Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  With my fingers I feel for her head, there is certainly something hard and wet there but I have no way to tell if it’s her skull, I must hope. I am moving still, unable to find the right position, on my back is a nightmare but on my hands and knees I can’t reach to catch her, so in the end I stand up, leaning my forehead against a tree. It holds all of me up, and I bend my knees and reach down to catch her. Within me is a certainty I have never known. This is my pain. It is no trick, not stolen; it belongs to no one but me. This is my body, my child. I can feel her and she is mine and in this moment the truth of that is so powerful I am able to give a mighty push. Her head and shoulders force their way out and then the rest of her slips free, my hands catching her by the leg and swinging her up into my arms. She is a bruised shade and covered in bloody, pussy muck so I lower my mouth to her face and suck her airways clean. She takes a huge breath and she is breathing into my lungs, lungs we share, and I thought my condition was a trick, a curse, a burden to carry but in this moment it is a gift. She opens her eyes.

  And looks at me.

  I am halved and doubled at once.

  * * *

  I sink to the ground on my makeshift bed and place her on my chest, against my skin, and I guide her to my breast so she can latch on. She does it straight away, with very little struggle. I vaguely feel the placenta coming free of me, but I’m too intent on her face to take much notice of it. She is so tiny. I don’t know if she’s getting anything out of my unprepared breast. I bite her umbilical cord with my teeth, and then I wrap her in my thick thermal undershirt. I can’t bear to put her down, to let go of her for a single second, but I have to get dressed or I’ll freeze to death. So I lie her down and clumsily draw on my clothes and then press her to my chest inside the warm coat. I have no strength left in my body, my legs are almost paralyzed with weakness. I am bleeding quite a lot, and this scares me but there isn’t time now to rest, I need to get her somewhere warm, somewhere she can be looked after. So I find what little strength I have left and I get to my feet and I start walking.

  * * *

  She sleeps in my arms, this little creature. We are both calmed by the smell of each other. I give her what warmth I have. Leaving a trail of red behind.

  * * *

  At some point I realize I have been following a figure up ahead, keeping my steps timed to his.

  “Dad,” I call, and he stops. Turns.

  “My girls,” he says, with such love.

  “Where did you go?” I ask.

  “Into the forest.”

  I swallow this aching thing in me. “Did it look after you?”

  Dad smiles. “It did.”

  I close my eyes.

  “Isn’t she beautiful,” he says, by my side now. “Keep going, darling.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “I know you are. But I’ll show you the way.”

  I follow my father through the trees until eventually he is swallowed up by the falling snow.

  * * *

  As night falls I must stop. I have been moving too slowly, I haven’t made enough progress, and now it is too cold to move at all: my body won’t obey. I try to make us a fire but Gall left with my matches and my hands are shaking and too stiff to make use of my fingers. So I hunker down against the base of a tree and I press my body warmth around my daughter, whose calm I take courage from.

  “We’ll start walking again as soon as the light changes,” I whisper to her. “We’ll walk forever if we have to. I won’t ever stop. You’re safe, little one.”

  I’m bleeding even more now, but I will get back up again soon.

  * * *

  It’s the scent of them that reaches me first. In the dark of the earliest hours comes the feather-soft musk of their approach. This is their forest, and they too have been alerted by scent, the trail of it I’ve left behind. I open my eyes. I haven’t slept, but have lain in a frozen kind of limbo, slipping back and forth.

  My first conscious thought in hours is: This night is too cold to survive. We’re going to die here.

  The second is: The wolves have come.

  * * *

  My will to fight is immense. I will stand and run at them, I will scare them. If they don’t scare, I will fight them with my hands and my teeth, I will tear at them, I will make of my body a shield, I will do anything. I will not let them hurt her.

  But the immensity of a will is still nothing, not compared with the body. The body is master of us, and it can only be asked for so much. I try to stand but nothing happens. I try to yell but only a rasp comes loose. The cold is too deep, I’ve lost too much blood.

  The wolves melt from the trees. Their eyes reflect the moonlight.

  I turn and cover my daughter with my body, and I look down at her in this little cocoon. Survive, I urge her.

  The air catches in my lungs.

  But she doesn’t attack me, this smallest of the wolves, nearly grown now but still white as the day I held her in my hands. She lies her body next to mine. And as the rest of her pack move to join her, pressing their warmth around us and saving us from the cold, I lower my face into the white of her neck and I weep.

  29

  When I wake to dawn light, they are gone, and I am left to wonder if they were real. The infinite mystery of wolves. I am delirious as I stagger to my feet. Little one has been asleep a long time now.

  I walk. Step after painful step. I’m amazed there is any blood left in me.

  Soon I hear a sound. I know that sound. It’s a horse. My body collapses to the ground and this time I won’t be getting up again.

  It doesn’t matter. She has found us.

  Have I imagined her?

  She swings off Gall and runs to me and she’s here, my sister is here, and so it doesn’t matter that I won’t get back up. There is no life in which she will let harm come to little one. She protects.

  Aggie kisses my cheeks and forehead and she scoops the baby into her arms. Her arm, which has blood seeping through its sleeve. I am confused, don’t understand her blood.

