Sister Wolf (2 page)

The Deyms had lived in one place for nine centuries. Until 1920, not one acre of their land had been sold. The Royal Stud was pastured on Deym fields. Flocks of mouflon sheep stood the crags of the limestone foothills. Boar occupied the forests of oak, living on acorns. Deym skies still harbored the windhover, and the rare red-footed falcon. Deyms were lovers of animals, domestic or untamed. Count Lajos, who shared a birthday with Louis XV, kept a private menagerie, paying the highest sums for specimens of the cat family, snow and hunting leopards from Tibet and western India, a white tiger netted in Persia, and the broad-tailed Chinese manul. The first keeper of the cats, according to the story, was a serf whom Lajos had won in a border war. One morning Lajos saw him take a whip to the panther. He ordered the serf to be slaughtered like a fattened steer, and fed the cuts from his body to the panther and his mate. The Austro-Hungarian emperor, a follower of Voltaire, had enacted a law that gave the right of trial to serfs; but on his own lands Lajos was above the laws of the empire.

By royal decree, the Deyms were the custodians of the left hand of St. Stephen, bearing all its rings, encased in a gold hand-reliquary and displayed, behind bars, in the family chapel. To gain sanction for their whims or their ambitions, the Deyms had appealed to no one but their king. Now Marit, the last of their line, stood in the Niles Grange Hall petitioning a group that she did not recognize as her equals. Her plan for establishing a wildlife sanctuary on her property was not a venal whim like another of her ancestors’ request for exemption from the grain tithe; it was her life’s work, her vocation, and her fate.

Marit had begun her speech by reviewing the list of animals that had inhabited the Berkshires only fifty years earlier, species that had been killed down to numbers that she counted off on her fingers. As she spoke, she stuttered over her notes, dropping a card or two, the cards for the lynx and the black bear, by no accident. In order to stifle alarm, she grew as sugary as she dared, pleading at length for the smaller, winsome animals—the snowshoe hare, the beaver, the silver fox. She described her negotiations with the Department of the Interior, and held up the papers, in a stiff green binder, that were her license to make her land into a private refuge for disappearing wildlife. She read a letter from Dr. Bouris, chairman of the Council of Massachusetts Colleges, praising her efforts on behalf of zoological research. She droned the letter, so that the notion of carnivores in the neighborhood should be as soporific as a bedtime tale, even to chicken farmers. Marit used other tactics: the worried diffident little frown she had worn throughout the speech; her hands that trembled and knocked over the water glass, that gripped the podium, ostentatiously, to keep from shaking. Between her purpose and these lumpish humans who might obstruct it, she raised an opaque scrim of personality, the image of a person who is desperately shy and whose nightmare is any form of public speaking. She could see her strategy working. They were transfixed, each one, by her nervousness, and barely followed the meaning of her words, the way a theatre audience is hypnotized by an understudy who may miss an entrance, drop a cue, or trip on his sword.

The people of Niles were filing back out into the foggy night. Marit had pressed the last broadside into the last hand, and thanked the last good soul for braving the elements. She wanted to leave the hall in order, so she set about straightening chairs, collecting ashtrays, and turning off lights. The light-switches were all on one board, in the anteroom. She dimmed out the entire hall, except for the stage lights, then threw the wrong switch, and the lobby went dark instead. As she flicked back the lights, she heard a low cough. She yelped, and wheeled around toward the noise. Sheriff Stoeber stood facing her, hat in hand. By his little smile she knew that her squeal had given him the advantage.

“We may have to appeal, Miss Deym,” he said, pulling a sad face. “The Interior never asked the county about that license.”

“You have the right, Sheriff Stoeber,” she answered, and hugged the green binder. She was so startled that she had forgotten to call him “Mister.”

Marit pulled a chair over to the turret window. The Dangerfield van was two hours late and she was tired of standing. The Sheriff had not come back, but the patrol car would pass her house in forty minutes. She shifted in the chair, which had a broken back and a wobbly leg.

