The Wolf Border

For Fiona

Susiraja
(Finnish) – Literally ‘wolf border': the boundary between the capital region and the rest of the country. The name suggests everything outside the border is wilderness.

O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,

Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

Henry IV
, Part II

It's not often she dreams about them. During the day they are elusive, keeping to the tall grass of the Reservation, disappearing from the den site. They are fleet or lazy, moving through their own tawny colourscape and sleeping under logs – missable either way. Their vanishing acts have been perfected. At night they come back. The cameras pick them up, red-eyed, muzzles darkened, returning from a hunt. Or she hears them howling along the buffer zone, a long harmonic. One leading, then many. At night there is no need to imagine, no need to dream. They reign outside the mind.

Now there is snow over Chief Joseph, an early fall. The pines are bending tolerantly; the rivers see white. In backcountry cabins venison stocks and pipes are beginning to freeze. Millionaires' ranches lie empty: their thermostats set, their gates locked. The roads are open but there are few visitors. The summer conferences and powwows are long over. Only the casinos do business with tourists, with stag parties and addict crones, in neon reparation. Soon the pack will be gone, too – north, after the caribou – the centre will close for winter, and she is flying home to England. Her first visit in six years. The last ended badly, with an argument, a family riven. She is being called upon to entertain a rich man's whimsy, a man who owns almost a fifth of her home county. And her mother is dying. Neither duty is urgent; both
players will wait, with varying degrees of patience. Meanwhile, snow. The Chief Joseph wolves are scenting hoof prints, making forays from the den. The pups have grown big and ready, any day now they will start their journey. The tribal councils are meeting in Lapwai to discuss scholarships, road maintenance, the governor's hunting quota, and protection of the pack. The Hernandez comet is low and dull in the east, above survivalist compounds.

The night before Rachel leaves Idaho, she does dream of them, and of Binny. Binny is sitting on a wooden bench in the old wildlife park outside the bird huts, wearing a long leather coat and smoking a rolled cigarette. She has dark, short hair under a green cloche hat. It is Rachel's birthday. This is her birthday wish – a day at Setterah Keep: the ruined Victorian menagerie in the woods of the Lowther Valley. They have walked round the boar enclosures, the otters, the peacocks, to the owls. Binny likes the eagle owl. She likes its biased ears, the fixed orange tunnels of its eyes. She sits quietly and smokes, watches the bird beating its clipped wings and preening. She is all bone and breasts under her coat: a body better out of clothes, a body made to ruin men. Not yet pregnant with Rachel's brother. Her green nylon trousers tingle with static when Rachel leans against them. The stocky, haunched bird prowls across the pen towards its feed, gullets a mouse whole, up to the tail. Rachel hates owls. They are like fat brushes – a ridiculous shape for a thing. They sweep and swivel their heads and have sharp picky beaks. When she goes inside the hut to see the lunar white one, the darkness hurts her head. The bird shed stinks of lime and feathers and must. Back outside, she sits on the bench with Binny and kicks the ground.
Are you bored, my girl
? Binny says.
You wanted to come. Go and see the
otters again. You can take some ice cream
. Binny likes freedom. She likes the man in the sweet kiosk. He makes her laugh by asking if they are sisters. She holds his eye.
Off you go, my girl
, she says, lighting another cigarette.
Be brave
.

Rachel walks to the otter pool, unwraps the mint choc chip and licks the gritty dome. The pool has a green-stained moat that moves like a river. The otters paddle round it on their backs, eating fish heads. Their fur snugs the water. They chitter to each other. Under the ice cream is a malty cone. She goes into the snake house, where there are bright insects clinging in glass tanks. The snakes move slower than forever.

Binny is still talking at the kiosk, leaning in. Rachel is allowed to go quite far – she knows all the ways around the village where she lives, the lonnings, the drove-tracks over the moors. She walks past the netted parrots squawking at each other, past the gift shop and toilets, over a bridge over a stream, to a burnt creosoted gate, on which there is a sign, made of red writing. She can't read it because she's not yet in school. Through the gate and into the trees. The trees smell of mint too. Wooded pathways with arrows pointing, corridors of shadows either side.
Be brave
. It is very quiet. Brown needles stream between trunks, and her steps make tiny silky squeaks. Fork to the right. Fork to the left. Into the dark, filtering green. At the bottom of the cone there's a chocolate stub. Once that's gone she's more aware of where she is.