  But she says to my daughter, with her voice, “Little one,” and I am crying again, and she is, too.

  “Take her,” I say.

  Aggie meets my eyes and we don’t need words. She knows what’s within me, the very farthest reaches of me. I can’t get on a horse, not hemorrhaging like this, and even if I could it would be too slow to try to carry us all. It’s time that matters now. It’s little one, and she hasn’t moved in a long time, far too long. And so Aggie nods, and she places her coat around me and kisses me again, and she says, “I’ll come back for you. Just hold on.”

  I hear her voice in my mind long after she has carried my daughter away.

  * * *

  In the dream I am sitting before Duncan’s fireplace and Fingal’s head is in my lap. There is twisted furniture all around. And his large hand is stroking my hair, slow and gentle, his lips against my temple.

  “You know what happened,” he whispers, breath to my ear.

  I do.

  I know it now, at long last.

  * * *

  “Ho!”

  The shout comes from a long way away. Maybe another world away. I have been slipping between two for hours; the veil is paper thin.

  I resist that shout, happy where I am. The fire is warm. His touch everything.

  “Up ahead!”

  Inti, he says, and I say, Duncan, and we both say don’t go but it’s too late, I am gone, returned to the cold.

  How long have I been out here? How long since Aggie left? Did she make it back in time? The sky is spinning. Snow clouds turn in circles. There are flakes falling on my face, into my eyelashes, onto my lips. I can taste them on my tongue.

  A face appears.

  It’s Red McRae.

  My hope stutters out. I think he will leave me here. An end to his problems. But he lifts me into his arms and says, “It’s all right, sweetheart, you’re safe now,” and I hold on to him as he carries me home, thinking I know n
othing about hatred or love, about cruelty or kindness. I know nothing.

  30

  I wake to find my sister in bed with me, and a baby in between.

  Aggie has been watching us both as we sleep. Our hands are linked and hers is so warm. Now she smiles at me, and I smile back.

  * * *

  Later, when things make sense again, she moves to the chair so I have room to try to breastfeed. I’ve been sewn up and given a blood transfusion, and left on a drip. My body hurts but mostly it just feels exhausted. Little one has been given fluids and warmth and has been monitored, she has some jaundice and I’m not producing much breastmilk, but she is, miraculously, in reasonably good health.

  She is tiny, with thick dark hair and the prettiest little face I have ever seen, and beloved.

  Aggie tells me she’d been watching for my return when Gall showed up carrying her burden. Aggie lowered the wolf from the horse’s back, then turned her around again and followed her path back to me, far more quickly than I was able to travel on my journey. It is strange to hear her speaking. I’m not yet used to it, and at the same time it seems as though she never stopped.

  We are quiet awhile, listening to the beeps of the machines that drift in from the hallway, and I marvel at the way it feels to breastfeed, at the intimacy, even when she’s not getting much. The trying, apparently, will help.

  “What happened to your arm?” I ask Aggie.

  “A dog,” she replies.

  I look up at her, frowning. “What?”

  She doesn’t answer, and I remember my dream, and know.

  * * *

  The story comes in small morsels, as much as Aggie can say at a time. She uses signs as well as her voice, because signing is not a habit she will shake in a matter of days, maybe not ever.

  It goes like this.

  When Lainey drops Stuart at the end of the road, she thinks she is leaving him to go after Duncan. But instead he walks for my house. It is me who has publicly accused him of abusing his wife. It is me who is vulnerable; Duncan is too strong a target for Stuart’s already-humiliated rage.

  Aggie wakes in the night to a furious hammering on the door. There isn’t a doubt in her mind that it’s what she’s been waiting for: Gus has found her. She takes a sharp knife from the kitchen, as she would do several more times in this very same kitchen when needs arose, and she looks through the window and sees a man. Her husband, come to finish her. She decides she will finish him first. She feels a thrill. A need. And fear to obliterate the rest, to swallow it all whole.

  The man is shouting. Saying her sister’s name, spewing abuse. How dare I stick my nose into his business.

  There is a jolt of cognitive dissonance as the man’s face changes before Aggie’s eyes. This is not her husband, but it is a husband, one who has been harming his wife. I’d been talking about him, after all. Talking and talking to a woman I thought couldn’t hear me, but as it turns out she was listening all along and she did not like the sound of Stuart Burns. She had seen him, as I had, sitting in his car beyond the boundary of our house, watching us.

  When the man gives up and walks away into the forest, Aggie follows him. She is very frightened, more so now that she’s outside, but she gathers her courage. She was fierce once. And she has always been more comfortable with rage than I have.

  She calls, “Stuart.”

  He turns and says, “What?” Like it’s normal to be addressed out here in the dead of night. He recognizes her, thinks she is me. He advances, thinking to teach me the lesson he came here to impart. But before he touches Aggie some instinct makes her arm jerk. She stabs and slashes with her serrated knife.

  Then she turns and walks home. Simple as that.

  What neither of us realized is that there was someone watching from the road, thinking she was me.

  * * *

  There is a long quiet as we both return from that night forest and its ghosts. I feel myself shiver, and wonder how I didn’t guess sooner. Little one has tired of feeding and fallen asleep.

