Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (33 page)

Roman laughed. “Maybe not. Maybe not. But it keeps me professional too.”

Fitzgerald shook his head, then moved into a lengthy explanation of the combined techniques he was using to change the wolves’ behavior. “If we nudge their learning curve just a bit, we can establish stable populations outside of the zoos.”

“You’re quixotic. They range too widely. Too much of their diet is big game, and they won’t stick to park lands and green belts. Even if people will leave them alone—there’s no guarantee of that—they won’t flourish on limited range.”

“But they have to. That’s all there is to it. They have to!” Fitzgerald’s face darkened in abrupt vehemence, and he looked down to his hands resting in his lap. “Wolves are part of what’s best about being human.”

Abashed, Roman didn’t know how to respond. They hadn’t known each other long, and the mercurial switch in moods startled him. Finally, he reached out and touched Fitzgerald’s wrist. “It’s all right. I’ll help . . . do what I can.”

Fitzgerald screwed up his face tightly for a second as some complicated emotion wrestled behind it, but then he relaxed and smiled wanly. “Promise?”

Roman nodded.

Later, after Fitzgerald cheered up, he said, “Do you want to see the animals in the wild? I mean, really see them?”

They walked through the long access tunnel that emptied onto a screened observation platform hundreds of yards into the reservation. Fitzgerald held a finger to his lips as they neared the exit, and they crept the last few yards until they were in the open.

Here, the island screened much of the wind, and the rustle of pine filled the night gently, like a steady background of rain in the distance. An almost full moon behind hazy clouds cast a delicate light on the hills around them, the sand glowed albino bright between clumps of salt-grass. Roman started to speak, but Fitzgerald pressed a hand to Roman’s shoulder and shook his head. “They’re just upwind,” he mouthed without sound.

They were only twenty yards away. Dark movement against the sand. It took a moment for Roman to pick out the details in the soft light, the long legs, lean chests, ears up, alert and relaxed. Posture revealed all. He identified the dominant alpha as it stalked through the pack: larger, a lighter gray than the rest with an almost black chest. Lesser males dropped their heads, turned away slightly, tails down, ears dropped. A whole grammar of rank and position in their stance. Roman held his breath. It was his first time this close to wolves outside of a zoo. All of his studies had been on wolves in captivity, on the other side of the glass. Here, nothing separated them but a thin camouflaged netting and a couple of good bounds through the night air.

Suddenly, they all looked toward the platform, their eyes picking up the filmy glint of moon. Roman froze. Fitzgerald’s hand tightened on his shoulder. The tableau remained still for long, long seconds until the alpha trotted to the top of the hill and the rest followed him. The others flowed out of sight, but the big wolf, silhouetted against the horizon’s clouds, gazed back at the netting as if examining the men inside, and, after the evaluation, dismissing them. He followed the pack.

“I’m going with them,” whispered Fitzgerald. He rolled onto his back, stripped off his shirt, unbuckled his pants and removed them and his shoes before Roman could say anything. To Roman’s astonished look he said, “You haven’t done a thing until you’ve run naked with the wolves.”

He raised the bottom of the netting, slipped out and loped up the hill. Roman rose from his crouch until his head brushed the top of the blind. The hazy clouds broke, and the moon light brightened Fitzgerald’s path. For a moment, he paused at the hill’s top looking back, a disturbing vision of white marble poised on the brink. Roman caught himself fingering the top button of his coat.

Later, and for many nights after, Roman dreamed of Fitzgerald standing on the edge of the unknown, half twisted around, beckoning. Sometimes, in the dreams, Roman joined him on the hill, and he’d wake up panting, scared so deeply that once he wept. He didn’t accompany Fitzgerald on a night trip to the reservation again although he was often invited.

Roman stowed a sandwich, a bottle of water and binoculars in a day pack. He considered leaving a note for Sharon, but decided that would be melodramatic. Besides, he thought, with the ferry coming soon, she’d probably never see it.

In the tunnel, green light panels every thirty feet cut the long walk into moments of sickly, pale illumination that turned his skin to weak lime, interspaced by green instances of near total darkness. It was like walking through the endless interior of a many segmented worm.

At the exit, he passed by the case with the tranquilizer guns without taking one.

