1
Adventure v. Wolf
It was winter when she crossed. Maybe she found a bridge of ice, maybe she snuck across Brownlee Dam, or maybe there was only current. Maybe she just swam. At the depths of Hells Canyon, the river that separates Idaho and Oregon is milky and knotted with rapids. At one end, over the reservoirs just south of the dam, the water is nearly a mile wide. The wolf would have chosen her path carefully. She did not flirt with risk, not like a coyote; she knew what she could do. A wolf can swim up to eight miles at a time, paddling like a dog after a stick, the skin between her toes enough webbing to help push her through a current. The Snake is the largest tributary to the Columbia River, its waters an echo of the agriculture it has slipped through heading west from Wyoming. The wolf could not know it, but all through the river there were traces of cow. Fertilizer, sediment, manure. Water that had once been blue was now often sea-glass green with algae.
It was 1999, and the wolf was in the belly of Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America, 2,000 feet deeper in some places than the Grand Canyon. From the sprawling plateaus and high pastures above, the canyon feels unfathomable, as if the northeastern border of Oregon has just unzipped rocky, sagebrush-strewn cliffs to reveal a world over a mile deep beneath mud-slick layers of limestone and lava, 300-million-year-old products of underwater volcanoes. This is the homeland of the Nez Perce, the Nimiipuu, who know the canyon as a place of shelter carved by Coyote. Their stories tell how Creator made wry Coyote the teacher of human beings, but the wolf, hÃmiin, belonged here too. This was her land. When white men appeared—those who would later hunt the region’s wolves to extinction—they had taken this same route, and the Nez Perce named them for it. Sooyáapoo, they called the invaders. The ones who divide.
As the wolf shook the river from her back, droplets constellated in the frozen air. She was a yearling, nearly full grown, the runt of her litter. Almost waist high on a grown man, her weight around sixty-five pounds, her coat the gradient of stone, the color, perhaps, of that day’s January sky. Her winter underfur was so thick the cold did not even reach her bones. She was a descendant of the Canadian wolves reintroduced to Idaho just a couple of years earlier as part of an effort to restore the American gray wolf populations that had been slaughtered to extinction in the early twentieth century. Around her neck, the radio collar given by the Idaho Department of Fish and Wildlife (IDFW) was a dull and nearly forgotten weight. B-45. That’s what they were calling her. The forty-fifth wolf to be collared in Idaho, one node of a federal wolf recovery program that the Nez Perce tribe was working with the IDFW to implement.
With each step, her saucer-sized paws splintered the lattice of icy crystals that frosted the earth. Turning tail to the river, she climbed into the snow and the vanilla-scented air of hundred-year-old Ponderosa pines. If a bald eagle cut the sky above her, she heard it. If a rabbit threw itself into a snowy burrow, she smelled it. A wolf can average eight to ten hours a day of travel, often moving in the seams between night and day. Ten miles, twenty, thirty, forty, more. She had left her family in east-central Idaho to look for the three things any young wolf needed to survive—a mate, a meal, and defensible territory—and she did not know that in climbing onto this far shore of the Snake, she had crossed a border. Not just a state line, but a line of history. Because she had been fitted a year earlier with a radio collar, her movements were legible to humans, and she was now superlative: the first known member of her species to step into Oregon in over fifty years. As in much of continental America, wolves had not lived here since the state’s last wolf bounty was paid to a trapper in the 1940s. When B-45 arrived, she came as both the dawn of the future and a relic from the past. “[B-45] seems to me a title ill-suited for a majestic animal, and more appropriate for a chemical used to color breakfast cereal,” wrote one skeptical editor of an eastern Oregon newspaper. When the Nez Perce tribe and an environmental conservation group held a contest to name her, “Freedom” won. A local conservationist began to call her “Eve.”
Though gray wolves were protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1974, law is a conceptual shield. It can mean very little in the quiet of America’s trees, where the “3S treatment”—“Shoot, shovel, and shut up”—can reign. But B-45 was lucky. Even as she made headlines, she traveled on, leaving her scent against trees, telephone poles, and fence posts. She walked a hundred miles from the state line, up and over the snow-clotted forests of the Blue Mountains, back and forth across Interstate 84, somehow, then toward the headwaters of the John Day River. “She appears to be doing normal wolf stuff,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Rocky Mountain wolf specialist Ed Bangs told the Oregonian.
