Second Nature (2 page)

That was the sound the trappers had heard on the last day of December, when the snow was ten feet deep and deer stuck in the drifts and froze solid. There, at the edge of northern Michigan, much of the land had never been charted and trees were so dense they blocked out the sun. Beneath the ice, streams were filled with green water. Bears in these mountains grew to seven feet, and their hides were so thick a whole hive of bees couldn’t sting them. It was dark as night on winter afternoons; trappers had to carry flashlights and leave lanterns hung on their snowmobiles in order to find their way back. Most of these men never poached enough to get caught by the rangers, and anyone looking for them would have had a difficult time. In the spring, moss appeared overnight and covered any footprints completely by morning. In winter, no one but a maniac or an experienced hunter would venture into the forest. For those men who didn’t fear the woods, there was little chance of legal action against them. Trapping was, after all, a criminal act without a witness. There was no one to hear a shotgun fired, or the peculiar cry made by a fox when a piece of cyanide-laced lamb takes effect.

The men who found him were an uncle and nephew who had worked the forest for more than ten years and who were not nearly as greedy or cruel as some of their neighbors. They worked in silence, not with poisoned meat but with steel traps, and they were always particularly careful to stay together, even when it made sense to split up, since they had seen, several times, huge paw prints, three times as big as a dog’s. In these mountains all sorts of things were said on winter nights, some to be believed, some not. A man they knew, over in Cromley, had a wolf-skin rug on his living room floor, head and all. He told everyone he’d shot the wolf, a male of more than a hundred and ten pounds, head-on, but his wife had let it slip that he’d simply found it the spring before, dead of natural causes, preserved all winter long by the cold. Wolves were rare, even this far north; you could probably count on your fingers the ones that had come down from Canada and stayed.

Still, their tenuous presence made for good talk and real fear. An old trapper who hadn’t been caught once in sixty years of making a living liked to scare some of the boys who were just starting out by swearing that it was possible for some wolves to become human. He’d seen it himself on a night when there was an orange hunter’s moon. A wolf was crouching down with the pack one minute and standing on two feet like a man the next. That happened with old trappers sometimes—they had killed more animals than they could number and, now that they were senior citizens who couldn’t eat anything but oatmeal, they suddenly started to have some kind of funny regret that mixed them up so badly they didn’t even notice people were laughing at them.

The uncle and his nephew didn’t listen to stories and they didn’t take foolish chances. As far as they were concerned, they weren’t breaking the law so much as taking care of their families. They were interested in deer for the meat, foxes, and raccoons for their skins, but they got much more than that on the last day of December. This was the season when the sky turned black at four-thirty and the cold made breathing painful and sharp. They were inspecting the traps they had left out the day before when they heard the howling. Normally they would have backtracked, but they had worked all day with nothing to show and still had one trap left to check. As they walked forward, it wasn’t the cold that made them shiver, and their brand-new parkas from Sears couldn’t help them one bit. The nephew’s teeth were hitting against each other so hard he thought he’d chip the enamel right off them.

It was hard to tell from the howling exactly how many wolves there were until they saw them. What sounded like a dozen turned out to be three, up above, on the ridgetop. All three were silver, brothers by the look of them. They seemed to be waiting for the uncle and his nephew, because as soon as they saw the men, the wolves stopped their racket. Yet they stayed where they were, unprotected up there on the ridge. When the uncle saw a pool of blood, he thought the wolves were after a deer or a fisher caught in the last trap, and he figured it might be best just to let them have it. The temperature had begun to drop and the sun would soon be going down. The uncle would have turned back then if his nephew hadn’t grabbed his arm.

The last steel trap was a good one; kept oiled and cleaned, it would last another fifty years. When they heard the whimpering sound, they assumed they were simply suffering from the cold. Hallucinations occurred in severe weather; they sprang up from the ground fully formed. Jack Flannagan insisted he’d been visited by his dead mother one day in the woods, when the temperature was ten below zero. A friend of the nephew’s would not hunt after dark, convinced that a deer he had shot one snowy day had cried real tears, just like a baby. So the wailing they heard might have been caused by twilight and ice. The notion of going home began to feel about right, even necessary. Then they saw the thing in the trap, struggling and bleeding, its foot partially crushed, and they might have shot it then, to put it out of its misery, if they hadn’t realized, all at once, that the struggling thing had the shape of a man.

