The Wild Read Free

not make him hear her, she stamped her foot and stalked off. The wolf had watched Bob until he reached the cage. Then it began to pace back and forth, its dewlaps wet, its eyes glancing from side to side, its tongue lolling. He watched the tongue, the black lips, the yellow, weak teeth, the eyes. The animal's tail was down, and when it passed close to him, it growled.
    Was that entirely an animal sound?
    He realized that it was literally frantic to escape, that its problem, very simply, was boredom. It was made for the woods, this creature, it belonged in secret and limitless spaces. But where were they? The woods that weren't being logged out were dying of acid rain. It belonged nowhere, this North American timber wolf. The animal was part of the past. Its last place was a cage in the middle of a zoo in the middle of a city totally beyond its understanding.
    What did it understand? It understood how to snatch trout from streams, how to eat voles and gophers, how to bring down deer and moose. Did it also understand how to turn a key?
    There was something about this creature, though, that Bob knew with crystal certainty could not be destroyed.
    "It's beautiful," Cindy said. She had come beside him. He felt what Monica would call "inadequate."
    "I wish I was some kind of an activist. I'd like to come in here and free all of these animals."
    "Kill them, you mean?"
    "Free them."
    "To release them into the city is the same thing as killing them. Even in the wild, most of these animals would die."
    The wolf remembers, though, the long shadows of evening and the darting movements of the muskrat. "You're so controlled. I think you're overcontrolled. What if they made it, all of them, even the sloth and the anteater."
    "The anteater's cage is empty. I guess it's dead."
    "What about giraffes? What if I found them all an apartment? They could live in comfort then, no crowds, no cages."
    "Who'd pay the rent?"
    "A secret zoo. Admission fifty dollars. Worth it to see a hippo cooking breakfast and a full-grown moose grazing the shag rug in the bedroom."
    "I want to be together later. When Celeste takes Kevin and Joseph to the movies."
    "I thought he and Joey were fighting."
    "No. Now Dashiel and Kim are fighting. The rest of the class has suspended hostilities, pending the outcome."
    The wolf turned and stood directly before Bob, lowering its head as if it wished it could ram itself into his belly. It growled—not a little, throaty sound, but a big noise.
    It was magnificent, it had the whole wild in it.
    Down the row of cages the baboon sat, its mouth lolling opened, its head resting against the bars, its eyes in Africa. The wolf paced and barked, and Bob knew that it was begging for freedom.
    No, begging for forgiveness. "It's just their fate," Cindy said, trying to be kind to him, "they ended up here."
    Bob thought. What if it isn't that way at all? The man-wolf knows. . . . "I'm no good today," he said aloud. "I didn't sleep. I don't want to go to Atlanta."
    She was hugging her shoulders, watching the wolf. "It is us it's reacting to. There's no doubt about it."
    "I'm scared. Maybe it's telling me not to fly. It's a portent."
    She shook her head as if trying to dislodge a gnat from her ear. "No, it—" The wolf threw itself against the bars, growling and yapping, dragging its teeth on the iron with a clacking sound. Cindy stepped back. Bob's impulse was to throw his arms around the wolf, to kiss it, to caress it. He had kissed his dog Moe when he was a boy, had put his arms around Moe, and he remembered Moe's smell, that musty dogginess, the fetor of his breath. Moe had been ground to wreckage beneath the wheels of the school bus. The bus had let Bob off. As it pulled out, there had been a crunch, a thud, a canine scream, and the bus had rumbled away with Moe's tail fluttering out from under the fender. Bob had been left with his dog, its jaw torn back, gabbling against the street, making noises like wet paper being dropped from a