The Keeper of Wolves

The rifle felt heavy in Robert Calloway's hands, though it weighed no more than eleven pounds and he had carried heavier things in France. He knew this because his shoulders still remembered the weight of a pack howitzer and the heavier weight of a boy from Brooklyn named Feinstein who had carried nothing but a radio and died for it in the Argonne.

Wisconsin, October 1922. The air smelled of pine needles and wood smoke, and the forest stretched before him like a dark cathedral whose nave was paved with fallen leaves. Robert had come out here on a bus from Madison, paid fifteen cents to the driver who looked at him with a particular expression — the expression of a man who has seen many young men with rifles come into these woods and has watched none of them come back the same way — and walked until the road ended and the trees began.

He was not here for the thrill of it. He had had enough of that in Europe. He was here because his uncle, a retired colonel living in Evanston, had told him that the timber barons of Wisconsin were killing the last great grey wolves of the Upper Midwest, and that if a young man with a rifle and a clear conscience wanted to make a contribution to the natural order, there was no better place to do it.

Robert's conscience was not clear. It was, in fact, something of a mess. But his aim was true, and that had to count for something.

He found the edge of the forest around noon, where the trees thinned to a line of aspen and birch and the ground opened into a meadow choked with goldenrod. He was setting up his camera — he had brought it for the photographs, the photographs that would prove to his uncle that he had done something meaningful with his autumn leave — when he heard a voice.

"You're aiming at nothing."

Robert turned. Standing at the edge of the meadow, with one boot on the grass and one on the forest floor, was a woman. She was perhaps twenty-six, tall and lean in a way that suggested she had spent her life doing things that required physical effort: climbing, hauling, wrestling. Her hair was brown and tied back in a knot that was losing the argument with gravity. She wore trousers and a thick wool sweater and a expression that was neither friendly nor hostile but assessing, as though she were calculating his weight in terms of something she understood.

"I was not aiming," Robert said.

"Then why hold the rifle like you're about to?"

"I was thinking about what it would feel like to shoot."

She walked closer, and he saw that her eyes were the colour of the meadow grass in autumn: yellow-green, complicated, not simple. "What would it feel like?" she asked.

"Good, I suppose. It's what people expect."

"People expect a lot of things. Most of them are wrong." She extended one hand. "I'm Catherine Whitfield."

"Robert Calloway."

"I know. Everyone in Wisconsin knows the Calloways. You're the one who wrote that article in the Atlantic about shell shock."

"I didn't think anyone outside Chicago read the Atlantic."

"Everyone outside Chicago who matters reads the Atlantic. Most of them pretend not to." She considered him for a moment. "You're going into the woods to kill a wolf. Is that right?"

"My uncle says there are wolves in these woods that haven't been shot at in thirty years. He says they're the last pure ones."

"Your uncle is a colonel."

"Yes."

"Then he probably thinks the purest things in the world are the ones that obey orders without question." She turned and looked into the forest. "Wolves aren't pure, Mr. Calloway. They're complicated. They kill each other. They steal food from coyotes. They have parasites. But they don't pretend to be anything they're not."

Robert did not know what to say to this. So he said nothing, and Catherine, as though his silence were an invitation, turned and walked into the forest.

He followed her.

Catherine Whitfield ran a wildlife sanctuary on the far edge of what used to be the Chequamegon National Forest. It was not called a sanctuary so much as "Miss Whitfield's place" by the locals, and it consisted of about two hundred acres of woodland and meadow that she had purchased with the inheritance from a grandmother she barely remembered and managed with a fierce, almost violent dedication.

"I don't save animals," she told him on their second evening, sitting in her kitchen — a single room above a garage, with a woodstove and a table and four chairs and walls covered in sketches of wolf anatomy. "I save land. The animals take care of themselves if you leave them alone. Most people don't leave them alone."

"Your uncle would disagree."

"My uncle also thinks that women shouldn't vote. We disagree about many things."

She was beautiful, Robert realized, in the way that a wolf is beautiful — not in the soft, conventional sense but in the sense of an organism perfectly adapted to its environment, every feature serving a purpose. Her hands were calloused, her skin weathered by sun and wind, her movements economical and precise. There was nothing wasted about her.

And he was, he understood with a shock that was both unpleasant and exhilarating, falling in love with her.

He did not shoot any wolves that autumn. He told himself this was because the weather turned bad, or because the deer were more interesting, or because his uncle's letters, which arrived with tedious regularity, reminded him of responsibilities in Chicago. The truth was simpler and more embarrassing: every time he raised the rifle, he thought of Catherine's hands on the table, and the way her eyes lit up when she talked about wolf packs and territorial ranges and the social structure of a pack alpha. He could not shoot beside that.

The fire came in November.

It started in the northern timber, a lightning strike that the rangers missed because it was raining and the rangers were tired and it was November and everyone was tired in November. The fire moved fast, driven by a wind that had no business blowing in November, and it moved south, and it moved toward Catherine's sanctuary like a predator that had found the scent of something worth catching.

