The Wolf Border

Her silence radiates dissatisfaction, and she feels sorry for Huib, though he seems in no way worried. Zen acceptance; he will move on to another job, thinking it fortuitous and an adventure, which, by virtue of his temperament, it will be.

The place did not exist when she was a child, is less than twenty years old, but in that time much has changed, the fabric of British politics, state definitions. It can be done, she thinks, if people want it badly enough, if they are tired, and hopeful. She stalls, wanders the hallway, reads a notice about the architect – a Catalan, controversiall

The casualness of the outcome is surprising to her. There are no handshakes. No signature of transferred ownership has been required, though there will be paperwork, stamps, scheduled legislature, she knows, wilderness being as bureaucratic as anywhere else.

When she woke, there was a sense of powerlessness, of it all being over. The Annerdale pack. The cottage in the woods. She got up, brushed her teeth, and sat on the bed, watching the sun rise and the rain on the lake, feeling the light of day translate notions of what is right and wrong – or expand those notions.

The worthy investment, the millions spent building a trophic Eden, it is simply another grand scheme that he can choose to dismantle again, if he so wishes. There is a bigger, more exciting game – testing beyond the cage, wolves in the real world. You godly fuck, she thinks, you absolute maniac, this is what you wanted all along.

Are they really so blind? she wonders. Sylvia, protecting her father, complicit in his scheme by virtue of her institutionalisation. Huib is reconciled, co-opted, too white of heart to suspect anything nefarious. She begins to feels sick. There is a conspiracy around the table, and they don’t even realise they are taking part. Even she is implicate

She tracks through the papers and the blogs – there is a huge public outcry over the dead wolf; the picture is being widely circulated. So like the English, Rachel thinks: object, ignore, and then, late in the day, after a tragedy, rally.

They find them a few minutes later, passing over the intermediate lands, the debatable lands as they once were. They are running over open moorland, the surviving five, driven hard by the noise of the helicopter. Ra leads them. She watches them run. She is rusty at targeting on the move, but could almost certainly tranquillise the breeding pair, we

She knows better than to assume, as she did for years, that men enjoy her casualness, her coolness, that it suits them better, or that they are less invested. It doesn’t take them long to sense that such an attitude stems from something else – a fear, a flaw, stuntedness.