SmokeLong Quarterly

I told you that I wanted you to propose to me with a dog. I imagined finding a rescue waiting for me in the kitchen, an engagement ring dangling from its collar. To tell you the truth, the dog alone would have done it. What I wanted was to commit to caring for a living thing together.

You were the one who told me about the wolf sanctuary. The volunteers took in wolf cubs from zoos and wolf dogs that had been abandoned. Sometimes, you said, they would give the wolves cubes of cheese. I wanted to make a plan to go with you, but even before I started talking about getting engaged you weren’t one for making plans. When I mentioned things that we might do in the future you were always silent.

Wolves tend to mate with those of different coloring. We often find different phenotypes to be attractive. When my eagerness began to fester into impatience, then resentment, I had us both take personality tests. “You see,” I said, “I’m a Judger and you’re a Perceiver. That explains it.” As soon as I’ve realized there is a decision to be made, I’ve decided. You let ideas swirl in your idea tank and every so often you take them out and consider them further. Imagining those long stretches of not knowing causes me visceral discomfort. But in the context of our relationship it was comforting—it wasn’t that you were unsure about me, it was that you were unsure about everything.

Wolves will hide or bury food for later. This behavior is known as caching. It’s a sign of their intelligence that they’re able to delay gratification.

My apartment was a forest of little tokens of your love for me. A drawing of a fox you’d done for me on a piece of cardboard. A sweater of yours you’d let me borrow indefinitely. “Have a nice day” on a sticky note you’d stuck to my pillow, more precious to me than my grandmother’s jewelry. I thought I was being smart by waiting for you. I didn’t expect that one day I would dig and come up with nothing, ask you “Where do you see this going?” and go to bed hungry.

It’s a myth that wolves frequently fight to establish dominance within a pack. In truth, if a wolf wants to lead his own pack he is free to do so, leaving his original pack in a phenomenon known as dispersal.

I always wanted us to have the big fight. I didn’t realize that in lieu of that you were leaving me quietly, peacefully.

Wolves are one of the few mammals that parent communally. They will accept any cubs into their pack and treat them as well as their biological offspring. The folklore of many cultures features stories of wolves raising humans. Might the ubiquity of these stories evince some truth? There has been at least one documented case of a feral child who lived amid a wolf pack in the mountains of southern Spain.

The clock was ticking for me to have biological children. I wasn’t in my twenties anymore, and I started doing the math—that if this didn’t work out with you, I’d have one year to mourn, a second year to meet someone new, and a third year to be sure enough that we should have kids together. From there I back-calculated how long I could stay with you.

Wolf packs don’t have an alpha male but a parental pair.

Scientists believe that wolves were domesticated many times over in human history. They also believe that it was the young of both species that initiated that domestication. Imagined this way, we see it less as one dominant species molding another and more as two species entering into a relationship.

I wasn’t trying to domesticate you. I just wanted to come in from the cold.

If you didn’t want us to be a parental pair, I needed to start looking.

When I finally broke up with you I hoped that the shock of it would be what finally convinced you to commit to me. “I thought it would be too,” you told me, sobbing, over the phone. That’s when I knew that you would never know, and that in itself was a kind of knowing. I spent a month burying my face in the chest of anyone who stopped by, howling.

Wolves are a keystone species. Entire ecosystems depend on them. They don’t just control the density of prey populations but their behaviors. Elk and deer graze less in open areas, allowing vegetation to grow lusher and even alter the flow of rivers. Wolves change the very landscape. Ever since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, scientists have observed a marked increase in new growth.

After that first year of mourning you, I finally went to the wolf sanctuary. I was wearing your sweater but I no longer thought of you when I wore it. It had gone through the wash enough times that it fit me. Outside the main enclosure I watched the parental pair dozing together. A few paces away was a carcass, the tendons ruby red in the winter sun. I sent you pictures.