This One Wants to Live

Graham von der Luft drove his axe deep into the heart of a short length of jack spruce, preparing well in advance as he always did for the coming winter. An excited yip sounded behind him. He turned, not quite believing what he was hearing: it could only be Chinook, the wolf pup he’d been raising for several months now.

The pup had blown into his life on a warm, windy day last spring when he was on a rare trip over to the Moberly Lake reservation picking up a part for his Ski-doo from Mike Saddle-back. He liked Mike. He found that most of his native friends were easier to be around than white people: they neither took nor gave out bullshit. They accepted him for who he was. If he needed to do business anywhere, the isolated reservation was where he tried to do it.

He’d loaded the part onto his snowmobile and was about to leave when Mike said, “Hey, man, you want a wolf?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Come inside, you’ve gotta see this.”

Von der Luft shook his head at Mike’s question, but followed the Indian into his cabin.

“It’s in the closet,” Mike said in his slow tribal drawl, eyes glittering. “Be careful, man, it’s pretty vicious.”

Mike and his jokes. Von der Luft cracked open the closet door and peered into the darkness, half expecting one of Mike’s kids to jump out at him.

But instead, he heard a soft mewling. Pulling the door open further, he made out a tiny blind pup, no more than few days old, nuzzling about the closet, looking for the comforting teats of its mother. He picked up the little whelp. It was coal black, warm in his hands.

“Isn’t that wild, man?” Mike said. “My brother, he found this wolf den up near the mountains. He shot the bitch and brought all the pups back here. Don’t ask me why. The other pups died. But this little one, she wants to live, eh?” He sat back on his heels and eyed von der Luft. “You want her? I can’t keep a wolf pup. I got kids.”

Without really knowing why, von der Luft tucked the whelp inside his jacket and took her back to his cabin on the Peace River. Once there, he realized his folly. How would he feed a baby wolf? Even if he could get his hands on some sort of milk, what did he have in his isolated cabin to use as a substitute bottle? A search of his cupboards revealed nothing. In the end, he’d shaken his head at himself and made the dread trip downriver to Hudson’s Hope for supplies: a doll’s bottle, powdered milk, canned dog food. He ignored the incredulous looks people gave him, although he could anticipate the dinner conversations they would have that night: the hermit was buying what?

Von der Luft never thought of himself as a hermit. In truth, he hated the term. The first time he heard someone refer to him that way was on one of his twice-annual supply trips to Prince George. He could’ve sold the furs he caught on his trapline—rich assortments of marten, fox, beaver and lynx—in Hudson’s Hope, the much-closer establishment, but he hated the scrutiny of folks in small towns. He had nothing against the particular people whom he supposed could have been called his neighbors—if you could refer to people who lived entirely differently than you, all their homes within view of each other, and a hundred miles downriver at that— as neighbors, but he knew the type. Well-meaning people, busy-bodies, some called them, looking at you with eyes full of distrust or, worse, pity. He wouldn’t tolerate it.

So he kept an old thirty-five-foot river boat tied up on shore near his cabin. Every spring after breakup, when the water was still high, he motored all the way to Prince George by way of the Parsnip, the Pack, and then the Crooked to exchange his load of furs for currency, which he then used to restock his supplies. Not that he needed much. In twelve years of living in the bush, he’d learned to do without what most folks felt they had to have. Simpler that way. But he did require certain basics—kerosene for his lamps, fuel for the boat, flour and salt for cooking, occasional replacement springs for his traps, thick woolen yarn to mend mittens or socks.

There were other trappers living along the upper reaches of the Peace, but he was one of the few who made an effort to avoid any interactions with others. There was some big shindig in Hudson’s Hope every year that apparently all the local trappers went to, some Christmas concert or other foolishness. He had never gone. If living alone and being mostly self-sufficient made a person a hermit, well, then, he supposed he was guilty.

At first, he’d fed the pup by holding her propped in the crook of his elbow, her small legs draped over one of his arms, bottle in his hand, while he sat reading. But as the pup grew over the months that followed, she learned to eat solids and then, eventually, to fend for herself. The first time Von der Luft saw the pup hunt on her own, he watched in amazement as she pounced with her front feet on grasshoppers. He supposed the instinct to hunt just came naturally. By then he had taken to calling the pup Chinook. It seemed appropriate: the pup had blown softly into his life and, he assumed, it would soon blow back out. Chinook graduated to catching voles, and then grouse and a rabbit or two. He stopped feeding the pup at that point, assuming the creature would return to the wild where she belonged. And then one day, when the rapidly growing pup was near four months old and already about the size of a Labrador, his assumptions proved correct. Chinook disappeared and did not return. That was three weeks ago. Von der Luft was surprised by the sense of loss he experienced with the pup’s departure.

But now here was Chinook again, barreling toward him, although something seemed amiss with her back leg. Von der Luft dropped the axe and knelt as the pup reached him and began covering his face with enthusiastic licks. Incredible. He’d thought it was improbable he’d ever see the pup again. Figured she was dead, or just run off for good. But no, against all odds, here was the little black bitch. What the hell happened to her, von der Luft wondered. Where had she been? He let the pup keep licking his face as he ran his hands over her haunches, slowly, tentatively. He could feel the pup’s wiry young frame wince when his hand hit a bare spot in the fur. A scab.