It should have been no surprise wolves would reenter the state the way B-45 did, just as guests will enter a house party if a door is ajar. Nearly a century earlier, after elk were driven almost to extinction by white settlers, their repopulation had caused a similar spectacle. “His place is in parks and museums, preserving the memory of Oregon undeveloped,” wrote one northeastern Oregon sheep rancher in 1912. “Civilization and savagery cannot occupy common ground. The one must give way to the other.” It had taken time—wariness from sheep farmers who worried about competition for their herds—but eventually, the elk had been reaccepted: a cherished Oregon citizen. Now the wolf was the trespasser. Specifically, B-45.
Looking back, Oregon biologist Mark Henjum saw her arrival as a turning point, not just for wolves but for how people talked about them. “[B-45] really tipped the scales to where wolves became a real issue,” he told a reporter. Local officials struggled to know how to react. Could an animal be invasive if it had once called a landscape home? “She presents a somewhat odd situation for us because Oregon is not part of the wolf recovery effort,” another ODFW biologist told a local newspaper. Officially, the state wasn’t anti-wolf, but they weren’t pro-wolf either. They urged caution: this wolf could get in the cyanide traps ranchers used for coyotes, or could mate with a dog, spawning a potentially dangerous dog-wolf hybrid. There was no management plan, but to do nothing, said livestock producers, was to let a predator walk free—toward their cattle, toward their lambs.
* * *
When B-45 stepped through the mountains, I was an elementary-schooler across the state in Portland, all braids and freckles and red Converse high-tops. I did not know a wolf had come back into Oregon because it had never occurred to me they had ever disappeared, that we had ever killed them off. In her New York Times Magazine article about mass insect extinctions, journalist Brooke Jarvis quotes a Danish bug-counting survey that describes the disorienting, indescribable sense that “something from the past is missing from the present.” I wish I could say I felt the loss of predators from the forest, but born into the loss, I accepted it as the norm. We do not grieve the things we have never learned to love. Scientists call this inability to register change “baseline theory.” Because I did not understand the ecosystems I hiked through with my family had been curated by a government-funded extermination campaign of native predators, I assumed wolves were out there in some distant shaggy forest, waiting with owls and bears beneath a peachy moon. The animals’ presence seemed both distant and guaranteed. Like a soulmate, I assumed one day our paths would cross.
Fifteen years later, when I began researching the wolf, I felt motivated by a handful of factors, but none was instinctual awe about the animal. Mostly I had become jumpy, and because I did not trust my fear, I was ashamed of it. It struck me as supremely unfair that in so many stories and sayings, the wolf had been made shorthand for the threat.
The French have an old saying, Entre chien et loup, which refers to that dawn-or-dusk hour when it becomes hard to tell the difference between a dog and a wolf. That time when you cannot tell if the shadow on the road before you is familiar or strange, if it poses a threat. With roots in the Latin expression inter canem et lupum—that time “when the dog sleeps, and the wolf seeks his prey,” as a seventeenth-century English treatise described it—the phrase connotes a threshold between known and unknown, that liminal zone where anxieties may be rational or unfounded. In the moment of entre chien et loup, it seems to me, the journey is as internal as it is external. What you see on the path is shaped not only by your eyes, but also by your mind: stories you have inherited, experiences you have accumulated, beliefs you carry about how the world will treat you. I began to suspect I would not see the wolf, never mind the fears it conjured within us, without first zooming in on this moment of identification. Every day we trace the contours of fear in our own lives, squinting for its shapes, listening for its creaks, evaluating if our hearts are right to pound. This is the tipping point where one creature might be tagged as predator and one as prey. It is the moment our eyes might first get it wrong.
Initially I believed I would be a good arbiter of entre chien et loup. Surely I could tell a dog from a wolf! I was mildly nearsighted but neurotic about detail. Rational, or at least attuned to the prospect of my irrationality. At the time, I was encountering stories about wolves both real and imagined with the cool, smug distance of a reader who could flip to the ending or turn away. But as I continued my research, driving into the mountains, sharpening pencils into little spears to take into the archives, I began to see that even if the stories I had heard about wolves were collected in the pages of folktales and old newspapers, their undercurrents were enacted in the pages of our lives. I wanted to consider the theater of predator and prey from the remove of my laptop screen. Life got in the way.