The wolves took up their howling again, while the uncle labored to open the trap. The nephew fired his gun in the air, even though he knew it was bad luck to shoot at wolves, and they took off, across the ridge and through the pine trees. It took almost two hours to get the poor creature out of the trap and carry him back to the snowmobiles. A trail of red blood burned through the snow. The drifts were now much higher, so that a mile seemed to go on endlessly. The nephew wondered aloud whether they’d be charged with murder if their unintended victim should die. He was already unconscious and his skin had turned blue. How had it been possible, the nephew asked his uncle, for him to have survived through the winter, wearing only skins on his body and wrapped around his feet? Why had they never seen him before, when they knew every man for a hundred miles around?

The uncle didn’t bother to answer, he was too busy tying the limp body onto the snowmobile with thick brown rope. Clouds were moving in fast, threatening more snow. They had to get to the rangers’ station, where a helicopter ran an airlift to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Cromley. The uncle’s breathing was ragged. He knew for a fact that the trap had shattered the left foot; bone jutted through the skin. As the uncle was positioning the head onto a blanket he realized how young their victim was, younger than his nephew. Once he looked at the pale face, with its high cheekbones and knots of dark hair, he couldn’t look away, even though he had removed his gloves to lash the rope to the snowmobile and his fingers were freezing. If he’d seen anything like this face before, it was in the chapel at St. Joseph’s, where he’d waited while his wife was being operated on for something wrong inside her stomach a few years back. To the right of the pews, in a dark alcove, there had been a statue made of white wood with a countenance so calm it had made him weep.

He pulled his gloves back on and started his snowmobile. In less than three hours, work would begin in the only operating room in St. Joseph’s as an orthopedic surgeon repaired the bones the steel trap had shattered. Two weeks later, the patient would be flown to Kelvin Medical Center on East Eighty-sixth Street in New York, a hospital that dealt exclusively with victims of traumatic stress. There he would stay, in a locked room, for the next few months, while some of the best doctors in the city tried to ascertain what they were dealing with. But the uncle knew what they had right then and there. It didn’t matter what people said on winter nights this year or the year after or the one after that. It didn’t matter what people believed. The uncle knew exactly what it was they were dealing with, on this night and forever after. They had caught themselves a wolf.

 
 
 
Robin Moore was stopped for speeding every time she drove through town. It made no difference whether she was going thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, or if teenagers in Trans Ams were revving their engines and passing her by. She could tell when it was going to happen, she’d get a funny taste in her mouth, as if she’d eaten a lemon or a spoonful of salt, and then she’d hear the siren. Robin always pulled over to the side of the road calmly, then rolled down her window and waited. “Is there a problem, Officer?” she’d say in a voice so sweet you’d never guess at the depth of her bitterness or imagine that she knew every local policeman by name. She’d had coffee with their wives, and invited everyone over to the house for barbecues; she’d fixed onion dip and guacamole on nights when the men had sat in her kitchen playing poker.

The problem was that she was divorcing Roy, and either he thought it was amusing to have his buddies stop her for minor infractions—an inspection sticker overdue, a broken left tail-light, the alleged speeding—or he believed this harassment would make her realize she needed him. Either way, Robin’s glove compartment was now chock-full of tickets, none of which she’d paid. She had fallen for Roy when she was sixteen, the same age their son, Connor, was now: a dangerous and stupid year when boys jumped into fast cars without thinking twice and girls drank themselves silly down at the beach near Poorman’s Point and sometimes did enough damage to last a lifetime.

