Sarah Hall - The Wolf Border

Orange juice?

She points at the Guinness pump.

No, I’ll have a half.

Of stout?

Binny had stout every day when she was pregnant with you, she tells her brother. She said the doctor told her to — something about iron deficiency. It might just have been an excuse.

Well, I turned out OK, he says.

Anyway, I’ve been reading the studies. The latest evidence is alcohol in moderation is fine. Caffeine and alcohol, yes, smoking and class A drugs, no.

Right-o, he says, grinning. This is a nice pub. I’m going to try something local.

He orders a pint of Helvellyn Gold. They sit at a table by the window with menus and their drinks. Now she has stopped walking, Rachel can feel the baby moving — a sensation somewhere between tender thumping and flapping, a sudden burst under the skin. Nothing is as she anticipated. There are moments she feels genuinely joyful, irrationally so, and other times the decision to go ahead seems ludicrous, a madness. But the screening results came back good. The second scan was clear — no anomalies, the baby is developing well, heart chambers, brain, spine. She glances at her brother, who is looking out of the pub window at the kempt village green, sipping his pint. He is decent and kind, though under the surface he often seems conflicted, true parts of himself hidden away. But then, is she not also reticent, giving herself over only gradually, if at all? It would be good to have him as a friend.

I have thought about it, she says. I have thought maybe I’ll be a hopeless mum. Like her.

Lawrence turns back, barely missing a beat.

No, he says, firmly. No, Rachel. You’ll be brilliant. I know you will.

He looks her squarely in the eye.

You’ll be a brilliant mum, he repeats.

It is an irrefutable assertion. He does not know her, any more than she knows him. Life divided them early, made them strangers. How can he know anything so certain from the handful of times they have met? But it is not hysterical optimism or crazed fantasy. He means to believe and so he believes. Perhaps it is survivalism, she thinks, the method he used to get away from the intolerable reign of Binny, still a teenager, vulnerable, only half made. He could so easily have fucked it all up — school, a profession, his love life. But he didn’t. He left, and he prospered. If he were the elder, if she had been less autonomous, less isolationist, he probably would have tried to take her with him. Whatever demons he carries, he also succeeds, she thinks. For a moment she feels almost ashamed, and humbled by his generosity. It is she who should express admiration.

Thank you, Lawrence. That means a lot.

He holds up his pint glass.

Right-o, he says. Cheers. Here’s to the baby.

*

High summer. The district bakes in a rare spell of unbroken heat, week after week of open blue sky, elegantly cut through by swallows and martins. The upland grass parches, and in the valleys and the corners of fields, the smell of hay beginning, an elative smell — reassuring to the agricultural memory, perhaps. Heat shimmers on the roads as the horizons soften, and the tar melts. The wolves become nocturnal, moving about the enclosure at night, keeping to the shade in the day.

The morning that she and Alexander perform the surgery is beautifully warm. He arrives with sterile equipment and sheeting on which to work. His sleeves are rolled. Rachel moves quietly round the enclosure until she can get a clear shot with the gas-projector. The first barbiturate dart hits Ra in the hindquarters. He whimpers, turns to bite at the spot, takes a few paces. His back end sinks, and he drops. Merle tucks her tail, step-crouches away from him, pauses, looks back. Rachel reloads quickly and darts her.

Nice shot, Alexander comments. Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you.

They enter the pen, dressed in plastic suits and gloves, carrying the implants. It is hot inside the suit — the internal zip only just closes over Rachel’s stomach. She blindfolds the wolves, to protect their eyes from the sun. They set up a makeshift outdoor theatre and move the two limp bodies onto the sheeting. She is careful of bending and lifting, her ligaments have started to soften and her back aches a little, but the work is not too difficult. Alexander does not ask if she would rather, in her condition, assist or sit the procedure out, and she is grateful for the assumption of capability.

While unconscious, the pair are weighed, checked over, blood samples are taken. A section of their abdomens is shaved and cleaned. They are laid out on their backs, their hind legs splayed. Both are moulting, leaving hair on the sheeting and the suits. Their heartbeats are monitored on a Doppler. Alexander works calmly, opening a clean wound in Ra, parting the sides of flesh, inserting the transmitter. The devices will be kept away from vital organs and muscles, Merle’s uterus.

Deep enough? he asks.

Yes, great. Just so long as it doesn’t travel to the skin and irritate.

He tucks the implant inside, secures it, stitching the inner lining tidily, then closing the outer with a subterranean line that will be harder to chew out. He repeats the operation on Merle. Though the technique is new, it is clear he is used to performing such procedures on site; he is efficient but unhurried, his gloves barely stained red. Sweat gathers on his brow, rolling down his temples. She feels beads slide down her back under the plastic material. The surgery is brief, twenty minutes in all.

You must have taken Home Ec in school, she jokes. Embroidery?

Oh, yes. And I can make a mean stuffed pepper, too.

Stuffed with what? she asks.

With pepper.

He cuts the last thread. He gives each animal a shot of precautionary antibiotics. They turn them on their sides, pack away the equipment and remove the blindfolds, then leave the enclosure, disinfecting on the way out. Within a minute or so the wolves come round, stand woozily, shake, and move about. Ra sits and licks his belly. Merle sniffs his underside; he hers. Iodophor. Something has passed while they were asleep, but what? They investigate their small territory but find no intruders. They drink from the well stream, lope back to the bushes, and lie down. There seems to be no inhibition of movement or negative effect.

Come and have a coffee and we can check the signals are right on the receiver, she suggests.

I never say no to coffee or good signals, Alexander says.

He might be flirting with her, she can’t tell. They make their way from the wolfery to the office. The pair are checked regularly over the next week for altered behaviour, infection, inflammation; they lick at the wounds for a day or two, but seem as normal. Their blood work comes back clean.

Later in the week, Rachel swims in the river with Huib and Sylvia. The heat has become massive, almost solid, the fan in the office stirring turgid air, and there seems no better way to cool down. Her bump is properly declaring itself: taut, shiny, the belly button beginning to malform and nub outward, the linea nigra appearing. The pool is not cold, but cool, exquisite. The valley’s rocks over which the water has travelled have been warmed; patches of the river are warm, too. The slate bottom electrifies the water, renders it exotically blue, like something from a rainforest or a lagoon. Further up are waterfalls, in deep, shadowed gulleys, the miasma of their spray jewelled by sunlight. Everything smells of minerals: green and reedy. Sylvia and her brother Leo bathed here as children, she tells them. Huib, too, has discovered the spot, a short hike from the stone bridge near the wolfery, and has been using it regularly. Still, the place has a feeling of gorgeous secrecy.

They have become a team lately, the three of them, now splashing about, laughing, floating on their backs like lidoists. Rachel watches the other two jumping from the buttress of a rock into a frothing ghyll, fearless of anything beneath the surface. Sylvia is slender, pale-limbed, nothing too womanly protrudes; her collarbones are like vestigial fins, her hair slicks down her back as she surfaces, aesthetic, Piscean. Huib, whatever his proclivities or restraints, seems not to be appreciative of such a body, at least not beyond having an enthusiastic swim mate. They have become unlikely friends.