* * *
I had been studying the subject on and off for a few years when the jury of an artist residency granted me a cabin in the woods to write about it. I decided to travel west by train, alone. My second year of graduate school at the University of Minnesota was done and my students’ grades were submitted. The Wi-Fi on the tracks would be bad. For thirty-six hours, I thought, I could disappear. Nobody would be able to ask anything of me. Like B-45, I imagined myself crossing the border into Oregon undetected.
It was eleven p.m. when the ticket-checker nodded at my phone and the gold-ceilinged Amtrak station gave way to a platform lit by buzzing fluorescent lights. Tiny bugs danced in the metallic glare as my fellow passengers volleyed cheery midwestern hellos. It was late May, but the Minneapolis night was defiant with chill. I hugged my backpack straps to my jean jacket, jostling the suitcase and tote bag I had packed with cheese, crackers, and apples for rations until the train reached Portland, a short drive from the cabin.
Since arriving at the station, I had surveyed my fellow passengers like we were in a reboot of Lost. Plane travel was so often frictionless, choreographed by the omnipresence of flight attendants, but traveling by long-haul buses and trains was a different game. Earlier that year, my then-boyfriend and I had spent a surreal day stranded in a train in Idaho due to some unforeseen malfunction on the track. We spent those fraught, bonus hours sitting beside Bakken oil field workers and sightseeing retirees. At one point, we called a pizza delivery to the train and split it with a nomadic octogenarian with a literal feather in his green felt cap; later the three of us took up Amtrak’s offer to dine on free Kentucky Fried Chicken in the white-tableclothed dining car. We had fulfilled a certain archetype, then—the smiley young couple with laptops and a bottle of wine on our observation-car table—and only as I stood alone on the platform was I aware that I was playing a different role now. The only young woman traveling solo. Black jeans and short black boots, a big sweater beneath my jacket, my shoulder-length brown-blond hair typically unruly. Headphones, yes, but I listened to nothing. Music was good, but staying tuned to the present while maintaining a guise of unapproachability? Better.
“An insider tip for you,” said a man behind me, tipsy with authority. “Minot’s pronounced ‘Why not.’ If you pronounce it like a French guy you’ll sound like a real asshooooole!” The smoker’s rattle in his throat rose to a low howl. Beside him, two women who looked to be in their late sixties threw their heads back in laughter, jostling hand-quilted bags. I couldn’t help grinning. I was a sucker for eavesdropping. It was like stepping into a room where a TV show was playing and trying to get your bearings. On the train, I’d be the audience. I’d watch the prairie buckle into mountain and read my books.
I was reading One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals by Steven Church, which opened with a chapter on a twenty-five-year-old man who, in 2012, had jumped into the zoo pen of a four-hundred-pound Siberian tiger. The man survived, giving little explanation for his actions. “It’s a spiritual thing,” he said. “I wanted to be at one with the tiger.” Church was interested in what had drawn the man into the cage not because the feeling was foreign, but because he found it so familiar. I never wanted to face off with an animal, but I had long chased the tingle of launching myself into the unknown. Most of my friends were surprised I was choosing to travel solo without a bunk or cabin, but I’d heard a rumor that the new president, Donald Trump, was going to slash funding for the route, and I wanted to take the trip however I could afford it. I liked traveling alone. I surveilled the world more acutely. The volume turned up on my senses. My last solo train ride had been only a few hours on the East Coast, but I’d ended up getting looped into a game of Uno with a few guys from Toronto who were drinking Soylent on their way home from the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City. We followed each other on social media at the end of the night, and every few months I would come across a photo of one and wonder who he was, how he had gotten into my feed and my brain. The train, I would remember with a twitch. The train threw us together.
