Once There Were Wolves

“Both cottage and camp sit on the edge of Abernethy Forest, one of the last remnants of the ancient Caledonian Forest that arrived here after the Ice Age. These old trees belong to an unbroken, 9,000-year evolutionary chain, and it’s within them that we placed the closest wolf pen, the one containing wolves Six, Nine, and Thirteen.”

This section provides the context for the wolves’ rewilding. The ancient history of the forest is juxtaposed with the modern efforts of humans to control the landscape, which has resulted in its dying. The wolves are part of the forest’s ancient lineage, and their reintroduction symbolizes returning the forest to its natural state.

“This is how the trees speak with and care for each other. Their roots tangle together, dozens of trees with dozens more in a web that reaches on forever, and they whisper to each other through their roots. They warn of danger and they share sustenance. They’re like us, a family. Stronger together. Nothing gets through this life alone.”

This paragraph is a clear statement of the novel’s thesis: Humans and nature are stronger together. The statement “Nothing gets through this life alone” refers to nature on a large scale and to Inti in her personal life.

“Why did she keep bringing us here to witness the absolute worst in people? […] Because she was trying to break me. To make me admit that she was right. That people were, for the most part, irredeemable. And that if I didn’t toughen up I would become one of the people in those stands, telling a judge what had been done to me.”

Inti’s mother brings her daughters to court cases when are young. Many of them feature female survivors of rape and domestic violence. When Inti is young, she staunchly believes that people are inherently good. After her sister’s rape, her perception changes. As the novel progresses, Inti will learn that people are not all good or all bad.

“[W]hen I saw the instruments of Dad’s life scattered all over the benches instead of neatly hanging from the wall in their respective spots, when I saw the state of the blades, the blood that had been left to stain and rust the steel, the oil spills that hadn’t been cleaned up, the animal carcasses left to rot instead of tenderly treated and stored, I didn’t feel at home, I felt scared.”

This paragraph describes the moment Inti and Aggie discover their father’s mental health deteriorated. McConaghy uses objects to represent characters’ personalities. Inti’s father is represented by his tools and his shed. They are the foundation of his lifestyle, and he values them greatly. They symbolize his ethical approach to living in communion with nature and his respect for the animals he kills. Seeing these instruments scattered warns Inti that something is wrong.

“Ways to kill a person: slipping something in his drink, tampering with his brakes, driving him off an icy road, following him into the night and bludgeoning him…”

Inti is sitting in the Snow Goose after confronting Stuart. Her thoughts of killing Stuart foreshadow his murder and that she will become a suspect. They also establish her personality as someone who has the mindset to kill. Later, she will learn that she lacks the ability to carry out her intentions.

“[A]ll I am is this wolf, all I see is the beauty of him, and the power even now, even so reduced. Why didn’t I come to him when I knew he was straying too close to danger? Why didn’t I come and move him along somehow? The strongest of them. The mightiest. The most at home here. Snuffed out.”

After Red kills Number Nine, Inti fears for the success of the project. Nine was the strongest wolf, and his death underscores that a man with a gun is the apex predator. This incident sets the stage for Stuart’s murder, which seems like a wolf’s retribution for killing one of its own.

“My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart. He said we might survive this mistake if we found a way to rewild ourselves.”

The project of rewilding the wolves simultaneously rewilds Inti, Aggie, and the entire community. Rewilding can be seen as reconnecting. People have developed an idea of separateness from “the wild.” Learning that humanity and nature are part of the same world and rely upon one another for survival is the goal of rewilding.

“When I turned thirty, almost to the day, I started thinking about a child. Something in my body said Now, now, this is why you’re here, this is the meaning. An urgent clock I hadn’t believed was real until I felt its chiming. The cells of me wanted to nurture, they wanted to love and protect.”

When Inti realizes she is pregnant, her old desire for a child surfaces. It is at odds with her current belief that she no longer has enough love to give to a child.

“‘It must be what turns you on, huh? The thought of scaring women. Only we’re not scared. I’m not scared of you, Stuart. I think you’re pathetic. I stand by my window and watch you out there and I fucking laugh.’”

Inti reverses the abuser-victim paradigm by confronting and belittling Stuart. Rather than showing dominance, she tells him is reveals his smallness. She implies that he gets pleasure from terrifying women. His response, which is to move toward Inti in a threatening manner, suggests that her comments have struck a nerve.

“I don’t know enough to recognize the forensic difference between a serrated weapon and the tearing of an animal’s teeth, and I can’t look for long enough to make a guess, but I know how this will appear.”

Inti’s mention of a serrated weapon when she finds Stuart’s body foreshadows the truth of the murder, which is that Aggie slashed Stuart’s throat using a serrated knife. The ferocity of the wound and its similarity to a wolf attack show that Aggie was acting on animalistic instinct, rather than careful premeditation.

“[W]hen I try to meet her eyes there is no awareness there. She is just too tired for it. I hope she is somewhere better. I wish I were somewhere better because here fucking sucks. Here is a waking nightmare.”

When Inti returns to the cottage after finding Stuart, Aggie has drifted back into her withdrawn state. The trauma of murdering Stuart has likely exhausted her, leaving her in a stupor, but to Inti, Aggie’s unresponsiveness removes her as a possible suspect for Stuart’s murder. McConaghy skillfully creates this expectation in the reader as well by establishing Aggie’s need for constant care.

“‘One of you will have to leave the other eventually.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she doesn’t belong in the forest, and you do,’ Mum said simply. Abruptly there were tears in my eyes.

‘But I don’t want that without her.’

Mum studied my face. Hers blurred. ‘Toughen up.’”

