chapter ELEVEN
• GRACE •
When I first became a wolf, I didn’t know the first thing about how to survive.
When I’d first come to the pack, the things I didn’t know wildly outnumbered the things that I did: how to hunt, how to find the other wolves when I got lost, where to sleep. I couldn’t speak to the others. I didn’t understand the riot of gestures and images that they used.
I knew this, though: If I gave into fear, I’d die.
I started by learning how to find the pack. It was by accident. Alone and hungry and feeling a hollow that food wouldn’t fill regardless, I’d tipped my head back in despair and keened into the cold darkness. It was a wail more than a howl, pure and lonely. It echoed against the rocks near me.
And then, a few moments later, I heard a reply. A yipping howl that didn’t last long. Then another. It took me a few moments to realize that it was waiting for me to respond. I howled again, and then, immediately, the other wolf replied. It had not finished howling when another wolf began, and another. If their howls echoed, I couldn’t hear it; they were far away.
But far away was nothing. This body never got tired.
So I learned how to find the other wolves. It took me days to learn the mechanics of the pack. There was the large black wolf that was clearly in charge. His greatest weapon was his gaze: A sharp look would effectively send one of the other pack members to their belly. Anyone but the large gray wolf who was nearly as respected: He would merely flatten his ears back and lower his tail, only slightly deferential.
From them, I learned the language of dominance. Teeth over muzzle. Lips pulled back. Hair raised along spine.
And from the bottommost members of the pack, I learned about submission. The belly presented to the sky, the eyes directed downward, the lowering of one’s whole body to look small.
Every day, the lowest wolf, a sickly thing with a running eye, was reminded of his place. He was snapped at, pinned to the ground, forced to eat last. I thought that being the lowest would be bad, but there was something worse: being ignored.
There was a white wolf who hovered on the edge of the pack. She was invisible. She wasn’t invited into games, even by the gray-brown joker of the pack. He would even play with birds and he wouldn’t play with her. She was a non-presence during hunts, untrusted, ignored. But the pack’s treatment of her wasn’t entirely unjustified: Like me, she didn’t seem to know how to speak the language of the pack. Or perhaps I was being too kind. Really, it seemed like she didn’t care to use what she knew.
She had secrets in her eyes.
The only time I saw her interact with another wolf was when she snarled at the gray wolf and he attacked her. I thought he would kill her.
But she was strong; a scuffle through ferns ensued, and in the end the joker intervened, putting his body between the fighting wolves. He liked peace. But when the gray wolf shook himself and trotted away, the gray-brown joker turned back to the white wolf and showed his teeth, reminding her that though he’d stopped the fight, he didn’t want her near.
After that, I decided not to be like her. Even the omega wolf was treated better. There was no place for an outsider in this world. So I crept up to the black alpha wolf. I tried to remember everything I’d seen; instinct whispered the parts that I couldn’t quite remember. Ears flattened, head turned, shrunk down smaller. I licked his chin and begged for admittance to the pack. The joker was watching the exchange; I glanced at him and cracked a wolfish grin, just fast enough for him to see. I focused my thoughts and managed to send an image: me running with the pack, joining in the play, helping with the hunt.
The welcome was so boisterous and immediate that it was as if they’d been waiting for me to approach. I knew then that the white wolf was only rejected because she chose it.
My lessons began. As spring burst out around us, unfurling blossoms so sweet they smelled of rot, turning the ground soft and damp, I became the project of the pack. The gray wolf taught me how to creep up on prey, to run around and clamp down on a deer’s nose as the others swept up its flanks. The black alpha taught me to follow scent trails at the edge of our territory. The joker taught me how to bury food and mark an empty stash. They seemed to take a peculiar joy in my ignorance. Long after I’d learned the cues for play, they would prompt me with exaggerated play bows, their elbows down to the ground, tails high and waving. When, hungry to the point of distraction, I managed to catch a mouse on my own, they pranced around me and celebrated as if I’d caught a moose. When they outstripped me on hunts, they’d return with a bit of the kill, like they would for a cub; for a long time, I stayed alive because of their kindness.
When I curled on the forest floor, crying softly, my body shaking and my insides ripped to shreds by the girl that lived inside me, the wolves stood watch, protecting me, though I wasn’t sure what I needed to be protected from. We were the largest things in these woods, barring the deer, and even for them we had to run for hours.
And run we did. Our territory was vast; at first it seemed endless. But no matter how far we pursued our quarry, we circled and returned to the same stretch of woods, a long sloping stretch of ground broken by pale-barked trees. Home. Do you like it?
I would howl, at night, when we slept there. Hunger that could never be filled would well up inside me as my mind snatched at thoughts that didn’t seem to fit inside my head. My howling would set off the others, and together we’d sing and warn others of our presence and cry for any members of the pack that weren’t there.
I kept waiting for him.
I knew he wouldn’t come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images to me of what he’d looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf by the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn’t know how to begin to look.
And it was more than his eyes that haunted me. They were a doorway to other almost-memories, almost-images, almost-versions of myself that I couldn’t catch, more elusive prey than the fastest deer. I thought I would starve for want of whatever that was.
I was learning to survive as a wolf, but I hadn’t yet learned how to live as one.