Summer of the Wolves (13 page)

The new larger pen was about the size of four living rooms and had shade, rocks, and room to run. They'd put a child's wading pool in one corner, the kind with a pull drain in the bottom. Just outside the fence was a hose with a trigger nozzle. Rocks surrounded the wading pool.

They could just come up here and find us, Nika decided. She sat down cross-legged inside the pen, leaned against the trunk of a large white pine, and waited.

 

Khan's straight-up ears rotated like satellite receivers. His hearing was definitely online. Nika turned to look toward the path. Ian led the way, walking stiffly, hands fisted in his pockets. Striding behind him was a redheaded woman with a long braid down her back. She was dressed like Ian, all khaki and boots. She decided this must be Elinor. There was a catlike grace about her that reminded Nika of the way Olivia moved. Olivia, whose favorite thing was modern dance. A young man and a young woman followed behind them, grinning like kids happy to be asked along on an adventure. She'd hardly noticed them at lunch, she'd been so eager to get out the door. The young man was tall and loose-jointed and held his head at an angle as if he were waiting for the answer to a question. The young woman was solid, not fat, but looked rooted to the earth by her sturdiness. She had a bush of dark brown curls escaping from a baseball cap that said, “Earth Is Home.” Nika had to admit that they both looked okay.

Nika stayed braced against the tree. Khan ran and stood beside her, his eyes on the newcomers. They entered, and Ian closed the gate. Then he bent down and called, “Here, Khan-boy, here, pup.” Khan twisted his small black body and ran to him, his tail circling, his head low. He rolled in front of Ian and got a proper belly rub. Standing, the pup cast uncertain glances toward the three who squatted down against the fence. Then, he ran a circle toward the others and returned to energetically cover Ian's face and ears with toothy licks. Elinor called Khan's name. Before long he walked over to investigate, sniffing one person at a time. He licked Elinor's face, then poked behind her for the bowl of meatball treats. She held one out to him. He stretched his body, took a meatball, dropped it, then raced across the enclosure to Nika again.
Hah!
Nika thought. So much for the fancy research assistant and her meatballs.

But Elinor didn't give up. She crooned, “Here, Khan, come here, boy, good boy, here, pup. Here, Khan-boy.” She held out her hand again. Khan made a second approach. This time he gently slid the meatball from her hand, then took a few steps away before gulping it down. Elinor smiled and laughed. “What a cautious little wolf you are.” Reminding the two volunteers to let Khan approach them, she handed the bowl of meatballs to the young man. Soon Khan had taken treats from everyone until he'd had enough and went off to watch them from his new rock throne.

Ian got up from where he had been sitting and walked over to Nika. For a moment he just looked at her, his brows pushed together in a question. She stood.

“So how did it go, coming up here?” he asked.

She tried to decide if he was mad or not. It was hard to tell. He wasn't smiling, though. “Oh, perfect.” She brushed off her jeans. “He came right along with me. He was great.”

“Well, good, and at his age, following is natural.” Ian folded his arms over his chest. “But just be sure two people are on a shift when he's transferred back and forth from now on. Use a leash. Carrying still works. We wouldn't want to lose him after all of our hard work.”

So it was shifts now, like at a fast food place. But she knew Khan would stay with her. She wouldn't lose him, ever. Besides, they were on an island. “Yeah, okay,” she said, watching the volunteers admire Khan as he dragged the chunk of deer hide around the pen.

 

The next morning Nika awoke in the screen porch as she heard Ian getting ready in the kitchen. She peeked at the clock they'd hung high on the wall. Five-thirty a.m. She shut her eyes again. Ian whispered goodbye to her, and then the sounds of his footsteps drummed across the living room.

Khan was still asleep under the stuffed bear. After she knew Ian was gone, Nika got up and went into the kitchen. A note was taped to the counter:
Y
OU KNOW THE DRILL WITH THE PUP
. B
E SURE TO VISIT
R
ANDALL
.T
ELL
P
EARL WHERE YOU ARE GOING
. S
TART TYPING THE PUP HOMEWORK PROJECT ON THE COMPUTER
. T
AKE CARE MOVING THE PUP TO THE HILL PEN
. I
MADE A SCHEDULE FOR VOLUNTEERS, 2 PEOPLE AT A TIME, 8 HOURS ON
. E
LINOR HAS 4 MORE VOLUNTEERS FROM THE COLLEGE
. H
AVE FUN
. S
EE YOU SOON
. I
AN.

Not exactly a warm and fuzzy note. But studying the details and the neatly written schedule posted on the kitchen cabinet, Nika realized that volunteers were lined up for the evenings and Elinor was only coming every other day. On the opposite days, Nika and Pearl would be completely in charge. That started Nika thinking about an outing she'd begun to dream about. Something that maybe now she could really do.

 

The silvery-tan wolf ate, but it was never enough. Emptiness kept her moving. Always before with the woman, and then the man, food had come to her. Now her instincts sharpened and she hunted mice and voles. Stiff-legged, the wolf pounced at small fish in the shallows.

Two days after Ian left for St. Paul, Nika decided that today was the day to take Khan for a run on the Big Island. The night before she imagined how it would be, like Julie and Amaroq in
Julie of the Wolves.
The way Ian talked, the pup would never be able to live like a wild wolf. But she wanted Khan to smell and feel the spaces and freedom of the forest.

After a restless night, Nika took Khan from the porch to the hill pen and gave him his meat mixture. Then she came back down to find Pearl. Pearl had said that she was fine with Nika spending today alone with Khan, but still Nika was nervous about her plan. Two new volunteers were lined up to stay tonight with the pup, and she didn't know exactly what time they were coming. She would have to be home before anyone found her and Khan Missing in Action.