Shuffling forward in line, I now watched a man in front of me maneuver two giant beaten bags forward. He was moving a life or something else. That was the thing about trains. No airport security, rarely dogs. You came with whatever you wanted. Each of the man’s bags was the size of an ottoman, and he too seemed supersized. His bald white head and broad neck gave him the look of a giant thumb, one that now hovered nearly a half-foot above five-foot-nine me, his shoulders draped in what some people called a “drug rug,” a term that stunk of Reagan-era bias. Something in his movements struck me as off-kilter, but I tried to squash the possibility of threat. Don’t judge people you don’t know, I thought just as he turned and caught my gaze with a thin line of smile. Were his teeth black, or was it the shadow? He gestured for me to board ahead of him while he put his bags in the external compartments. I nodded thanks. Was I an asshooooole? I shuffled on. The half of the car reserved for “Families/Couples” was nearly empty, but I headed toward “Singles,” where each row was occupied by a lone rider except the one I now claimed. Everyone had taken the aisle, so I did too. I would move if I had to. Dog eat dog.
* * *
The cabin I’d be visiting was at the base of a peninsula in coastal Washington where wolves had long held importance to Indigenous residents. Early twentieth-century anthropologist Alice Ernst wrote about visiting the winter ceremony she called “Kluukwalle” (tłókwali), which was later referred to as Wolf Ritual, where members of a Wolf Society, probably hunters, captured young warrior initiates and took them to a Wolf House for a night of rituals that challenged their mental and physical strength. If they passed the tests, the youngsters were said to attain new strength: the strength of a wolf. In the last decade or so, wolves themselves had begun repopulating this rain forest peninsula. I did not expect to see one in the wild, but its shores seemed like a good place to hole up, and there was a wolf sanctuary nearby where I could pay $30 for an afternoon tour. I never had a coming-of-age ceremony, no bat mitzvah or even graduation party, but the two-week cabin trip was beginning to feel like its own rite of passage. After a lifetime of never spending more than a day or two alone, I hoped the hurdles of loneliness would leave me stronger and more self-reliant. When I told people I was going alone to the woods to write, they joked I should try not to get murdered, haha, until it felt as if that was my goal. Not to work on my thesis, but to stay alive. Haha. I could do that.
The tall bald man walked slowly down the aisle. He was the last one to board, and thanks to his invitation for me to go ahead, every row was now taken. I ducked my head toward my backpack and began a theatrical search for nothing, determined to avoid eye contact.
“Mind if I sit here?” His shadow stretched across my seat.
“Sure,” I said automatically, scooting toward the window. My voice wave-tossed. The man did not put anything in the overhead compartment. He shoved a bag under the seat and brought a thin leather briefcase to his lap. At rest, the side of his body touched mine. How, in my imaginings of the trip, had I not considered I might spend hours touching shoulders with a stranger? Folding his arms across the briefcase, the man stared at the seat back before him. A conductor with barrel-curled blond hair walked down the aisle, taking notes on where we were all headed; most passengers were exiting in North Dakota and Montana. When she got to us, the man and I spoke at the same time. Portland. It felt so shitty I almost laughed.
“What’s in Portland?” he asked, after she passed. I did not want to share my life, but I had nothing else to say. Lying made me blush.
“From there,” I said. “You?” The conversation was a reflex, my voice falling into that familiar groove of feigned interest. I had a high tolerance for talking to strangers, even if I didn’t personally like them. It was why I had wanted to write nonfiction: to have an excuse to ask people about their lives. But now I was tired, and the only life I wanted to think about was my own. Though I learned cordial kindness from men—my father is notoriously helpful and courteous with strangers—it had been distorted by a gendered instinct to subjugate my comfort to those around me. Partly I did not want to sit with the sense of having hurt someone else’s feelings, but partly I feared that if I did hurt this man’s feelings, he could, hypothetically, hurt me in return. An unconscious calculus. To preserve peace in this dark and inescapable space, I spoke, straining to sound less annoyed than I felt. My father, I sensed, would have known how to make the conversation stop.
