There was a time when it was all idyllic, at least it seems so in my memory. My sister and I lived together in the ramshackle house on Crystal Falls Drive and we baked brownies and I made chicken stock. We went running and did yoga together, atop mats that separated us from the carpet that smelled a little too strongly of dog urine to concentrate completely on yoga. I worked at the health food store and brought home just-expired glass jugs of milk with cream on top, which we scooped out and stirred into our coffees. Globules of fat would rise to the top, and I liked that. Sister didn’t, so very much. She wouldn’t eat the cream straight off the top of the milk like I would, but I respected her choice.
She worked at the Diamondback Grill and sometimes if I was stoned or hungry she would bring me a Table Mountain Beef Burger. Grass fed and topped with Lamb Chopper sheep’s milk cheddar, washed down with an expensive beer, we were poor but we were fancy. Hippie rich. And we played music, and we built forts out of blankets and pillows around the fireplace when the power went out and the huge, cavernous house couldn’t even begin to think about keeping us warm. It was built in the sixties, I think, when propane was cheap and you can tell because there were vents everywhere for central propane heat to escape and warm its occupants briefly before radiating out through the huge single-paned glass windows that ringed the entire upstairs. We would tape plastic sheeting over those goddamn windows to try and keep the heat in. Some people who came to visit said it was creepy. It didn’t really work, anyway.
We took the wolf for excursions together out in the woods, where he could run off-leash. My mom brought him home from Washington one year when I was still in college, using him as a panacea for her crumbling marriage. The save-the-marriage-baby. Sister said she always felt an affinity with Wolf because she was a save-the-marriage baby too. Except that was a different marriage. I remember the day I met him. “We brought something ho-ome!” my mother said, in that singsong voice that implies that that something is alive. But her husband turned into a meth addict, and mom couldn’t care for the creature. He could leap 5-foot gates. And when he did, he killed baby deer and brought them home. He dug up my dead cat, Loki. Several times.
But when he ran with us in the woods it was glorious. Caitlin would walk him, on the leash, away from where we’d park the car, ambling for a few hundred feet down the old logging road that before it was a road was old logging train tracks. We could smell ponderosa pine and bear clover, and the sound of the cars would fade. In the spring the red dirt was squishy with melted snow, in the early fall crimson dust would swirl up around our tennis shoes and settle into the white patches of Wolf’s coat. When we were far enough from the road for him to only care about what lay ahead in the wilderness she would have him Sit! Stay! And remove his leash. His limbs trembled with anticipation, and he glanced, tongue lolling, toward the beckoning bend in the road up ahead. Then back up to my sister, who somehow held the power despite the fact that he could have torn both of our throats out. And then… “Okay!” with an open-armed gesture towards his destination, and he would be off like a starting gun had sounded. His rear end always listed slightly to the right, making his graceful, loping gait slightly imperfect, which endeared him to us all the more. Within seconds he’d be out of view, and we’d start running to follow him, hopelessly clumsy, chunky, slow–breathing methodically and reminding ourselves that we were supposed to be enjoying this. When he’d sometimes appear in view, racing down a hillside that he’d dashed up chasing a scent, I’d feel a sting of envy to watch his delirious face as he moved quickly through the woods, feeling the pure joy of running singing in his tendons.
It was a day like this when we found the goose nest. Rounding a corner just after the wolf had paused, smiling back at us, we heard an almighty kerfuffle, which is a word my father, with his love of H.L. Mencken and Spike Milligan, would be proud to know I’d used. Shrieking, jumping, we followed the sound through a grove of Jeffrey pines and emerged upon the scene–an enormous goose flapping about in the water, and the wolf running full-tilt down a steep embankment toward the shore. On his way, he crashed over a grand, fluff-covered nest of eggs and proceeded to pace the edge of the water, panting, eyeing the goose.
The wolf could be a real sissy when it came to the hard fact that he had to enter into a body of water to accomplish his goals. In fact, mostly I only saw him swim when my sister swam with him, beckoning him, her blonde hair swirling around her shoulders and he paddling to stay at her side. It seemed that this was not, however tempting his quarry, an instance in which he could justify entering the water. The goose shook its wings menacingly and squawked, flustered, panicked, angry. Geese have a reputation for incomparable avian meanness, and I’m certain that the wolf standing between us and the water was the only thing deterring her from chasing us, snapping at our rears and protecting her unhatched offspring. I felt her panic with a deep sense of concern and responsibility for our beast’s inexcusable behavior. As my sister made moves to harness her animal, I raced down towards the downy circle encompassing the eggs, wondering what irreversible and deadly damage our blundering pet had done to this wild family. Incredibly, blessedly, each of the four perfect, cream-colored eggs were intact. His deft paws had sailed right over this precious little landmark on his way to chase the far more active and enticing prize that was surely, upon the first sight of him, making its way to the safety of the water before we arrived to witness the scene. I couldn’t help thinking that, had we not been there screaming at him, had he the luxury of wildness without a leash waiting in a pocket, without the threat of love withheld, he would have turned his nose up at the mourning goose and proceeded to eat those eggs with gusto. Do wolves eat eggs? Or am I transposing the qualities of a pine marten or badger upon my meat-eating pet? Surely those exposed fangs and that bulbous nose would sense a meal when he saw one.
Regardless, for the moment, panic notwithstanding, this mother goose would live to hatch her chicks. We would take our cameras and our running shoes, our leashes and our half-tamed wolf home.
