Pack of Dorks (16 page)

The sanctuary owners—Marcia and Adam Able—were much more talkative than Aunt Shelley. We could hear them talking to each other from the moment we walked in, Marcia in high-pitched happy laughs and Adam in endless speech. Marcia laughed with her head thrown back, her short black hair shining in the fluorescent lighting. Adam’s pale bald head shone nearly as much. Both of them wore hunter green polo shirts with the outline of the howling wolf I saw on the pamphlet over their breast pocket. Marcia was strong, but not in a wide way like Aunt Shelley. Marcia’s muscles were long and lean, like a braided rope lay under her brown skin. Adam was tall and strong, but I didn’t notice his muscled arms right away because of the way his stomach pushed against his shirt. He had a soft blonde mustache across his upper lip. It twitched whenever Marcia laughed, which was pretty much always.

Aunt Shelley cleared her throat super loudly.

“Oh!” Marcia said brightly. “We have guests!”

They approached the two of us, hands outstretched for half-hug, half-handshake moves. They smelled a bit like wet dogs once we were up close. At first Marcia kept calling me Shelley’s “little niece” until Sam corrected her and said I was her little niece’s friend. But then when Sam called Shelley “Aunt Shelley,” I could see Marcia was entirely confused. She kept glancing over at Sam like she was trying to figure out if
he
was Shelley’s “little niece.”

Adam just went on blabbing. He told us that the sanctuary opened about ten years ago. He said he used to live in the suburbs and his neighbor’s dog kept jumping his fence and terrorizing the birds at Adam’s birdfeeder—as well as snagging anything he ever brought to the back porch to put on the grill.

“Turns out,” Adam said, “it wasn’t a dog at all. It was a wolf-dog. And a real bad neighbor.” Moustache twitch, moustache twitch.

“A wh—?” Sam started to ask, but Adam was a step ahead with the answer.

“A wolf-dog is a half-wolf, half-dog. These animals can’t make it in a domestic situation, you know, one with your mom and dad. They’ve got too much wild in them.” His moustache twitched, and I braced myself for another bad joke. This time Adam elbowed Marcia to give her the heads up one was coming. “Guess that’s why I like them so much. I’m a regular wild guy myself.” Twitch, twitch.

“Anyway, our neighbor got evicted from his apartment and somehow forgot his dog. About the same time, my folks passed and left me this land. I adopted the dog and brought him here to live like he should. Soon requests came pouring in for more help for wolves and wolf-dogs. I met Marcia, and we decided we were
able
to make a difference. Able Sanctuary. Get it?” He looked as us eagerly. We nodded. I tried hard to roll my eyes only in my mind.

“So, now we house about ten wolves. We try our best to keep their lives as wild and free as possible while also keeping them safe,” he said.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Mrs. Righter asked, “how do you afford that? I can’t imagine the costs involved.”

Marcia’s smile faltered a little. “We manage,” she said, “but it’s tough. We mostly operate on donations.”

“These animals, they get expensive. They really ‘wolf down’ the resources! Get it?” Adam said. Twitch, twitch.

I saw Mrs. Righter grab a pamphlet titled A
DOPT A
W
OLF
from a rack hanging on the wall. She slipped it into her purse.

Marcia and Adam gave us a quick tour of the center. One of the rounded walls featured two huge maps of the United States. In one, an orange blob covered most of the map like a massive Sunny-D spill. This showed where wolves once lived. The other had small little splotches along the top of Minnesota, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. In the southwest, New Mexico and Arizona had tiny drops of orange also. All of Alaska was covered. This was where wolves now lived.

“Once there were two million wolves in the wild. Now, there are less than sixty thousand left in the whole world,” Adam said as we stared at the map.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What happened? Didn’t you ever hear of the Big Bad Wolf?” Adam’s moustache was startlingly still. “That’s what happened. People were sure the wolves were out to get them, out to eat their cattle, kill their babies, decimate the deer population. People killed wolves to the brink of extinction. The government held bounty hunts where so-called hunters got money for turning in just the ears of wolves they killed. Only a few places are left where you can hear wolves and see them roam without fences and safety signs.”

“It was because the wolves wanted the same things as humans,” Marcia said. I knew what she meant. They wanted to live with their families. They wanted to hunt and to eat. They wanted to have young and grow old. They wanted to continue doing these things in the same places where humans wanted to live, eat, have babies, and grow old. And, worst of all, just like humans, they would fight to protect what they thought was theirs.

“But they were different than humans, too,” I said.

“I can relate,” Sam muttered.

“What do you say we go see some of the wolves?” Aunt Shelley said, separating the thick silence that seemed to cover us all after Sam spoke.

Chapter Thirteen

Another howl erupted as we left the building, but this one was different. It was high-pitched and somewhat happy. I know, I’m doing that thing scientists and teachers who grade papers hate where people try to give animals human emotions. But I swear, the howl was happy sounding. And a few seconds later, a bunch of other happy yips and howls joined in. Aunt Shelley didn’t say anything about it, but she had a huge smile on her face.

We loaded back into the golf cart and headed toward one of the enclosures.