“Me—I’m going to Portland because I’m on the run!” The man exhaled a huff of laughter. Beneath us, the train jolted. The rails hissed. “My ex tried to fucking kill me, that’s why. That’s fucking why I’m leaving. Yeah, I’m from Iowa.” He shook his head vigorously. Steam filled the windows as we began to move. “I’m moving to Portland because now I’m with her little sister. Wild, wild fucking world.” I made a hum of acknowledgment, pressing my lips into what I hoped was neutral acceptance. I had just told my students I liked nonfiction because people said things in real life you couldn’t make up, and this man’s words fell in that category. They would be hard to pull off in fiction, but here they were, a pebble thrown into my night. True.
“A fresh start sounds good,” I said. Inside, I raged. This man had hijacked my dream of a quiet night, the kind literally every other passenger in the car was having. I envied the man alone in front of me, then I felt bad for wishing a seatmate on someone else. Wasn’t this just the contract of public life? Sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you were not? But was this luck? The man’s eyes tracked me as I stared at my book. Around us the lone men were balling up sweatshirts as pillows, putting in headphones, falling asleep. With six hours of darkness ahead, the discomfort in my gut crystallized to dread.
Outside, the black boxes of the St. Paul freight yard popped in and out of view. I tried to focus on city lights in the black milk of the Mississippi, but the man’s pale reflection wobbled atop it all. The silver hinges from his briefcase glinted in his lap like blades.
“Hey, can I tell you something really honest?” His voice so close I flinched. “Iowa kills. It fucking kills.” He pulled up his sleeve and showed me the inner crook of his elbow, skin full of track marks, a constellation of bull’s-eyes. Needles made me dizzy; I hadn’t known their marks would too. The man saw me trying not to look, and started laughing, low and slow, moving jerkily, watching my reaction. I sucked in air, hoping to telegraph Yeah, dude—addiction sucks, before turning my gaze resolutely back to the page.
My mind, though, lingered on the briefcase. What was inside, and why wouldn’t he take it off his lap? A gun? Or maybe just his next fix? Was I paranoid to think these thoughts, or naive not to think them? I knew I was prone to catastrophizing. I had recently come across a French proverb in my research, Quand on parle du loup, which is akin to the English “speak of the devil.” When you talk of the wolf, the saying goes, you see its tail—on en voit la queue implicit at the end of the phrase. I understood the proverb to mean a scary thing could appear if you conjured it. You could bring your nightmare upon yourself. On a molecular level I did not believe this possible, but I understood perspective shaped reality, and I wanted to scrub my fears from the window of the future. “I will believe it a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently,” wrote Meriwether Lewis in his journal as he came upon what he thought were the Rocky Mountains in 1805. I prickled at the presumption of manifest destiny, but the Pollyanna-ish optimism of his words resonated. Should I try harder to see the path before me as smooth? Friends encouraged me to think less about earthquakes, cancers, car crashes, snakes. I got carried away! I knew I did. And now I was twenty-five years old—an adult! I had to learn to chill out. In this light, my worry with the man on the train seemed rude.
He interrupted my thoughts. “I’ve got a lot of games for us to play later.” Did I imagine it, or were his eyes bulging, two veined grapes in his wide forehead? He lifted the briefcase. My fingers felt fizzy, a stranger’s hands folded in my lap. Slowly the man creaked open the hinge, eyes tracking my own. Instead of a weapon, a backgammon board and a Ziploc of cards and game pieces spilled out. “Wow!” I said, because I did not know what else to say.
A minute later, when the man stood to readjust his belongings, my overhead reading light blinked off in the process, throwing us into dark. “Sorry,” he said, a grinning shadow. Newly aware I was going to have to keep the sickly yellow light on all night as vigil for my worry, I flicked it on, then gestured vaguely to the aisle. I needed out.
“Gonna explore,” I said. He stood, silently. It did not occur to me he did not need my explanation. Walking to the dining car, I tried to ignore the eyes of those who traced my path. The men who tapped cans of beer against the plastic tables. The train was rocking, a rattle that matched my pulse, and when it jolted, I went with it, flying toward whoever was sitting nearby, barely catching myself as I did. In the closed cafe, a woman in a blue Amtrak uniform sat at a table surrounded by legal pads and charts.
“Hi,” I said. “Excuse me.” She gave me the tired smile of someone who knew she was about to be asked for something. I apologized for bothering her.
Copyright © 2023 by Erica Berry
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Copyright © 1993 by Linda Hogan
Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Pierce
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