Here. Beside a fence built tall and seriously, up into the trees. The wire is thick and heavy, knotted into diamond-shaped holes. Pinned to it is another sign. Maybe it's the end of the park. What is on the other side?
Hello?
She reaches up and takes hold of the wire. She slots the tips of her shoes through and lifts herself off the ground. Beyond are bushes and worn earth. A bundle of
something pinkish, with bits of ragged hair and buzzing flies. She leans back, bends her knees, sways and rattles the metal. Emptiness beyond. Flickering leaves.
Hello?

It comes between the bushes, as if bidden. It comes forward, mercilessly, towards her, paws lifting, fast, but not running. A word she will soon learn:
lope
. It is perfectly made: long legs, sheer chest, dressed for coldness in wraps of grey fur. It comes close to the wire and stands looking at her, eyes level, pure yellow gaze. Long nose, the black tip twitching, short mane. A dog before dogs were invented. The god of all dogs. It is a creature so fine, she can hardly comprehend it. But it recognises her. It has seen and smelled animals like her for two million years. It stands looking. Yellow eyes, black-ringed. Its thoughts nameless. She holds the fence but the fence has almost disappeared; she is hanging in the air, suspended like a soft offering. Any minute it will be upon her.

In sleep, Rachel has stopped breathing. Snow is falling on the cabin roof, through acres of blackness; the computer in the office is winking slowly, storing emails and data; elk season is open. The Chief Joseph den has been abandoned and the pack is moving single file through the Bitterroot terrain, winter nomads. Her British passport is in her jacket pocket and her mother, no longer hale or able, is dying, a long way away.
Go on, my girl
. In the dream, the wolf stands looking at her. Yellow-eyed and sheer. A mystic from the Reservation once asked her to describe the feeling of communion seeing a wolf that first time. What did her heart feel? There was money in it for him he'd hoped – she had only just arrived, maybe she would buy one of his sachets of fur, a leather charm, a tooth.
I don't believe what you believe
, she'd said.

How does it feel? Pre-erotic fear. The heart beneath her chest
jumps, smells bloody. She unclutches the wire and steps to the ground. Its head lowers: eyes level again, keen as gold, sorrowless. Then it releases its extraordinary jaw. Inside is a lustre of sharpness, white crescents, ridges, black pleated lips. A long, spooling tongue. In her brain an evolutionary signal fires. What a mouth like that means. She steps back, turns and walks carefully along the fence, her hands clenched. The wolf crosses paws, folds round, and walks parallel behind the wire. A blur of long grey, head tilted towards her, one eye watching. She stops walking, and it stops. She turns slowly and walks the other way. It crosses paws, turns, and follows. An echo, a mirror. She stops.
What are you doing
? Its ears prick up, twitch forward. She begins to run along the wire, over the slippery forest floor, needles and branches. She is fast. But it is there, running at her side, exact, switching direction when she does, almost before she does, running back the other way. It turns as she turns, runs as she runs. She runs hard through the Setterah woods, along the fence, and it runs with her. Through the trees. To the very corner of the cage, where she stops, breathing hard, and it stops and stands looking at her.
What are you doing?
she says.

But already she knows. The layers of sleep are falling away. The radio alarm is blaring, KIYE station, a rock song from the eighties. Her shoulder is cold outside the heavy covers. Her brain is restarting. That creature of the outer darkness – of geographic success, myth and horror, hunted with every age's weapon, stone axe, spear, sprung-steel trap, and semi-automatic – was playing.

5 a.m., Mountain Time. Kyle will drive her to the airport before daylight to catch the hopper to Spokane. She lies under the blankets and listens to snow dispatching softly from the roof and the
branches. Setterah Keep: a lost world. She had loved going there for birthdays as a child. Until, in 1981, the Licensing Act brought an end to many of the parks and it closed down. Even a century before, they must have known the enclosures were too small, pens, dementing places. After coffee and a shower, when she is properly awake, she phones Binny and reminds her what time she will be arriving.
Yes, Thursday. Yes, by dinnertime, if the traffic isn't bad
. Then, unusually, she tells her mother about the dream.
No
, Binny says.
No. That wasn't a dream. There were wolves in the park for a while. Don't you remember? You kids used to torment them. One of them got out, created havoc
.