Robert was in Madison on the first evening, visiting a friend from the war. He heard about the fire on the radio in a drugstore — a brief bulletin, nothing dramatic, just words that should have meant more: "Fire spreading rapidly toward Chequamegon area. Evacuation orders in effect for —"

He ran. The bus driver, the same one who had looked at him with that knowing expression in October, would not pick him up, so he ran to the edge of town and then walked, and then ran again, and by the time he reached the sanctuary the sky was orange.

Catherine was not evacuating. She was in the forest.

He found her on a ridge above the sanctuary, standing with her arms at her sides, watching the fire come. The smoke was thick enough that the sun was a red disc behind it, and the heat was already making the air shimmer.

"Catherine!" he shouted. "You have to leave!"

"I can't."

"What do you mean you can't —"

"The pack. There's a pack of eight — no, nine, I've been tracking them for two years, there's a ninth one, a sub-adult male — they're in the valley below and they can't get out fast enough and if I leave them —"

"They're wolves, Catherine! They'll find their own way!"

"Not this fire. Not this fast. Not with the river burned out and the creek beds dry." She turned to him, and her face was streaked with soot and her eyes were bright with something that was not quite madness but was close to it. "You came to kill a wolf, Robert. Now you get to decide what a wolf is."

He could have left her. He should have left her. He should have turned around and walked back to Madison and gotten on a train and gone to Chicago and gone back to his uncle's house and gone back to being the man he had been before he came to Wisconsin with a rifle and a conscience that needed something to do.

Instead, he went down into the valley.

The pack was there, nine grey shapes huddled in a rocky hollow beneath a stand of burned pine, watching the fire with the ancient, wordless intelligence that wolves possess. They did not flee. They knew, better than either of them did, that there was nowhere to go. The fire was a wall.

Robert picked up the smallest of them — the sub-adult male, ribs showing, one leg bearing a old wound that had not healed cleanly — and ran. The heat was unbearable. The smoke was blinding. He ran until his lungs burned and his eyes streamed and his feet were blistered inside his shoes, and he carried the wolf like a child, and behind him the forest screamed in a way that he would hear for the rest of his life.

They reached the river at dawn. The water was low and warm with ash, but it was water, and the wolf fell into it and drank and staggered out and stood, shaking, on the far bank, and Catherine was there and she put her hands on Robert's face and he did not know whether he was crying or whether it was just the smoke.

They stood together on the riverbank and watched the sanctuary burn. Two hundred acres of forest, two years of work, gone in one night. The pack scattered into the unburned timber on the far side of the valley, and Robert counted them as they went: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight.

The ninth stayed behind.

Not because it was wounded — though it was. Not because it was weak — it was not. It stayed because the fire had taken everything it knew, and the new world on the other side of the river was alien and terrifying, and sometimes the bravest thing an animal can do is sit down beside something that is familiar and wait.

Robert sat down beside it. He put his hand on its head — rough fur, warm skin, the pulse of a heartbeat that was faster than his own — and he thought about his uncle's letters and his rifle and the Atlantic article and everything he had believed about pure things and obedience and the natural order, and he understood, with a clarity that was almost painful, that none of it meant anything.

The wolf let him pet it for a long time. Then it stood up, shook itself, and walked toward the river. Robert stood up too. He did not pick it up this time. He walked beside it, and together they crossed the shallow water and joined the others on the far bank.

Three years later, the Chequamegon Wildlife Sanctuary was re-established on fifty acres of unburned land that Catherine had purchased with money from a Boston benefactor who had read a story about the fire in the Milwaukee Journal. Robert was there from the beginning. He had quit his job in Chicago, sold his father's watch, and bought a one-way bus ticket to Wisconsin with forty dollars in his pocket.

He still carried a rifle sometimes — not for hunting, but for protection. Bears came through in the spring, and on one occasion a man with a bottle and a grudge. But most days he did not carry it at all. He walked the perimeter with Catherine, counting wolves, planting trees, building fences, doing the small, unglamorous work of rebuilding a world that had been destroyed by forces larger than either of them.

On the anniversary of the fire, they stood on the riverbank and watched the sun set over the new forest — young saplings, staked and protected, reaching up toward the sky with a determination that Robert found, after all these years, almost unbearable to witness.

Catherine was silent. Robert put his hand in hers. Her fingers were rough and warm and real.

"You know," she said quietly, "the pack is back to nine."

"I know."

"A new female joined them last spring. They have a full pack again."

"I know."

"Sometimes I wonder if the wolf that stayed behind — the one you sat with on the riverbank — made it across."

Robert looked at the river. The water was moving, as it always moved, toward something he could not see. "I think," he said, "it didn't matter."

She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

Somewhere in the young forest, a wolf howled. It was not a lonely sound. It was the sound of a pack calling to each other across the darkening meadow, and the response came from the other side, and then from the other side of that, and the sound moved through the trees like a wave, and the world — the broken, rebuilt, imperfect, beautiful world — went on.

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