The possibility of Inti’s and Aggie’s separation looms throughout the novel, even though each seems to completely depend upon the other. Ironically, Aggie proves their mother wrong when she realizes that she, too, belongs in the forest.

It’s a blueberry.

‘Huh?’

Aggie tilts her head. Your baby is the size of a blueberry.”

Aggie’s recognition of Inti’s pregnancy forces Inti to confront what it would mean for her to bring another life into the world. Aggie supports whatever decision Inti makes, but she knows what Inti is thinking. Aggie tells her not to give the baby up on her account. Inti struggles with this decision for the rest of the novel.

“She was wearing a T-shirt dress that made her look skinny and leggy, and she’d cut her hair into a chic bob, her bangs reaching her huge sooty eyes. She looked gorgeous, and painfully cool, and light-years from the girls we were in the forest.”

Inti often looks at Aggie with awe. They are identical twins, but Inti never remarks on her own appearance. This quote reveals that Inti may see Aggie as more beautiful and cooler than herself.

“And as it has finally turned out, delicate Number Thirteen, left behind in her pen because she was too afraid to leave, might not have been afraid at all. Maybe she was simply waiting. Because yesterday, yearling male Number Twelve, who was circling dangerously close to her pen and worrying us all, moved within its chain-link fence. But he didn’t attack Thirteen, he mated with her.

The behavior of wolves is difficult to predict, even for Inti who has studied them for most of her life. Thirteen’s behavior reminds her that it is not wise to judge a wolf’s intentions. This idea foreshadows her night in the forest when she thinks the wolves have come to kill her, but they sleep beside her instead.

“Five years passed in Alaska. The three of us managed to coexist, for the most part. But I’d noticed a change in my sister. She no longer seemed lit from within, excited by the prospect of waking to a new day. There hadn’t been any new signs invented in a long while; in fact I couldn’t remember the last time she’d used our sign language.”

Inti notices a change in Aggie’s behavior five years into her marriage with Gus. The change comes gradually because domestic violence in a relationship develops over time. Inti is seeing the result of Aggie being worn down psychologically, emotionally, and physically from trying to survive in an abusive relationship.

“Birch seeds cover the ground each year, trillions they say, but the deer come along and eat up any of the tree shoots so nothing can grow. Now we’ve been tackling the deer trouble for many, many years here, love, since before you were alive. And out that way they’re not as fortunate as we are here—they don’t have any wolves to move the deer along.”

Mrs. Doyle voices support for the wolf project, citing the problem of deer overpopulation as a major factor in deforestation because they overgraze the landscape. Mrs. Doyle says they are “fortunate” to have the wolves returned to the Highlands because she understands the interconnectedness of wildlife and the environment.

“‘A piece of advice? Move your cattle back to your own land and get them behind a fence. You were warned about this months ago, again and again. And now the Wolf Trust is expected to reimburse you?’”

The farmers do not want to fence in their land because it will force them to acknowledge that the wolves have become a permanent part of the surrounding woods. Their disregard is an act of defiance, but as the wolves grow in strength and number, more livestock will be killed if the farmers refuse to act.

“I have always worried more about the plight of the predator than its prey. Predators spend their lives starving slowly. Every hunt could be their last. So if it was just me here, I would let the wolves feast. But this is a world carved by humans. Feasting on the wrong animals will see the wolves dead.”

One of the novel’s motifs is the blurred line between predators and prey. Unlike the others, Inti understands what is at stake for the wolves and how vulnerable they are, especially in a foreign landscape.

“If Aggie couldn’t leave her husband then I would become her, I’d play the old game and don her disguise, and I would end this toxic marriage of theirs, I would leave him for her. And I would only tell her after it was done, so she wouldn’t try to stop me.”

Inti’s protective twin instinct drives her to place herself in harm’s way to free Aggie from Gus. Her move is naïve because if there were a way for the sisters to leave, Aggie would have already done it. Inti did not consider that Gus was holding Aggie hostage by threatening to harm Inti, and ironically, it is Aggie’s protective instinct toward her sister that compels her to stay with Gus.

“For the first time this morning I Googled whether this was normal, all of it, and discovered that the size of my belly is actually smaller than average. […] I put the phone down in a cold panic the second it started telling me things like how the baby can see light now, and coughs and hiccups and dreams.”

The longer Inti is pregnant, the more difficult it is for her to ignore the choice she will have to make. She does not want to humanize the baby because she wants to give it up and knows that thinking about it as a person will make the decision more difficult.

“He let me inside, and Aggie was naked on the bed and really out of it, drunk or stoned or something, and James was holding her down by the throat, he was holding me by the throat, and when Aggie saw me she tried to sit up, she shouted to get me out of here, to let her go, she shouted at them to stop, begged for them to stop until James swung his fist and punched her so hard in the face that she was knocked out.”

McConaghy describes the rape in visceral detail. Though most people do not have mirror-touch synesthesia, empathy makes us internalize the experience of others. Conveying the details vividly makes the reader unable to turn away from Gus’s act of violence and to empathize with Inti’s direct experience of the rape through her mirror-touch synesthesia.

“Aggie wakes in the night to a furious hammering on the door. There isn’t a doubt in her mind that it’s what she’s been waiting for: Gus has found her. She takes a sharp knife from the kitchen, as she would do several more times in this very same kitchen when needs arose, and she looks through the window and sees a man. Her husband, come to finish her. She decides she will finish him first. She feels a thrill. A need. And fear to obliterate the rest, to swallow it all whole.”

The description of Aggie’s thoughts and feelings in this section align with the response of someone with Battered Woman Syndrome to the threat of violence from their abuser. She cannot separate the past from the present, and in this moment, instead of allowing herself to be prey once more, she decides to become the predator.