But the top of every low hill revealed nothing. He swept the landscape through the binoculars, peeking under the trees, studying each rounded back of rock for sign of the missing animals. He found fresh scat and broke it open with the toe of his boot. It was filled with grass. He thought, are they ill? After an hour of crisscrossing the south end of the island and visiting an abandoned den, he hiked to the eastern beach and headed north. Rough gravel crunched on each step. He was below the hills now, and couldn’t see farther inland than the sandy crests only a few feet away, but he figured that here, at least, nothing would smell him, and he could poke his head above the dunes every once in a while to scout the land.

The night they learned the grant would not be renewed, and at the end of the current study period the wolves would be returned to their zoos, they met in the communications hut, where Sharon broke out two bottles of scotch from her bags and proposed a party. After they were all a couple of drinks down, she said, “Damned Philistines think original research is an oxymoron,” then she turned up the music and twirled into the middle of the room to dance by herself. Her blonde hair swirled around her face like a nimbus. She danced with her eyes closed, not really moving to the music, but to some unshared rhythm of her own.

Roman took a long pull out of the bottle, and the heat flowed from mouth to gut in an unbroken line. He was deep into a melancholy, and he pictured the end of the wolves. For decades now their numbers had declined. There were probably too few of them left for a viable genetic pool. The bottle felt cool against his chest; he hugged it close. He pictured the wolves as he’d seen them that night with Fitzgerald, and the dozens of trips that he’d made on his own, and he saw them as a symbol. Wolves were primordial in man’s imagination, he thought. They had stalked cottages deep in primitive European woods, long before the great cities arose and every square mile was tilled and touched and owned. How families must have trembled when the wind rose and the wolves howled. Nothing between them and the savagery of the forest but their prayers and their homes’ thin walls. The fairy tale of the wolf at the door, huffing and puffing and blowing houses down had meaning. Little Red Riding Hood had reason to be frightened, and in real life, no hunter could bring the little girl and her grandmother back alive from the stomach of the beast. There must have been a time, he thought, there must have been a time when it looked as if the forest might win. The wolves would take back what was theirs, and the broken down walls would melt back into the forest floor.

Sharon turned slowly round and round in the middle of the floor. Music filled the hut, and Fitzgerald threw a towel over the desk lamp that gave the only light in the room so that Sharon spun wraith-like in the shadows. After a while, Fitzgerald rose, and they both danced in the darkness of the communications hut.

Drunk, Roman only half watched their body language until he realized that he was seeing all the signals of a mating ritual. Sharon moved slowly, hands open and head back, her throat exposed, and she rolled her head around, kept her heavy lidded eyes half open as she swayed to the music. Her tongue touched her lip, and every turn his way she slowed, holding his eyes for a second before moving away again, every lean a tease and retreat. Her dance said, come and get me, I’m running until you catch me. She was dancing to Roman.

Scotch thrummed like a bass chord in his throat and forehead, and he wished he could write it all down. Of all his time studying gesture, posture and behavior, he’d never felt as if he understood it so well. Sharon might as well be talking to him. He could see it in the tension in her arms, the curl of her fingers, the bend of her knees. She was asking him to dance, in all its metaphorical ways, and he found it interesting. An academic exercise. He felt no urge to stand or to join her, but it fascinated him like a good book, like a successful experiment.

In the concentration of the moment, Roman realized he hadn’t paid attention to Fitzgerald, so solemnly Roman shifted his gaze. He almost giggled; his head felt heavy, and changing his point of view was a ponderous undertaking until he saw Fitzgerald dancing a few feet to Sharon’s side. More of the light fell on him; his face was less shadowed. He too danced as if he heard other music than the tune that poured out of the speakers. A bottle in one hand, Fitzgerald advanced and retreated within a self-imposed box, never moving beyond it, but his dance said he recognized the boundary, and to Roman, Fitzgerald suddenly looked noble and tragic.

A part of Roman recognized his own drunkeness, but even drunk, a little part of him watched from afar, commenting on the moment, and right now the little part said that he was reading too much into what he saw. However, Fitzgerald sliding back and forth on the floor, drinking to hold back the misery of the lost wolves touched him, and he wanted to hold the man. All of Fitzgerald’s theories were to be taken away when the wolves left. They’d never again get a chance like this to study the wolves. Fitzgerald would never again get a chance to reintroduce the wolves to the rural landscapes where they might survive if he could just change their eons old behavior patterns a little bit.