After stuffing a cheese sandwich and an orange for herself and meatballs for Khan into her backpack, Nika called, “Pearl!” She found Pearl in her studio off the living room.

She was painting. Pearl had always illustrated her husband's books and articles. Now that he was gone, she still painted northern plants and flowers, animals and trees. Pearl looked up. “Everything okay out there?” She smiled and put down her brush.

Nika walked closer. A half-done painting of a moose up to his knees in a pond stood on the easel.

“I love your painting. It's so watery. But real, too.”

“Some rainy day I'll teach you,” said Pearl. “So what are your plans for today?”

Nika tried to line up her words. She wanted to tell the truth, just not
all
of it. “Well, I thought I would take food and some books for my project and just spend the rest of the day with Khan. I'll be back for dinner.” She shifted her loaded backpack to her other shoulder.

“Fine, dear. I'll come up around suppertime, and we can bring Khan down together. Those young volunteers are coming.”

“Yeah, I know. Have a nice day. 'Bye!” Nika went through the coolness of the house and out through the screen porch and up the path.

Her stomach felt jittery as she approached the gate. Khan greeted her with his whirling dance, licking and jumping. When he settled down, she opened the gate again and said, “Come, Khan-boy, come, puppy pup, come now . . .” and she trotted to a path that went directly down to the sand spit from the old cabin site. As though Khan did this every day, he trotted along with her, stopping to sniff now and then. He stayed close to her as they approached the sand spit and the inlet. He drank from the lake and started to chase a minnow, so she scooped him up and carried him quickly across the sand spit up to where the woods path split from the main trail. She didn't want to spend much time visible on the beach. Up the woods path about fifty feet, she put the squirming pup down.

Then she jogged slowly along the trail, calling to the pup now and then. He stayed with her the whole way. When she stopped at a small shady clearing above the beach cove, Khan lay down in the shade, panting. “This will be our rendezvous spot, like wild pups have,” she told him.

Her heart pounded, and she took deep breaths. She couldn't believe what she had done. The pup had followed her. And he liked it. She felt something well up inside, strength, a wildness, a new sense of being alive. A sense of freedom, like none of the hard things in her past could reach her now. She imagined being with Khan on this spot ten thousand years ago, before airplanes and California, before cabins and books and accidents. She might have been dressed in animal skins. They would have smelled the smells and heard the birds call in a steady rhythmic music of trills and twitters and whistles. They would have hunted side by side and slept in skin tents and helped the family.

 

The day went by quickly. The weather was perfect, not hot, not cold. Even the insects that had been so bad earlier in the summer were less irritating. Squadrons of blue and neon-green dragonflies stitched through the air like tiny silent helicopters, gobbling mosquitoes and black flies. The wind in the trees was like soft breathing.

Khan was teething and found sticks to chew on and drag around. They played in the shallow water of the sand beach. While Khan dug holes, Nika dug out her journal. Then they both fell asleep in the quiet of the afternoon. After waking, Khan came over to her and rolled at her side, letting his feet flop in the air. Even though he was relaxed, his nose twitched and his eyes darted as the ripple of a red squirrel's tail vanished in the leaves above them. Nika rubbed his belly. His guard hairs had begun growing in, making him inky black with tiny sprinkles of gray. His woolly undercoat still showed in dirt-colored patches. She took one of his paws in her hands and massaged the rough pads.

“Good boy, Khan. Good little wolf,” she said. The forest breathing with bird song and small breezes felt like home, like what she needed. This place. And Khan. She didn't know why, but here nothing else mattered and she felt peace fold over her like a blanket.

And for no reason she could think of, Nika started to cry.

Khan cocked his head and perked his ears forward as though he was trying to understand this new thing she was doing. Which just made her cry some more.

When she stopped crying, she laughed. She remembered that Meg had called it “raining on the inside” and said it was good for her. Odd, but she had never cried much right after her mom's accident. She'd been numb, like when she cut her hand once on a broken glass in the dishpan. The cut was so deep, it didn't even hurt until after the stitches. The doctor had called it shock. She had felt numb like that after her mom's accident, when she and Randall had been taken to their empty house to pack some things. The first few nights they'd stayed at Olivia's—she kept wanting to go home. She had felt numb all through the nightmare of the funeral, when people talked about her and Randall, offered them food, and looked incredibly sad. She had felt numb when they were taken to the first foster home, where kids fought all the time. She'd felt numb in the second, where it had taken them over an hour on the bus to get to their old school. Then the last one before Meg's. Life became a blur of repacking bags and strange-smelling rooms. Finally they had gone to Meg's, and Nika had started to feel whole again.

Like now. She took in a deep breath and filled her lungs with pine-fresh air.

 

When the sun was no longer overhead but slanted through the trees in bands, Nika took out the food she'd brought. Khan gingerly ate his meatballs and dragged the hide over to a bed of pine needles. She finished her sandwich and packed the bag again. When Khan was relieving himself, she grabbed his hide and started to jog for home. If they were going to do this regularly, she'd have to create a routine. The game of “keep up” seemed to work. This time he didn't even stop on the sand spit but raced up the hill, sailed through the open gate of the enclosure, and splashed into his pool, where he drank and waded, then lowered in the water to drink again. She'd done it. She'd made her own decision, and everything had turned out fine.

Nika didn't like keeping her run with Khan secret, but when she met Pearl late that afternoon to bring Khan down together, she knew there was no other way. Ian hadn't wanted her even to take Khan up the path to the pen without a leash. If she told Pearl what she'd done, she might never be able to do it again. Maybe after a while she would explain how well it was working, how the pup had stayed right with her, and everyone would understand.