t have a dick but it rushed through me anyway, as he knew it would, the feeling of being touched between my legs, and I was filled with heat, heat that flushed my body and cheeks, and this was very different, this was not gentle, it was shame.

  “Inti? What?” Aggie asked.

  I hunched over, wishing the feeling away, sickened by it. I wanted to tear myself from my own body and never return to it. I could hear the boys laughing.

  “What did he do?” Aggie demanded, but I wasn’t about to say it. So she signed, Don’t look, and got to her feet and marched over to the boys and without warning she swung the collected works of William Shakespeare into John’s face. Whoomph.

  I knew better, but I looked anyway. I saw the impact of those words—and there were a lot of words—on John’s nose, which meant my nose, and then I was boneless, sinking, gone.

  * * *

  Gold and green swelled above, sharp pricks of light and woozy orbs of color. Slowly the leaves of the trees took their shape once more and I returned to myself. Aggie was looking down at me. You broke my nose, I signed, and she replied, I told you not to look, and then neither of us could stop laughing.

  * * *

  Aggie was expelled from school for the third time in as many years and Mum cracked the shits and sent us to live at Dad’s place—which for me was about as far from a punishment as I could imagine. Mum said it was Dad’s turn to deal with us but secretly I knew she liked that Aggie was so feisty, so quick to fight. It was me she didn’t know how to handle, me who was too soft and vulnerable. It frightened her that I didn’t know how to protect myself, because what kind of creature is born without this instinct?

  * * *

  Our arrival in British Columbia wasn’t what I expected. It was the tools in his shed that alerted me first. All our lives he had lovingly cleaned and treated and sharpened them, he’d spent hours out there, lost in the meditation of it, because the thought of allowing something to rust when it could be maintained was not only wasteful, but disrespectful to the tool that fed and sustained. That morning in the shed I was hit with the familiar smell of blood and fur and sawdust and grease. The acrid stickiness of it felt like coming home. But when I saw the instruments of Dad’s life scattered all over the benches instead of neatly hanging from the wall in their respective spots, when I saw the state of the blades, the blood that had been left to stain and rust the steel, the oil spills that hadn’t been cleaned up, the animal carcasses left to rot instead of tenderly treated and stored, I didn’t feel at home, I felt scared.

  The house, too, was a mess. Aggie plunged into a mountain of washing up so I put on several loads of clothes and started tidying the chaos in the living room. Dad was using it as a kind of recycling center, with wavering pillars of cardboard and paper and empty bottles. He used to take all of his recycling into town to the plants, but when I asked him why he hadn’t done it in so long he said he didn’t trust that they weren’t just throwing it in a landfill. “Well,” I said, “I guess that could be true. But you still gotta take it somewhere or you’ll drown in it.”

  “Nowhere to take it. They gotta stop making it.”

  “Yeah, but…” I didn’t know what to say.

  I spent three days in the shed using steel wool and a can of WD-40 to clean the rust off each and every one of his tools, from the carving knives to the wrenches to the hundreds of tiny screwdriver heads. The pads of my fingers were scraped raw.

  While I tended to the shed, Aggie gave all the stabled horses a long ride to stretch their legs. I went with her on the last and we discovered that what had once been forest was now wasteland. The loggers had been. They’d felled in great swathes, right up to the edge of Dad’s property, and looking out at the stumps I recalled viscerally the feeling I had when Dad showed us the lone Doug fir. I wondered if this was what he felt all the time now, that hurt, so much that it paralyzed him. Or if it was the memory of the things he himself had torn down.

  Aggie and I left the horses to graze and lay with our backs flat on two of the tree stumps. They were wide enough that I could press both my head and feet to the years of rings; if I counted those rings there would be hundreds upon hundreds. It was a giant, this tree. Aggie scared me by letting out a furious yell, a sound flung up to the sky, one filled with all the grief in my chest. That we should be so powerless. That this was the end of our forest family, that it was gone now. For the first time I lifted my voice and yelled with her.

  * * *

  We made spaghetti Bolognese with frozen venison from Dad’s storeroom. As I retrieved it I realized it was one of the last packs. The cupboards were pretty bare, too, no pickled or stewed fruits, no fresh vegetables from the garden. It took an enormous amount of work to live a subsistence life and when one thread came loose the rest followed and suddenly the life you’d created unraveled.

  “When was the last time you went hunting, Dad?” I asked as we sat down to eat. My finger was throbbing around a splinter I got while chopping firewood, but at least there was a roaring fire to keep us warm.

  “Last week. Got a nice big buck.”

  “Where is it?”

  He looked at me like I was mad. “You forgotten everything I taught you already? It’s where it always is, drying in the scullery. You can help me butcher it.”

  “There’s nothing there, Dad.”

  He frowned, pondering this equation, then shrugged. “Must have been more than a week ago then.”

  Aggie and I shared a look.

  “We’ll have to go to town,” she said. “Do a proper shop, stock up.”

  “There’s plenty of food here,” Dad said.

  “You’ve eaten it all, Dad.”

  “Where do you look for sustenance?” he asked.

  Aggie sighed. “In your backyard.”

  “There’s a garden out there full of vegetables. And a forest full of animals.”

  “It’s the end of winter,” Aggie said. “The garden’s mostly empty.”

  “And we can’t hunt,” I added. “We don’t even eat meat at home.”

  “I wouldn’t either if it was bought from some sunless metal cage and pumped full of antibiotics,” he said. “Look, girls. We have to do our bit to slow the changing of our planet’s climate, to halt its degradation. That means reducing our impact as much as we can, living as lightly upon this Earth as we’re able. We’re not here to consume until everything’s gone—we are custodians, not owners. And if others won’t do their part in turning the tide then we must do more than our
share. You know this.”

  We nodded because we did know it, and there was comfort in hearing the words he’d raised us on, but that truth didn’t stop him from being a changed man. If anything, the fact that he still believed so passionately in the things he always had was an indication that he was unable to keep his subsistence lifestyle going, not that he was unwilling.

  A few days later Aggie and I started on the garden.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she asked as we turned the earth over and buried potato seedlings.

  “I dunno. We might have to take him to a doctor.”

  She scoffed. “How are we gonna do that? Handcuff and blindfold him?”

  She was right. When I suggested it he ignored me. And when Aggie drove an hour to town and bought a whole stack of freezable meals, including a mountain of beef mince, jars of pickled vegetables, and long-life milk, he ordered her flatly to take it all back to the shop and get her money back. He wouldn’t have her supporting industry, didn’t we know how much carbon those purchases alone produced? He wouldn’t even touch it, let alone eat it. This is how the world dies, he said, with laziness.

  And it seemed to me that what was once the wisdom of a man courageous enough to see another path was now turning slowly toward madness.

  * * *

  He did, however, understand the need for food, despite all his distractions. So he began to teach us how to track and hunt, calling on the lessons we’d had when much younger. He had never expected Aggie to make the kills then, but now he did. I was the better tracker and she the one able to pull the trigger. We made a good team, Dad said. We took the bus forty minutes to school and forty minutes home, and then he would take us into the forest to spend hours waiting and watching, or slinking through the underbrush as silently as we were able. He quizzed us on the signs various animals left, on what their prints and their scat looked like, on their behavioral patterns. He took it more seriously than any teacher we’d ever had. It was like he knew we needed preparing.