  “Promise me you’ll never tell anyone,” I say to Aggie. “If he’s ever found, we’ll let them think it was Number Ten who killed him, and I’ll admit I was the one who buried him because I wanted to protect my wolves.”

  Aggie looks at me for a long moment, but she doesn’t reply. And Duncan? I want to ask. But I already know the answer and I can’t bear to hear it spoken aloud. Something in me will perish along with him, when I know for certain that he is dead, and she the one to do it.

  I can already picture how it must have happened.

  Aggie sees that I’m afraid of him and that’s all it takes. The tried and tested practice of her life. She walks the same path through the forest once more, further this time. She takes the knife. She waits outside his house for him to emerge. He lets his dog out first, maybe. Fingal is barking, he can smell someone in the trees. Duncan follows to see what the fuss is about. Maybe Aggie has intended only to threaten him, she means to keep him away from me, but maybe the dog panics her and the man is advancing and so she lifts her knife and slashes Duncan’s throat. The dog attacks, sinking his teeth into her arm. She is forced to cut him, too. And runs, leaving them both where they fell. My shadow sister.

  “I was so tired of feeling afraid,” Aggie says, and she does, she sounds so tired. “I didn’t want that prison for you, too.”

  I understand. It’s why I told her I’d killed Gus. To free her.

  “Why that night?” I ask. “What made you go to Duncan’s that night?”

  “He came to our house,” she says. “Earlier that day. You were at work, I didn’t answer. He was knocking and knocking and calling my name, saying he wanted to talk to me and I just … I knew he wouldn’t ever stop trying to get to you. Not unless I made him.”

  Oh, Aggie.

  “I love him,” I say.

  She blinks, and then her mouth forms a soft oh of surprise. No, Aggie signs. A refusal.

  “I do. He never did anything to deserve fear. It was Gus who did that.”

  Aggie closes her eyes. Terrible pain passes through her. I thought it was happening again.

  So did I, I sign in return. But, as it turns out, we were the ones who couldn’t be trusted.

  * * *

  There is a knock at the door. I twist in bed to see Red and Douglas McRae poking their heads politely into the room. “Okay to have visitors?”

  “Yes, come in.”

  The two men shuffle in. Douglas is holding a bunch of flowers, which he places on my side table, knocking over a cup of water in the process. “Look at this little lassie,” the old man says, sweeping my daughter into his arms and cradling her with practiced ease. I blink in surprise. All right then.

  Red is looking between my sister and me. “There’s two of you.”

  I introduce them and Red gives Aggie a polite nod. She looks him up and down with cool appraisal.

  “Word is you shot the wolf yourself,” Red says to me.

  For the crimes of having attacked two people, crimes she did not commit. I will never forgive myself for this mistake, but in the end, Ten would have had to be destroyed anyway, because she drew a map of dead livestock and the fury of man is absolute.

  “She’s at home,” I say. “You can go and see for yourself if you need the proof.”

  He shakes his head. “I believe you. I’ve called off the hunt.”

  “Thank you.”

  Red is shifting uncomfortably and I wait to see what’s bothering him so much. “Did she…” He hesitates. “Did she show fear, when it ended?”

  I am surprised by the question, and search his face. “No.” My throat prickles. “She was very calm.”

  “Mine too,” he says. “The big male.” And then he admits, softly, “The moment I pulled that trigger, I knew it was evil I’d done.”

  I close my eyes. The bed moves as my sister sits beside me and takes my hand.

  “The way I see it,” Red says gruffly, “you and I have some things to talk
about. None of this is going to work unless we start talking.”

  A great weight lifts off my chest. “I couldn’t agree with you more, Red.”

  * * *

  Later, after I have slept a little, I watch my sister with the baby, rocking her gently by the window.

  “I’m sorry, Aggie,” I say. Long overdue.

  She looks at me.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t stop them. I’m so sorry I didn’t fight.”

  “You couldn’t have. They were doing it to you too.”

  I shake my head. “That isn’t real.”

  My sister holds my eyes. “You came in to be with me. They were doing it to you too.”

  “You went so far away.”

  “You were with me. You’re always with me.”

  I say, “I didn’t kill Gus.”

  Aggie takes that in. She breathes out wearily, then lowers her cheek to little one’s. “Okay. That makes sense.”

  “I tried, Ag. I’m sorry.” I hate him so much for what he’s done, for what he’s taken from her. And from me, too. So much time, wasted in fear of others.

  “I love you,” she tells me.

  “I love you.”

  I look at my daughter and she helps to fortify me.

  “Is Duncan…?”

  Aggie says, “He’s waiting for you.”

  * * *

  With little one in my arms, my sister wheels me into his room. It’s on another floor. He is hooked up to a monitor and drip. There are thick bandages around his neck. His eyes are closed, face pale. Aggie pushes me to his bedside, as close as she can, and then she leaves us.

  The sun moves beyond the window, casting us in warm evening light. We wait for him to wake. Maybe it’s the soft sounds little one makes, but soon he opens his eyes. When he sees us his tears slip down his cheeks.