The Sheriff was not her only adversary. She had as much to fear from Commander Enos, the chairman of the board of the Meyerling Community for the Unsighted, which bordered Marit’s estate on its eastern flank. Commander Enos had God on his side. He had been an officer in the Salvation Army, and kept the title after his retirement. The Commander was tall and gray, with seven strands of hair. His limbs and parts were so attenuated that he seemed to float. His bones did not join and lock, as in mortal vertebrates; the Divine Will held his skeleton inside his skin, instead of joints. His arms seemed to be the normal length for his unusual height, but outstretched, their span was as startling as a condor’s wings. Marit was a trustee of the Meyerling Community, and she dreaded functions where she might have to shake his hand: the Donors’ and Patrons’ cocktail party; the graduation exercises; the opening of the bakery, where the blind inmates displayed lopsided loaves and misshapen cookies. After meeting him for the first time, she had drawn her hand away and found her black glove coated with pallid scales. The Commander’s skin flaked and peeled, unlubricated by animal juices; his flesh seemed to be effecting its own disembodiment. Marit called him the Holy Eunuch.

The Holy Eunuch regarded his trusteeship as a sacred mission. He proclaimed that the afflicted were made more nearly in God’s image than the whole and sound, and that the care of the maimed and defective must be an act of faith, as it was in some primitive or ancient tribes where the citizens worked only for their priests, to keep them in marble palaces and linen robes and fed on rare foods. Addressing the board of trustees, the Commander would hold up both hands, thin fingers splayed, narrow fingertips as transparent as the fingertips of virgins and nuns, and implore Heaven, or some crack on the boardroom ceiling, if he, if any of them, were worthy of serving the blind.

Bishop Meyerling had left the Community an endowment so rich that it would need no supplement until the year 2000. Yet money flooded in, unsolicited, from children’s allowances, widows’ mites, overstocked trust funds, and guilty profits, even though Meyerling was a private school and nearly all of its pupils came from wealthy families. For the few teaching positions that opened up each year, so many applications were received that extra staff had to be hired to answer and process them. Nothing attracts financial support like a little child. In South America every female beggar walks her rounds with a baby, drugged to look sickly. When poliomyelitis was epidemic, an adult victim would not have made good poster art. The unsighted of the Meyerling Community, who inspired such generous giving, were all children, as young as five and as old as nineteen. These tender gobbets roamed loose and unguarded, learning to function without a dog or cane. If they wandered onto the Deym preserve by accident, they could not see a bear or lynx, and might be stunned or gouged by the threatened animal, perhaps to death. These children of night and pathos endangered Marit’s animals. When he learned of her plans, Enos would arm the villagers with guns and torches, and march on Marit as if she were Frankenstein and the woods were alive with her created monsters. It was fortunate that the Commander did not live at Meyerling. He spent his summers at a clinic in Austria, taking injections of a serum made from the organs of sheep, which were thought to reverse the hardening of body tissues.

A horn blared as if it were stuck. Joe Miller brought the Dangerfield van in, honking like a G.I. jeep entering Paris on V-E Day. Marit made it down three flights of stairs in record time.

“Cut it out, Joe! I told you no horn and no lights!”

“You did,” said Joe, jumping down from the driver’s seat, “but I got to thinking what a kick if people knew what I had in here.”

“I’m going to do worse than kick you,” said Marit. She was fond of Joe, with his freckled, tufted head. He was the first keeper at the model zoo in Dangerfield, fifty miles over the New York border. Joe had calculated how many animals her thousand-acre refuge could support, and worked out the ratio of deer to the larger predators. He knew about the balance of nature, and the difference between summer and winter territories. He had taught her to stock the sanctuary with rabbits, mice, and moles, and to let swarms of bees loose, which would pollinate fruit-bearing trees and bushes, and make honey treats for the black bears.

“Climb right back in,” said Marit, heading for the passenger’s side. “We take the next dirt road up on the left. We’ll let them out when we’re inside the gate.”

“No, I will,” said Joe. “They know me.”

Once they were off the asphalt and bumping down the newly cut dirt road, Marit remembered the anxiety of waiting.

“You took your own goddamned time getting here.” She turned to look at him. “What accounts for the hip boots?”

“The jaguar,” said Joe. “We saved the baby, anyhow. There was a lot of blood.”