*

The Earl is not at home when Rachel arrives at Pennington Hall. She was warned by his secretary that he is unreliable, that he keeps only some of his appointments. The prerogative of wealth and eccentricity. The drive from London has taken eight hours: congestion around the airport and the north orbital, an accident south of Kendal, all lanes halted until the air ambulance could set down on the carriageway to collect the shattered motorcyclist. As ever, the county's interior routes move sluggishly: compact dry-stone lanes and dawdling sightseers. A landslide on one of the mountain passes has resulted in road closure, so she must turn back at the barrier and take the longer lakeside road into the western valleys. The fells rise, carrying dead bracken on their slopes the colour of rust. Granite juts through, below gathering cloud. She sets the wipers to intermittent, but the rain is either too heavy or too fine; the rubber blades screech or the screen blurs. The GPS recalculates, asks her to turn round, go back the way she has come. She
switches it off and buys a map from a village shop. This is not a part of the district she knows – her home village is on the other side of the mountains.

She is extremely tired by the time she reaches the gate into the estate, nauseous with jetlag and service station coffee. But she's alert enough to notice the beauty of the place – September's russet fading in the trees, wet, glistening light on the hills – and to note that the lake would be a good territorial boundary, were this still wilderness. It has not been wilderness since the primeval forest was felled. The gate into the estate is an elaborate wrought-iron affair, bearing a coat of arms. She pulls up next to the intercom, lowers the window, and inhales. Moorland, peat, ferns, water and whatever the water touches: the myrrh of autumn. She's become used to spruce and sagebrush, the rancid vegetable smell of the paper mill downriver from the Reservation. Cumbria's signature aroma is immediately recognisable: upland pheromones.

She reaches out to press the button, but the gate opens silently. She is being watched on the CCTV. The drive is long and newly gravelled, oak-lined. She passes a tree so old and obese with bark that its lower branches are sagging almost to the ground. Wooden struts have been built underneath to prop them up. Beside the drive a handful of roe deer graze. They raise their heads as she drives by and do not move. In the rain, the red-stone manor looks patched and bloody. Ivy is growing shaggily up the facade, but for a building of its size and age it is far from dereliction. The crenellations are intact; the windows expensively replaced. Thomas Pennington has not suffered hard times, death duties, or insurmountable taxes, it would seem. The building is clearly not a casualty of democratic change like so many of the countryside's aristocratic behemoths. Perhaps the garden and house are
open to the public, or a lucrative tearoom is hidden somewhere behind the maze, bulbs and plant cuttings for sale, wedding hire, the usual schemes. Or perhaps the Earl's business portfolio has been skilfully updated and he has accounts offshore. Rachel parks at the side of the tower, next to a little blue MG and a utility van, gets out, and stretches. The air is damp and cool. Rooks clamour in the nearby trees. The mountains behind could have been built for aesthetic purposes – it is an incredibly beautiful view.

The main door of the hall is a dense medieval affair, shot through with bolts: siege-proof. On either side sit two stone lions, lichen mottling their manes. It seems wrong to use such an entrance, but there is no other way, no tradesman's signpost. She pushes the bell and a ferrous donging sounds within. A woman answers: middle-aged, plump inside her navy suit. She is auburn-haired, unadorned by jewellery or cosmetics, with winter-rose skin. Extremely English-looking; from an England seventy years gone. She would suit a rabble of hounds at her feet, Rachel thinks, a shotgun crooked over her elbow – the complete incarnation has probably at some stage existed. The woman introduces herself as Honor Clark, the Earl's secretary. Rachel shakes her hand.

Really sorry I'm late. The flight was delayed. Snow in Spokane. We were sitting on the runway too long – they had to re-spray the plane. I almost missed the connection. Then the drive up . . . I hope he hasn't been waiting long.

The apology is irrelevant.
He
isn't here.

I don't know where he is at the moment, Honor Clark tells her. The Land Rover's gone, which doesn't bode well, but it does mean he's on the estate. I'm leaving in an hour. Do you want to come in?

Rachel checks her watch.

Ah. Yes, OK. Thank you.

She follows the woman across the threshold, into a large, temperate reception hall, then down a corridor hung with portraits of stags, Heaton Coopers, and a few tasteful abstracts. She is shown into a vast drawing room containing an elaborate suite of furniture, a Bauhaus chair, glassware cabinets, bookcases, and an immense stone fireplace. The grate is un-laid but the room is warm, free of medieval draughts. The secretary holds her hands up as if fending something away.