We caught up with the rest of our family, and an overly friendly docent waved us into the visitors center. Siobhan immediately set to work on being hyper. She jumped up and down in an imitation of Tigger on a sugar high, and the movement made her ribboned pigtails bounce like mattress springs. Our mother, who had little in the way of patience, told her to stop about twenty times. When the docent launched into a boring speech about the history and mission of the preserve, I crept up from behind, took one of Siobhan’s honey-colored curls into my hand, and tugged.
“Hey, you,” I whispered. I hoped my sister would smile or squeal the way she always did when I got too close. She didn’t. Instead my father warned, “Drew!” and I slunk off to the far side of the room, where my stomach growled and hot beads of resentment welled up inside my chest.
Cruising the back wall like a lowrider, I stared at the wildlife photography hanging above me. There was a bobcat. Birds of prey. A family of raccoons. A big-eared thing I thought was a rat until I read the sign informing me it was a fennec fox. Then I came to the wolves. Such ugly beasts. All scary eyes and open mouths and lolling tongues. What was so cool about them? Sure, I’d absorbed their gothic draw from books I read. Movies I watched. Wolves were meant to be fearsome, wild, the darkness untamed. I’d met the lone wolf. The big bad wolf. The wolf at the door. I’d cried wolf, wolfed down my food, and thrown others to the wolves when at all possible.
I stared harder.
The longer I stood there, the more their predatory gaze felt familiar, chillingly so.
I thought of the look in Soren’s eyes before I hit him. My father’s words on empathy.
My head swam.
What was I? Hunter or hunted?
My stomach growled again.
When the talk ended, we got to tour the property. The animals kept here couldn’t be returned to the wild for some reason or another. As I stepped down into the preserve, the first thing I noticed was the stench. Everything everywhere smelled strongly of animal waste. A wooden placard told us that the first enclosure we came upon housed a herd of miniature goats and a donkey. Siobhan waggled her fingers and stuffed blades of grass through the fence into the waiting mouth of a speckled kid.
I wandered off on my own. Kept going until my family was out of sight. I passed the little fox and the raptors until I reached the wolf habitat. The animals all lounged in the dirt, lazy. Staring at them, I felt disappointed, romance swallowed up by reality. They weren’t even big. More like exotic dogs. I remembered the guide telling us the current pack consisted of a young male, his mate, and an older female whose mate died over the summer. That made me sad. Wolves mated forever, he’d said, so that meant the older wolf would be alone until she died. I wondered if she knew. I thought I understood how she might feel.
I turned and kept walking.
Above me, the sun struggled to break through the thick cover of tree branches and I shivered in my unlined jacket. With a twist of my head, I caught a faint view of the surrounding mountain range and the wide swath of river chewing through the land below. My heart pounded from the quiet beauty. I wanted it to take me. I wanted it to fill me up, this cool flush of green and brown forest sanctuary.
Heading deeper and deeper into the West Virginia woods, I realized I was not alone. The older wolf had followed me, pushing through the underbrush not three feet from the path where I walked. I swiveled to look at her. Amber eyes bored straight into mine. Her ears flattened. She was a ratty beast, with patches of thinning fur and protruding bones.
Her presence pleased me, but I couldn’t have said why. Maybe she was drawn to our joint loneliness. I walked to a cutout in the cyclone fencing meant for cameras and fished one of Pilot’s dog treats from my pocket. Then I thrust my hand through the chain-link barrier.
“Come here, girl,” I crooned. I made a kissing sound with my lips.
The wolf took one step forward, then squatted to pee in the soil. She didn’t take her eyes off me. A dozen more steps and we stood facing each other, separated by mere inches. Her coat was a dull swirl of brown, silver, and white. I wanted desperately to touch her and reached out farther with the hand that held the small piece of liver. It happened in an instant. She whirled and slashed with her sharp teeth and I flinched, dropping the treat in the process. The wolf snapped it up, then vanished. My cheeks burned. I pulled my arm back and glanced around.
No one else had seen a thing.