Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

We had been tipped off to the story by a viewer, who’d brought his toddler down to the zoo and who had been surprised to see a crowd gathered around the small enclosure where the wolves were kept. Apparently one of the zookeepers, Luke Warren, had begun to sleep overnight with the animals, and to spend part of the day inside the enclosure. His superiors-at first sure this was a suicide attempt-now realized the wolves had accepted him into their fold and encouraged Luke to interact with them during the park’s open hours. His antics had single-handedly quadrupled the zoo’s business.

When Alfred, my cameraman, and I arrived at the enclosure, we had to push our way through the crowd lined up along the fence. Inside were five wolves, and one human. Luke Warren was seated between two animals that were easily each over a hundred pounds. When he saw us, he walked toward the double gates leading out of the enclosure as people whispered and pointed. He greeted those who wanted to ask him questions about the wolves, and then he approached my cameraman. “You must be George,” he said.

I stepped forward. “No. That’s me. It’s Georgie . ”

Luke laughed. “You’re definitely not what I expected.”

I could have said the same. I figured that this guy would be a nut job like most of the others I interviewed-peculiar to the point of dysfunctional. But Luke Warren was tall and muscular, with blond hair that reached down to his shoulders and eyes so pale and blue that, for a moment, I had trouble remembering what I was doing there. He wore a ratty old set of coveralls. “Just let me get out of these,” he said, unzipping them to reveal the khaki uniform of a zookeeper. “The wolves are used to this scent, but by now, my clothes could probably walk away by themselves.”

He disappeared into a keeper’s hut and returned a moment later, his hair tied back neatly and his face and hands freshly washed. “So,” I said. “You don’t mind if we film…?”

“Go right ahead,” Luke replied. He led us to a bench that offered the best view of the wolves behind him, because-as he said-they were the real stars.

“I’m rolling,” Alfred said.

I folded my hands in my lap. “You’ve been staying overnight in the enclosure for some time now…”

Luke nodded. “Four months.”

“Continuously?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s gotten to the point where it’s more comfortable for me than any bed.”

Already, I was wondering what this guy’s angle was. You didn’t go sleep with wild animals for four months unless you were trying to get attention drawn to you or you were mentally ill. I thought maybe he wanted his own talk show. In those days, everyone did. “Don’t you worry about the wolves attacking you while you sleep?”

He smiled. “I’m not going to lie-the first night I went in, I didn’t get any sleep. But on the whole, a wolf is far more afraid of a human than vice versa. At this point, because I allowed them to teach me instead of telling them what to do, they’ve accepted me as a low-ranking member of their pack.”

Definitely mental illness, I thought. “Well, Luke, the obvious question is: why?”

He shrugged. “I think if you want to know what a wolf is really like, you can’t just observe. Most biologists would disagree, and say that you can watch the interaction of a wolf pack through your camera lens and draw your conclusions based on what you know of human behavior-but isn’t that completely backward? If you want to understand a wolf’s world, you have to be willing to live in it. You have to speak his language.”

“So you’re telling me you speak wolf?”

Luke grinned. “Fluently. I could even teach you a few phrases.” He stood up, setting one foot on the bench as he leaned in. “There are three different types of howls a wolf makes,” he explained. “There’s a locating howl, which gives the whereabouts of any pack that’s in the area. Not just my family, but rival packs, too. The defensive howl is a little deeper. It means stay away; it’s a way to protect your territory and the pack inside it. The third type of howl is a rallying howl. That’s the classic Hollywood howl-mournful, melancholy. It’s used when a pack member is lost, and scientists used to think it was a measure of grief, but actually, it’s a vocal beacon. A way for a missing family member to try to find his way back home.”

“Can you show me?”

“Only if you help,” Luke said. He pulled me up until I was standing. “Take deep breaths, filling your lungs. Hold those breaths as long as you can, and then exhale. On the third breath, send the howl.” He inhaled three times, cupped his hand to his mouth, and a long, two-tone note swelled through the enclosure, rising over the tops of the trees. The wolves looked up, curious. “Try it,” he said.

“I can’t-”

“Of course you can.” He put his hands on my shoulders from behind. “Breathe in,” he coached. “Breathe out. In… out. In… ready?” Leaning forward, he whispered into my ear. “Let go.”

I closed my eyes, and all the air in my lungs poured forward on a vibration that started in my center and filled my body. Then I did it again. It was primal, guttural. Behind me, I could hear Luke howling a different pattern-longer, lower, more intense. When his voice tangled with mine, the result was a song. This time the wolves in the enclosure tipped their heads back and answered us.

“That’s amazing!” I cried, breaking off to listen as their howls rolled in patterns, like waves. “Do they know we’re human?”

“Does it matter?” Luke asked. “That was a locating howl. Pretty basic.”

“Do another one?”

He took a deep breath, rounding his mouth into an O. The sound that issued was completely different, like a distillation of grief. In that one note I heard the soul of a saxophone, a breaking heart.

“What does that one mean?”

He stared at me, so intense I couldn’t look away. “Is it you?” Luke whispered. “Are you the one I’m looking for?”

Cara is trying-unsuccessfully-to eat the Jell-O on her dinner tray. She can chase the little bowl around with her left hand, but every time she tries to get a spoonful, it either tips over or scoots forward. “Here,” I say, sitting down on the edge of the bed and feeding her myself.

She opens her mouth like a baby bird, swallows. “Are you still mad at me?”

“Yes,” I sigh. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” I watch as she takes another bite, remembering how hard it was to get Cara to eat solid food. She was more likely to mash it into her hair, finger-paint on her high chair tray, or spit it in my face than eat it. At her well-child weigh-ins, she was always on the verge of undernourished, and I’d go out of my way to explain to the nurse practitioners that I wasn’t starving her-she was starving herself.

When Cara was just a year old, we stopped at a McDonald’s on the way home from one of Edward’s Little League games. While I was busy opening up jars of baby food and digging in my purse for a bib, Cara reached from her high chair to Edward’s Happy Meal place mat and started happily gumming a French fry. “What about her baby food?” Edward asked.

“Well,” I replied. “I guess she isn’t a baby anymore.”

He considered this. “Is she still Cara?”

Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might be dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.

Cara pushes away her dinner tray with her good hand and starts flipping through the television channels with the remote control. “There’s nothing on.”