It’s late and it’s dark and I’m cold, and I have no idea where I am. As far as I’m able to tell, it’s the very definition of the middle of nowhere. Despite the fact that this is northeastern Canada in early spring, with snow and ice still stubbornly covering the roads, the ridiculous car reserved for me at the airport in Ottawa doesn’t have snow tires — nor is it an all-wheel drive, so I’m also deeply and thoroughly irritated.
I half–skid, half-slide into a gas station and park, trying once more to get the vehicle’s lazy GPS system to kick in. No luck, so I grudgingly leave the warmth of the interior to go inside to ask the counter clerk for directions, explaining to her that I’m trying to find Parc Omega, where I’m going to spend a night in one of two cabins built against the edge of the wolf habitat area.
“You here to see the wolves?” she asks, curious. As I nod in affirmation, a man steps into line behind me. He smells like woodsmoke, and he listens as my conversation with the clerk continues. While she’s giving me directions, he speaks, the interruption clearly deliberate. His voice is surly and aggressive. It’s entirely the wrong timbre and volume for the store’s small space.
“Effing wolves,” he says.
It’s a challenge, and I figure as the stranger in town, I should keep my mouth shut, but since that’s a personal strength I’ve never really developed, I turn and face him.
“What’s that?” I ask, my left eyebrow elevated for emphasis.
“Shouldn’t be there,” he says. His voice is almost a snarl. “Shoot them all, that’s what I say.”
The clerk looks uncomfortable. I think she knows him, and being the wiser person present, she chooses to ignore his statement. I stare at the collar of his sweatshirt, visible behind his open, heavy coat. It’s dirty, and so is his hair. I don’t like it when people get lax with personal hygiene, so I continue the conversation out of annoyance, fully aware that it’s the wrong thing to do. For all I know, he has a hunting knife in the belt at his waist.
“Animal hater, right? Shoot them all? The world belongs to humans?” I pause for dramatic effect. “Our personal track record as a species really sucks, in case you haven’t been paying attention.”
He stares back, and I detect something else in his eyes. There’s a moment of silence, and then he speaks, but his voice has lost some of its aggression.
“Killed my good dog, that’s what they did. Tore him to pieces right there, in the field by my barn. He was nine years old when they did it. I raised that dog from a pup, and then I let him down.” He looks away for a second, then back to me. “Effing wolves,” he says again, this time with conviction.
This shuts me up. If I saw that happen to my dog, I’d feel differently too. Maybe I’d be just as anti-wolf, and take every opportunity to express my opinion, even when it wasn’t asked for, which is something I’m actually pretty good at.
The clerk waits while I scribble notes on the back of my paper boarding pass, stuffed into my bag. I thank her for the directions. When I get to the door, I have just enough decency to speak once more to the man.
[Image: Debra Bokur]
“I’m sorry about your dog,” I say, because I am.
I walk back out to my rental car, the directions clutched in one hand. My exchange with the stranger has stirred up memories of when my husband and I first brought Tasha, our half-wolf, half-Malamute, home to the small mountain town in Colorado where we live. She was barely four months old, a small bundle of fur and legs and ears. Someone in the mountains had captured a female wolf that they’d been illegally breeding. The authorities had stepped in, but through a connection with a ranger we knew, we were able to take Tasha home with us, under the provision that she would be immediately spayed and documentation would be supplied to the appropriate authorities.
I carried her on my lap, wrapped in a scarf, while my husband drove and our son sat in the back seat, happy that we were bringing a new puppy into our family. The moment I placed her on the kitchen floor, she walked to my husband and sat beside him, leaning against his leg, then dashed to our son.
When I reached down to pet her, she growled at me. For the next month, she took every opportunity to wedge her small body between my husband and I whenever we sat or stood next to one another. She had claimed the role of alpha female, and it was going to be necessary to do something about it.