Hawthorn trees grew thick by the road. Their thorny branches arched over the road, clattering on the top of the van like a drumroll. The bright headlamps probed far down the tunnel of trees and across the field, and lit up a high steel gate rigged with a megaphone, which could broadcast an alarm that sounded like a fire siren.

Marit got out to unlock the gate, dismantling the alarm with another, smaller key. Joe ordered her to stay behind, and to close the gate once he got through. He handed her a long aluminum flashlight.

“Shine it on the back end of the van,” he called. “I have one too, but I need more light.”

Marit trained the beam. The van was lined up parallel to the gate. She saw Joe press down, very carefully, on the handle of the right-hand panel of the door, then pull the door back suddenly and spring quickly into position behind it. Marit’s flashlight made a circle of light on the ground underneath the open end. Nothing happened for the space of many seconds.

Then, one after another, in a recurring arc, like trained divers, five wolves jumped into the pool of light, moving, when they landed, to the edge of the pool, into shadow. They jumped in order of their precedence in the pack. Big Swan, the father, and Lakona, the pregnant mother. George, the lame uncle, his coat matted with a yellow salve. The two young wolves, a male and a female, born in the zoo eleven months before.

In the Dangerfield Zoo, the wolves had lived in a fine cage, in a spacious lair made out of rock, like a cave. They had climbed on stone ledges, graded in size, which descended from the cave down to a gully in front of the spectators’ railing. Down the ledges ran a thin stream of water, which provided drink and kept the cage clean. In the Northwest Territories, trailing caribou and elk, the wolves used to travel fifty miles in a day. Their narrow flanks were built for speed. In full cry, they have been clocked at thirty-five miles per hour. In their cage in Dangerfield they huddled like immigrants in a refugee camp who may wait many years for acceptance in their new country. Swan grew fat, and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. Old George developed mange scabs, which no medicine had cured. From boredom, not adjustment to captivity, Swan and Lakona had mated and bred two live wolf pups. For a while the pups were taken away from Lakona. She had been grooming them compulsively, licking and nipping until there were raw spots on their skin. The wolves slept most of the day, although visitors tried to tease them into action. Young girls would cling to their boyfriends’ arms, begging them not to get close to the cage, while the brave swains bayed and barked at the indolent animals.

One day Marit had walked, on an impulse, into the office of Harrison Feitler, the zoo’s director, who had encouraged her to make her land into a wildlife refuge, and had offered her the zoo’s resources to help her start it. Feitler had just put down the telephone. The wolves in their atrophy haunted him. He was trying to work out an exchange with Basel, the cageless zoo, but Basel was more interested in the white Siberian wolf than in the North American gray wolf. Forthwith and outright, Feitler had given his wolves to Marit, warning her only of their hostility to the lynx.

Now, as she watched them in the beam of her flashlight, shivering and uncertain, she knew how far their wildness had been compromised. Was she a stouter guardian than the iron bars of their cage? She had rescued them from humiliation, but she could not guarantee their safety. She had put up a fence, but the fence might be too low, or the lock too easy. The zoo had a squad of keepers; she was the only warden of her preserve. In order to protect the wolves, she must harbor them in secret. She had already lied to the Wildlife Registrar by omitting any mention of them in the list of animals that her land would shelter.

Marit was used to keeping secrets. She guarded herself closely, since she did not like people well enough to give them any rope to hang her. Wolves are the most important northern predator upon the larger mammals; people are the only predators of wolves. In the zoo the wolves were prisoners; behind bars they could be mistaken for big lazy dogs. Roaming unlicensed on her estate, they would be outlaws. They already had a legendary criminal record. Every right-thinking person knew that wolves attacked homesteads, ravaged herds, relished a child as much as a calf, cheated the hunter out of his yearly kill, loomed against the moonlight with red eyes and rabid jaws. They looked the part, with their deep chests and tapering skulls, and evil self-sharpening flesh teeth. The power of their bite was supernormal; they could leap on the rump of a bull moose and tear to a depth of four inches through the finely packed hair and hide. In fact, they were shy and private; they mated for life and stayed in a jealous family circle. They were as frail as Marit—even frailer, for they pulled hatred the way magnets pull metal filings.