“No touching the animals. No trying to put your fingers through the fence. No standing too close to the fence. Pretty much, just watch from a distance,” Aunt Shelley warned as she yanked the cart into park. “Remember, they’re wild animals.”

“Right,” I nodded. Sam put up two fingers in the Boy Scout pledge.

Aunt Shelley smiled as she tossed us two sets of binoculars from the back of the golf cart. A third set hung from a strap on her neck. She raised them up to her eyes and scanned the enclosure. “There!” she pointed.

A few yards out was a giant rock boulder. Under it was a wolf-shaped lump. Once I put on my binoculars, I could see it was a wolf with gray fur and a huge bushy tail. Bouncing around her were two pups, one black and the other splotchy brown. They jumped at each other, going down on their front legs with tails high in the air, then ramming into the adult wolf. She rolled onto her side but didn’t move away from the battling pups.

“Aww!” Mrs. Righter said a second after Sam passed his binoculars to his mom.

“How old are the pups?” Sam asked.

Aunt Shelley shrugged. “The people who dropped ’em off said about three months. They wanted wolf-dogs, until they realized how much more wolf they are than dog. Said the pups tore up the carpet in the living room, shredded the couch, and bit the baby.”

The two pups rolled over each other, sending up a little dust cloud. One yipped, scooted to his legs, and dashed toward us. The other followed. The gray wolf rolled back onto her legs and watched.

“They were going to be put down at the shelter,” Aunt Shelley said, “until Adam took them in. Had to drive across three states to get them.”

“Put down?” I asked.

“It means killed,” Sam said.

Aunt Shelley nodded. “Wolf-dogs are always killed at shelters. They don’t have a chance. And we probably wouldn’t have been able to take them if they weren’t pups.”

The gray wolf—named Luna—was also a wolf-dog. Aunt Shelley told us about half of the sanctuary’s population were actually wolf-dogs and not full wolves. She said a few years earlier, Luna’s owners drove to the sanctuary and begged Adam and Marcia to take her. She had attacked the neighbor’s dog and had to go. If the sanctuary wouldn’t take her, she’d be killed.

“Luna fit in right away and joined a pack with Antonia and Winter. They’re two of our oldest wolves.
Were
two of our oldest.” Her voice caught on “were.”

“They passed away?” Mrs. Righter asked softly.

“Yeah,” Aunt Shelley grunted. “Winter got sick. Cancer. Died about six months ago. Antonia stopped eating. Tried everything to get her to bounce back. Even Luna would drop food by her muzzle. Nothing worked. Died four months later.”

“That’s so sad,” I said.

Aunt Shelley shrugged. “Animals die. People die. That’s the way it works.” But the way she crossed her arms like she was holding herself together made me think it wasn’t the way Aunt Shelley wanted it to work. “Anyway, we thought Luna would be next. Stopped eating. Stopped playing. Just laid around. Then we got these pups. Took a chance Luna would be maternal. And she is.”

By now, Luna was up and trotting toward the pups. I guess they were getting too close to us for her liking. She circled around them and then took off running. The pups chased her, yipping and bouncing like it was the best game ever.

“That’s the thing about wolves,” Aunt Shelley added. “No matter how much they’re messed up from people or other wolves, they always take care of pups. No wolf I’ve ever met has rejected one.”

“What if there is something wrong with a pup?” I whispered.

“What could be wrong with a pup?” Aunt Shelley asked, then turned and went back to the cart. Sam bumped his shoulder gently into mine as he turned, and I knew he did it purpose.

The sad howl we had heard earlier rang out again. Once again, no other wolves joined in. Aunt Shelley stopped walking and listened.

“Let’s go meet Sascha,” she said.

We wound around more dirt paths to another fenced-in enclosure. Marcia and Adam were already there, holding walkie-talkies to their mouths and staring at the reddish brown wolf pacing a few yards in from the fence.

“Sascha,” Aunt Shelley said as if she were introducing us. At the sound of her name, the wolf stopped pacing for a moment and stared at us. Her head tilted upward slightly and her tail rose a little, too.

“She’s striking her alpha pose,” Aunt Shelley murmured. Another wide smile tugged her leathery cheeks.

“You like this wolf,” I said.

Aunt Shelley nodded. “I do.”

Marcia moved a little closer. “Shelley’s one of the few humans Sascha seems to trust. She came here a few months ago, too mean for the owner’s new wife and too skinny to be healthy. She hasn’t felt a heck of a lot of love in her life.”

“How old is she?” asked Sam, walking a bit closer to the enclosure as Sascha circled slowly toward us. Mrs. Righter grabbed the back of Sam’s T-shirt and pulled him back a few inches.

“She’s about two years old,” Marcia said. “Now that she’s closer, check out that bald patch around her neck.” I nodded as I glimpsed the bare, raw looking skin around her furry neck. “She was chained up, barely given enough length to stand, for most of the day.”

“Except when she figured out how to dig up the spike holding her,” Adam said. “Then she’d rip through the neighborhood with the chain dangling behind her, terrorizing lap dogs and demolishing trash cans.”

Marcia didn’t smile. She bit her lip hard and shook her head. “Despite getting beat every time her owners caught her, despite being trapped and starved as punishment all over again, she misses them.”