And that was when he lifted his eyes and saw the girl step through the same clearing in the trees the pup had just barreled through. And he knew, somehow understood, that they were connected: the miracle of the pup’s return and what he would come to think of as the miracle of the girl, twined together like the peavines growing wrapped around the pole in his garden. Improbable, he thought, doesn’t always mean impossible.

 “Hi. I’m Micah,” the girl said from the edge of the clearing, her voice confident and clear.

Von der Luft nodded in acknowledgement. He glanced toward the trees behind the girl. Were there others with her? Surely she hadn’t traveled here alone.

“Is that your wolf?” the girl asked, gesturing to the squirming mass of black fur that was Chinook.

He looked down at the pup, rolling delightedly now at his feet. His wolf? He held no claim over the pup—they were just two creatures trying to survive.  He realized the girl was waiting for an answer, and he shook his head, no.

She stood waiting for him to expound. She looked like an apparition, Von der Luft thought, standing there in the mist, wearing a long denim skirt and a man’s work jacket. Maybe he finally had gone crazy; he was seeing ghosts emerging from miles of sheer wilderness.

When he didn’t speak, she said, “So, are you the hermit?”

He didn’t answer, not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t. He’d lost that ability—or was it a curse?—a dozen years ago, when he had the stroke. He wasn’t old when it happened, only thirty-five. Doctors called it a freak thing, lifting their hands, one doctor after another. Specialists, his ass. If they specialized in anything, it was in saying, repeatedly, that they couldn’t explain why he’d been the very picture of health until the day he had a stroke that stripped him of words. It had a name: dysgraphia. The loss of the ability to express oneself, either by speaking or writing. His voice and his handwriting: they had both deserted him. A rarity, the doctors had said, never seen it before.

He looked at the girl and lifted his own hands, palms up, feeling like one of the fool doctors. It was such a helpless form of expression, the lifted palms. He pointed to his throat, shook his head. I can’t speak. I’m sorry.

She seemed to understand. She was what, maybe twelve? He hadn’t seen a child in so long, he had no idea. Her chest was still flat, child-like. Yet she had an air of confidence about her that many adults never achieved. She nodded, then walked toward him and stuck out the hand that wasn’t cupping the egg. “I’m… I’m, well, your neighbor, I guess.”

Your neighbor. He didn’t have any neighbors. He’d bought this trapline far up the Peace specifically for the isolation. What was she talking about? And then he realized: this girl must be from the commune. But Christ, that was some five miles downriver. Had she walked here? Alone? The woods were thick between there and here, sliced through with sharp cliffs. No one traveled along this section of the Peace by foot; river boat was the only way. He looked at the hand she still held toward him, slowly making the mental connection: she wanted to shake his hand. He hadn’t touched another human in over a decade. He moved his fingers forward, a gesture that seemed as laborious as if he were reaching upcurrent in the swiftest section of the Peace, and touched just the end of her fingertips before letting his hand fall back to the pup.

“Watch this,” she said, and placed the egg on the ground. A long tuft of summer grass curled up around it like a nest.

Chinook immediately rose and picked up the egg in her mouth, carried it a few feet away and set it down again, then bared her teeth, cracked the shell, and began licking out the contents. “She always does that,” the girl said, clearly delighted. “She always carries it a little way away before she cracks it. She’s such a lady.”

He understood then that she’d been caring for the pup. He pointed to the pup’s leg, where the scab was, narrowing his eyes and tilting his head: What happened?

She didn’t seem to find it odd that he wasn’t speaking. “Levi—one of the boys in my class—trapped her a couple weeks ago and she fell into the river trying to get away. Not the Peace, the Wicked. It cuts through our land.”

He nodded; he knew where the Wicked River sliced a rumbling trail through a small gorge on its way to join the Peace. If she lived by the Wicked, she must be from the commune.

She pointed at Chinook. “He said she might eat our chickens.” The pup looked up at her. “Doesn’t she have the prettiest eyes?”

Von der Luft tilted his head forward, yes. Chinook’s eyes were still the pale blue all wolf pups are born with. They would change to amber yellow before long, he knew.

The girl turned her attention back to the pup. “When I heard Levi talking about trapping a pup, I waited until everyone was busy. Then I sneaked down to the Wicked and waded across. It’s not deep there,” she added. “The poor thing was still in the water, caught. She couldn’t get out. And she was really, really cold.”

Chinook had finished licking the eggshells clean and was now lying near the girl’s feet, not von der Luft’s. The girl knelt and laid a hand on the pup’s head. “I dragged her out of the water. She was really heavy. Then I got a sled and hauled her to this old mine we found in the woods awhile ago. I figured if I took her back to camp, Levi would kill her. Or my dad would. So I kept her in the mine until she got better.” She said this with the simplicity of a child: of course the pup would get well. Of course it wouldn’t snap at her, or bite her as she tried to help. Of course she wouldn’t get hurt herself when, alone, she followed the pup five miles back through the woods to see where it was going. Good was rewarded with good, right?

Von der Luft didn’t know how to thank her, for her innocence or her effort. He was touched by both. He looked at this girl, another improbability blown into his life, and cracked his lips upward in what he hoped was a smile. 

Deleted chapter from BENEATH THE PEACE by Liz Stroud. All rights reserved.