Fitzgerald danced, and his eyes met Roman’s. For a second, Roman felt a cold connection, as if he were reading Fitzgerald’s mind, but the feeling passed, and Fitzgerald was just dancing. Roman watched Fitzgerald gathering himself in movement, speaking volumes of himself and betraying himself as he danced.

And then a little barrier snapped in Roman’s mind. Fitzgerald’s dance was a mating one too. His shoulders rocked back and forth on the fulcrum of Roman’s face. His head wove side to side, always returning his gaze to Roman’s gaze. Fitzgerald’s lips were parted, and Roman could see the glistening tips of the teeth behind them, and when he looked into Fitzgerald’s uncharacteristically shy eyes he could see that Fitzgerald knew what Roman knew. The dance was for him. The invitation was for him. Roman, the dance said, will you move with me in the night?

Shaking, Roman rose; the bottle slid off his chest and shattered on the floor. He could feel the disgust forming on his face. The message he sent wasn’t just a refusal; it was revulsion and fear. Without thinking, he rushed to the door and out of the hut. A hundred feet up the trail, the wind punishing his face with salt spray, and the waves growling on the beach below the cliff, Roman fell to his knees and retched. It all surged out, all that good liquor, and as he coughed against the muscles’ iron hold on his gut, he heard a howl behind him that rent the air. But not a wolf. The howl came from the hut, and it was pained and sick and betrayed.

After hiking for thirty minutes, trudging up the loose sand dunes every few minutes to survey inland, Roman rested on a weathered limb of driftwood at the high-tide line. At the water’s edge dozens of tiny crabs worried chunks of flesh off a decomposing fish. Roman watched while sipping from the water bottle. The ocean reflected the color of the sky, a sullen gray, and beyond the island’s shelter, the wind sheared the tops of waves into white froth. Here, though, the breeze was just a gentle but cold push.

Finding the wolves didn’t really matter, despite what he’d said to Sharon. The grant was dead; the research was over, and no one in ecological management really believed wolves could be introduced back into the wild. Only Fitzgerald had believed it, and for a bit he felt he’d found an ally in Roman, a kindred spirit. All that was left was to discover if there was some kind of change in the wolves. Roman wasn’t worried about research now; he didn’t even think he could get a decent paper out of it, but maybe he could make retribution. Whatever remained of Fitzgerald remained in the wolves.

He couldn’t say goodbye to Fitzgerald, but he could face the judgement of the pack.

He took Fitzgerald’s note out of his pocket. The edges were frayed from continuous handling; he’d read it a hundred times. It said,
Dear Roman, A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf whether it knows it or not. The myth can be told different ways. Maybe the wolf wore the sheep skin to fit in. Maybe the wolf was raised by sheep and didn’t know differently. But don’t be fooled. Wolves are villains in so many of the stories because sheep wrote them. A single wolf truth vanishes in the din of the flock. But that doesn’t mean the wolf has to like it. Yours, Fitzgerald.

Rocks skittered against each other, and Roman looked up. Standing thirty yards away, a single wolf faced him, its ears up, its tail up, tongue lolling out lazily. Light gray, black chest: the alpha male. Water dripped from its head; its belly fur hung in a matted line, and water dripped steadily onto the gravel. Roman thought, it’s been swimming. Wolves don’t swim in the sea!

The wolf stood still for a minute, then lowered its head and the ears pointed forward. Roman scrunched backward on the wood. This was an attack posture. Legs bent, staying low, the wolf stepped toward him stiffly. Suddenly, it charged forward, cutting the distance in two. Roman didn’t move. He closed his eyes and waited for the teeth to take him. And he waited, but nothing happened. He opened his eyes. The wolf had stopped, its front legs lying straight on the ground, its rump in the air, tale wagging, flipping water left and right. It squeaked, a high-pitched cross between a bark and a whine. Then it dashed twenty feet away from him, up the beach, stopped, looked back and charged to the same position.