第16章 What the Wolves Know

The wolves came into the valley in the last week of February, and she heard them before she saw them, in the way she heard everything now, not with her ears but with her body. It was the howl that told her, of course, because a wolf howl carries in cold air for a distance a person cannot credit until they have been alone with one, and this one came down the valley from the north in the middle of the night and entered the cabin through the logs and stood in the room with her, and she sat up in the bunk with the hatch of her heart going and understood, with pure animal gladness, that she was not the only thing alive in the valley anymore. She had spent four months as the only heartbeat for thirty kilometers, and the sound of the pack was not frightening; it was company, and the joy of it came up through her chest before the fear had a chance. She saw them three days later from the bank above the lake. Six of them, grey and white and one black, moving out across the ice in a loose file, and she lay flat in the snow above the shore with the binoculars she had salvaged from the aircraft and watched the most beautiful and most terrible thing she had ever seen in her life. They were hunting the willow flats at the south end of the lake, where a moose had been wintering, and she knew it was a moose because she had seen the browse lines and the beds in the snow the way she now saw everything, by what it left behind. The wolves did not run the moose down the way a person imagines. They did it on their feet, in the open, patient and slow, and they did it in a shape, the file becoming a fan, the fan becoming a ring, and the moose in the middle of the ring, and the moose was not a calf and not a yearling but a grown animal with a body that could carry six hundred kilos of meat and antlers flat to its back for the winter, and it stood and it faced them and it turned and faced them, and for a long time nothing happened and nothing happened and the snow blew. And then one wolf went in and the moose turned and kicked and missed, and another wolf was behind it, and it was over faster than she could follow and slower than she could bear, and afterwards the six wolves stood around a thing on the snow that had not been a thing an hour before, and the valley, which she had come to think of as hers, took the death without a word. She watched them feed and she did not leave and she was not ashamed. She was a woman who had eaten five hundred grams of meat in the last three days and there was two hundred kilos of it down there on the lake, and a long time ago, in a different life, she would have called the thought that came into her head a crime, and now she called it arithmetic and let it stand. She would not have taken it while the pack was on it. A person who tries to drive wolves off a kill is a person who has decided to be food. But wolves leave a kill and wolves return to a kill and wolves have been known to be driven off a kill by a larger pack, and she was a larger pack of one, and if she was patient, and if she was careful, and if she came in the middle of the day when the light was high and the pack was lying up, there would be meat on that flat that the wolves could spare. She waited two days. On the third morning she went down to the lake with the sled and the hatchet and the knife, and she approached the kill on the ice from upwind so that the pack would know she was coming and could decide, and the pack was not there, and the moose was, and half of it was gone and the rest was frozen and the ravens were working the edges, and she took what a person takes when a person is careful: the roasts off the hindquarter and a haunch, and the fat along the spine, which was the true treasure, and the liver, which had fed a wolf two days ago and would feed her for four, and she was gone within the hour, and the ravens went back to work, and nothing followed her home. The meat changed the winter. It changed the arithmetic and it changed her body and it changed her mind, which had been eating itself for a month. She boiled the moose in the tin pot with the crowberries and rendered the fat and drank the broth with the grease on it and slept the sleep of a woman who is fed, and for the first time since January she woke up warm. She would think later, when she had the language for it again, that the wolves had given her the last third of her winter, and that she owed them, and that there is no way to owe a wolf, and that this is what wildness is. The strange thing, the thing she wrote down and could not account for, was the boundary. She found it while tracking the pack up the north side, because she had begun to read them the way she read weather, and a pack is a moving lesson in a landscape if a person has the patience to take notes. Their trail ran the length of the valley and along the bench and around the lake and it did not, ever, once, go up onto the upper bench of the north slope, the high ground above the Ordway claim where the snow lay deep and undisturbed. Six wolves, hunting a country with too little game, and a slope full of hare sign and old browse lines, and that slope was a hole in the middle of their map. She followed their tracks to the edge of it and found where they turned, all six, over two days of travel, and the turns were not the turns of animals that had found nothing; they were the turns of animals that had found something and declined it. She found a scat at the boundary, fresh, wolf, deposited on a stone set up on a stub of deadwood like a marker, which is what wolves do at the edge of their range, and beyond the marker the slope went on, white and untracked and utterly still. She stood at the wolf's marker in the blue light of the afternoon and looked up the long white slope toward the ridge, and she thought about the fire ring on the far bench and the stick with the notch cut in its top and the two fish on the board and the mitten on the nail, and she thought about a thing that had been in this valley long enough to have its own economy, and she said to the empty slope, quietly, with her breath standing in the air, "What are you." The slope did not answer, and she did not expect it to, and a part of her that she did not like had begun to suspect that it would answer one day, and that when it did she would wish it had not. The wolf came to the cache on the last night of the month. She was outside after dark, banking the stove, because the nights had begun to soften toward the equinox and there was a thing in the air that reminded her, very faintly, of water running. She had the hatchet in her belt and the mitten on her left hand and she turned from the door and the wolf was standing at the cache poles, ten meters off, looking at her. It was the thin one, the one that ran at the back of the file. In the starlight it was grey with frost and its ribs stood out and its eyes were yellow and it did not snarl and it did not lower its head and it looked at her the way a person looks at a person, level and unafraid, and she looked back at it and did not move to the hatchet and did not move at all, and for a while the two of them were just two hunters standing in the same cold, each of them knowing the other could take the meat and choosing, for reasons of their own, not to take it yet. Then the wolf turned and walked off into the spruce, unhurried, not looking back, and she heard it go a long way and stop, and after a while it howled, once, from high up on the north slope, from the edge of the ground that the pack did not enter, and the howl was answered by five voices from the flats below and by none from the slope itself, and Haldis stood by her door until the cold drove her in. ---