She couldn’t keep away from Roy back then. The more trouble he got into, the more her family despaired, the more she had to have him. His father, Neil, had worked for Robin’s grandfather and drawn up the sketches for the arboretum when the land was nothing more than cattails and scrub pine. In Nassau County, Roy’s father was known as the Doctor, since he could cure almost any tree, whether it was a dying elm or a willow hit by lightning. Roy had started coming around with the Doctor during the summer Robin turned sixteen, although it was clear he didn’t give a damn for willows and elms. He started throwing rocks at the patio whenever she was out reading in the hammock. He began to wait for her outside the kitchen door, near the rosemary and the Russian sage. He kissed her for the first time beneath the arbor where the wisteria bloomed. Not long after this kiss, and hundreds more like it, Robin’s grandfather made his declaration that under no circumstances could she marry Roy, which pretty much sealed her fate.

And now, although they had a legal separation, Roy was somehow convinced they were still together, even after their final fight, a nasty display of distrust on the corner of Delaney. That night Robin went home and dragged all of Roy’s clothes out to the driveway, and when he got home and saw his clothes flung across the concrete, he must have known where they were heading. Yet almost a year later he continued to appear at the house unexpectedly. He was there, he said, to check Connor’s homework—somethmg he’d never done when he lived with them—or to make certain the hot water heater wasn’t on the fritz. Once, he had arrived on a Saturday night and had done everything possible to try to get her into bed. He came up behind her and whispered, the way he used to:
Just this one time, one little fuck, come on, baby.
She thought he was kidding until he shoved his hand into her pants, and she had to push him away. The next day he’d come back, sheepish and polite, with a peace offering: a truckful of manure, which he said the Doctor had asked him to deliver, highly unlikely, since Robin had just seen her father-in-law that morning and he hadn’t mentioned a word about cow shit.

When Robin was starting out, the Doctor never viewed her as competition; surely there were enough gardens on the island for them both. He sent her customers and called nurseries out on the East End to get her a discount. He taught her to hang jars of beer from fruit trees so that wasps could drink themselves to death, and to circle herb gardens with a ring of salt, which slugs wouldn’t dare to cross.

It was true that Robin spent too long with each client, poring over books, plotting out designs for perennial beds in watercolor and ink, but that wasn’t the reason her business was ailing. Lately, everything she touched seemed to die. Robin attributed this to the anger she had carried around all winter, ever since her breakup with Roy. If she pruned a rose-bush in the morning, by midafternoon the canes would begin to wither; by evening they would turn black. Just last night, she’d discovered that every bulb in the pot of forced tulips on her dining room table had decayed only minutes after she’d torn off some of the yellowing leaves. All week there had been good weather for gardens, with a light rain turning the cold earth squishy and warm—perfect conditions to begin spring cleanup for her regular clients—but Robin didn’t bother to return any of their calls. Whatever bad luck she was having might seep through the old leather gloves she wore when she cut back brambles and raked mulch off the season’s first lilies-of-the-valley.

This stretch of sour fortune wasn’t the reason she was driv ing in to see her brother, although it now seemed as if just getting out of town would take all day. Already she had been pulled over twice, once near the King Kullen supermarket by that moron Woody Preston, who grinned as he wrote out a speeding ticket—four miles over the limit—and the second time only a mile from the bridge, where George Tenney at least had the decency to look embarrassed as he wrote out the ticket for failing to signal when she changed lanes. Robin had tossed the ticket into the overflowing glove compartment right in front of him.

“You’re going to have to start paying those,” George said of her growing collection.

“I don’t think so,” Robin said. She hadn’t bothered to dress up and was wearing her rain slicker, a pair of jeans, a khaki-colored sweater, old green boots. She had small callused hands and beneath each fingernail was a line of dirt that seemed never to wash away, not even if she sat in the bath for hours and used her good soap from Italy.

“You could give Roy another chance,” George suggested. He was a large, soft man who loved poker and almost went nuts when his own wife left him. For months afterward, Roy brought him home for dinner on Tuesday nights, and George ate steadily and slowly, asking for the peas or the rolls in a wounded voice.