Tasha was confused about her new living arrangements, I was sure. If, as she clearly believed, she was the dominant female force in her new den, why was I the one who slept with the alpha male, the one who mated with him? It was me who hunted for our meals, even if it was only at the well-lit, orderly market in town. It was me who filled her bowl and fed her. I was supply our pack with food.
She wasn’t sure what was going on, so we did what we were advised to do by a local wildlife ranger: the next time she placed herself between my husband and me, I knelt on the floor and gently turned her over onto her back so that her belly was exposed, then held her there for a few moments by placing my hand on her stomach. Her eyes said that she hated me even more for this indignity. It took two days to convince her that she’d been hasty in assuming her alpha position, and had miscalculated the camaraderie being offered by the only other female present in the den. There were two male dogs, my husband and my son in residence, after all. It just seemed like good planning to be girlfriends.
I didn’t like the belly exercise any more than Tasha did, but after two days had passed, she accepted the terms with grace and turned her ambitions to controlling the rest of the canine population in our household: a gentle part-retriever who’d been a rescue, and a goofy Weimaraner, both males who loved her unconditionally and who had no ambitions of their own regarding social hierarchy — and who never seemed to mind when she herded them across the living room just for the sake of doing it, or when she claimed the prime spot on the floor in front of the fireplace for herself.
[Image: Debra Bokur]
It had been a while since I’d thought about this. All three of those beloved family members moved on into the next world within weeks of one another as they reached the age of twelve. That was some time ago, and I still miss them deeply.
Now, in the chill of the Canadian night, those memories retreat, and I hurry to the car, turning it on and cranking up the heat. Outside the driver’s window, I see the man from the store walk outside to a pick-up truck parked in front of a gas pump. I notice how he walks, with his shoulders slumped, and I feel a pang of sympathy. He’s likely reliving some memories of his own. I don’t know if he can feel me staring, but he suddenly turns toward me and flips me off. Oddly, I feel better as I pull onto the road and look for the poorly marked intersection that will get me back on track.
It’s another 45 minutes before I find the park. When I get there, it’s closed and the check-in station is dark. Standing in front of the locked gate with my phone-turned-flashlight searching for the latch mechanism, I see a piece of paper stuck with duct tape to the upper part of the gate, just above my eye level. It’s written in French. Cleary, the message-leaver had no idea that I’m barely five feet in boots, and nearly missed the note — or that my French language skills (despite my French grandmother’s efforts) are best described as spectacularly sucky. I can understand just enough to follow the directions for using the unlocking code, and how to get the gate to open. Following the hand-drawn map along a winding road, I eventually reach a remote cabin set back among trees.
The cabin is designed as one open space with a separate bathroom; its defining feature a single enormous pane of glass across from the bed, placed to overlook the wolf habitat. It’s too dark to see anything that night, but when I wake up the next morning, there were two wolves patrolling the hillside beyond the window. I sit on the rug in front of the glass with a mug of tea, mesmerized, watching them for several hours.
I’ve traveled around the world to have deliberate encounters with wolves. I’ll write more about those in the future. Right now, I’m playing old memories in my mind, remembering Tasha as a pup, and an adolescent, and finally as a stately grande dame of twelve. She always adored my husband and son, just as they adored her. But she eventually came to like me, too, I think. I know that I loved her, and that the space under the old conifer she used as a base for her squirrel meditations is still too empty.
I wonder, sometimes, if that man in Canada ever found another dog to care for. I hope so. And I hope he might come to some understanding that everything wild has a place in the world. Except for maybe a few extraordinarily lucky souls, life is a great, messy tangle of events. The sad, wrenching things will always be challenging — and just as I let my bad mood get in the way of seeing that man as another human being dealing with his own set of griefs and heartaches, it can be too easy to judge. And that, I think, is where we risk losing our understanding of our connection to other living beings. And maybe to our humanity, as well.
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THIS IS ORIGINAL WORK. AI WAS NOT USED, OR EVEN CONSIDERED.
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