Sister Wolf Read Free Page A

villagers with guns and torches, and march on Marit as if she were Frankenstein and the woods were alive with her created monsters. It was fortunate that the Commander did not live at Meyerling. He spent his summers at a clinic in Austria, taking injections of a serum made from the organs of sheep, which were thought to reverse the hardening of body tissues.
    A horn blared as if it were stuck. Joe Miller brought the Dangerfield van in, honking like a G.I. jeep entering Paris on V-E Day. Marit made it down three flights of stairs in record time.
    “Cut it out, Joe! I told you no horn and no lights!”
    “You did,” said Joe, jumping down from the driver’s seat, “but I got to thinking what a kick if people knew what I had in here.”
    “I’m going to do worse than kick you,” said Marit. She was fond of Joe, with his freckled, tufted head. He was the first keeper at the model zoo in Dangerfield, fifty miles over the New York border. Joe had calculated how many animals her thousand-acre refuge could support, and worked out the ratio of deer to the larger predators. He knew about the balance of nature, and the difference between summer and winter territories. He had taught her to stock the sanctuary with rabbits, mice, and moles, and to let swarms of bees loose, which would pollinate fruit-bearing trees and bushes, and make honey treats for the black bears.
    “Climb right back in,” said Marit, heading for the passenger’s side. “We take the next dirt road up on the left. We’ll let them out when we’re inside the gate.”
    “No, I will,” said Joe. “They know me.”
    Once they were off the asphalt and bumping down the newly cut dirt road, Marit remembered the anxiety of waiting.
    “You took your own goddamned time getting here.” She turned to look at him. “What accounts for the hip boots?”
    “The jaguar,” said Joe. “We saved the baby, anyhow. There was a lot of blood.”
    Hawthorn trees grew thick by the road. Their thorny branches arched over the road, clattering on the top of the van like a drumroll. The bright headlamps probed far down the tunnel of trees and across the field, and lit up a high steel gate rigged with a megaphone, which could broadcast an alarm that sounded like a fire siren.
    Marit got out to unlock the gate, dismantling the alarm with another, smaller key. Joe ordered her to stay behind, and to close the gate once he got through. He handed her a long aluminum flashlight.
    “Shine it on the back end of the van,” he called. “I have one too, but I need more light.”
    Marit trained the beam. The van was lined up parallel to the gate. She saw Joe press down, very carefully, on the handle of the right-hand panel of the door, then pull the door back suddenly and spring quickly into position behind it. Marit’s flashlight made a circle of light on the ground underneath the open end. Nothing happened for the space of many seconds.
    Then, one after another, in a recurring arc, like trained divers, five wolves jumped into the pool of light, moving, when they landed, to the edge of the pool, into shadow. They jumped in order of their precedence in the pack. Big Swan, the father, and Lakona, the pregnant mother. George, the lame uncle, his coat matted with a yellow salve. The two young wolves, a male and a female, born in the zoo eleven months before.
    In the Dangerfield Zoo, the wolves had lived in a fine cage, in a spacious lair made out of rock, like a cave. They had climbed on stone ledges, graded in size, which descended from the cave down to a gully in front of the spectators’ railing. Down the ledges ran a thin stream of water, which provided drink and kept the cage clean. In the Northwest Territories, trailing caribou and elk, the wolves used to travel fifty miles in a day. Their narrow flanks were built for speed. In full cry, they have been clocked at thirty-five miles per hour. In their cage in Dangerfield they huddled like immigrants in a refugee camp who may wait many