den
Ice recedes at the river. Days grow longer. Sophie gives birth to two pups in her scooped and sculpted earthen hollow. Soon one no longer breathes. She digs a hole. She buries her pup. It will not be eaten by other predators. Another male wolf joins their small pack; they are now four.
Ice builds again, then retreats. Sophie gives birth to six pups—three male, three female—and the pack explodes to ten. A small gray-brown male searches the den, sniffing, pawing, yellow eyes gleaming. Green grasses grow tall, shadows short. Yellow Eyes follows the breezes, a hare’s musky scent, nose in the air then to the ground. A spotted snake stops him, hissing, snapping. He jumps and runs back home. The days lengthen. Yellow Eyes trails a red fox kit, a ground squirrel. A magpie crashes through branches, wind sends leaves tumbling. Nose twitching, he runs, captivated, a hundred different scents competing for his attention. His mother’s howl sings in the distance. He turns, the sound guiding him home.
The Tetons hold snow like treasure, buried under overhangs, beneath trees, in shadowed gullies. Sheer cliff faces are cold, gray stone. Some drip black with snowmelt. Jagged edges slice the air and mirror what within me is rough, defiant. We’re suspended eleven thousand feet above sea level, and the highest crags thrust another thousand feet into the sky. Jackson lies a vertical mile below the belly of our plane. Mark speaks into his headset and Kirsten responds, a muffled blur of sound. I cannot speak, a bubble of awe in my throat. The three main peaks of the Grand Tetons—Grand Teton, Mount Owen, and Teewinot—are the loudest of the range. Its other voices are no less resonant, though, and as we float, I see the sinew connecting them, the vales, the ridges of bone. The discordance gives rise to harmony, and I want to remain here, in this air, beside this massive disruption of earth.
Two hours later the wheels of the Piper Cherokee touch the Salt Lake City runway, and we chug to a stop by the hangar. We unload, pack everything into the back of Mark’s wagon, and slide my bike on top of it all. I’m headed home.
There are two in there, she says. I immediately accept this, as if I’d known these past four months that I’m carrying twins. It’s February, 1991. Bob leaps up in delight, dances around the darkened ultrasound lab. The technician moves her wand, clicks the mouse, measures, labels. You can clean off your tummy, she says, I’m all done. Bob hugs me and helps me sit; he’s glowing. I feel a bit larger than I did before.
They’re identical, and one is just a smidgen smaller than the other. Unusual in identicals, but not worrisome. They’ll keep an eye on it, and compare the discrepancy with next month’s ultrasound. I christen the big one Hoss, the smaller, Little Joe. I loved Bonanza.
The size disparity increases over the next two ultrasounds, but by the time I’m asked to come in for a test, Little Joe’s heartbeat is gone. He’d kicked the night before, perhaps performing his final somersault. The following day my body begins laboring, and at just shy of thirty-two weeks, my twin boys are born. Hoss is whisked to the ICU while I hold Little Joe. He is tiny, a few ounces over three pounds. He is dusky, no oxygen to blush his skin. His eyes, behind closed lids, must be blue, like Jake’s. I cradle him against me, tears flow. The obstetrician flicks her needle back and forth, repairing my skin, and, when she’s done, touches my knee. Tells me the nurse will take Little Joe when I’m ready. Ten minutes, twenty. I eventually release him to Bob, who hands him to a nurse, who carries him to the bowels of the hospital where his small, human form will be collected by the mortuary. We name Hoss, Jake, and name Little Joe, Joseph: he was going to be Andrew, but we’ve only ever known him as Little Joe.
I’d been in labor all night, and delivered the boys at nine on a gray, rainy morning. The loss, the death, the shock took my voice, took everything I thought I knew about myself and smashed it into pieces, then scattered them throughout the universe, laughing, daring me to find and collect them, to glue them back into a mosaic that might possibly, in small ways, resemble the me I used to be. Pieces float out of reach. Trust. Control. Lightheartedness. Wild abandon. Even today I continue to find small pieces of myself in unexpected places: dancing on a lake surface, looking suspiciously like moonlight. In the flick of a mule deer’s ear. In the eyes of my friend whose wife is gradually, almost imperceptibly, being paralyzed by ALS. I add these back, I fill in. I can live with a shattered heart. Like Doug’s wolves, I, too, can run with a broken leg.
Four days after the delivery, we stood in the cemetery, the winter-matted grass still dotted with snow. Family, the closest of friends, two dozen of us staring at Little Joe’s grave. Bob handed a white rose to each while I stood in a summer dress, arms wrapped around myself. Then we climbed into our car, and drove back to the hospital.
I return home from our Yellowstone and Montana trip the second Saturday in June. I drag my bags into the house I love, put my bicycle in the garage, leave the garage door open. Daniel and I hug hello, exchange a kiss. I look into his amber eyes, see a reflection of myself—wary, self-protective. I go to our room and change into biking clothes. He sits on a stool, in the kitchen. “Do you want to come?” I ask. “I need to head up Emigration.”
“No, thanks,” he says. “I’ve already been out, rode a little this morning.”
Transitions are difficult for me. This time I arrived home filled with longing for a closer connection to the land, to my earth goddess self. I’d spent a week away from everything I knew, and found that I was more comfortable in those foreign spaces than I was in my own home. My den. My disrupted den. I needed to visit my canyon.
Early in my first marriage I learned to decompress, alone, for ten or fifteen minutes after coming home from work. I was a buyer for Nordstrom, a position, it was said, that ate people like me for lunch. The more cutthroat you were, the more often you were promoted. I had climbed up the food chain by working an associate attorney’s hours, by always saying yes, and by learning to ignore pain and disappointment. I carried our medical insurance. It was less expensive than what Bob—a financial analyst—could provide. The coverage was excellent. It covered most bills from my pregnancy, even from the operating room delivery. And when the newborn ICU bills started flowing in, I used a notebook to track what they allowed, what they paid, and what I owed. Neat lines tracked the dollars and cents, columns representing needle sticks, blood draws, monitoring machines, nursing care, assessments from neonatologists, ophthalmologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists. The warming table, the incubator. And to keep this insurance, I would keep working. Jake had a preexisting condition, and Bob’s company medical policy would not insure him. After my leave, I would head back to my job to keep our family covered. I’d hire a nanny, someone to care for Jake while I was gone.
At the time, I didn’t know much about wolf behavior, that the breeding female of a wolf pack is known as the alpha, and that it is often the alpha female who directs the activities of the pack. It is she who chooses her mate and searches the landscape to find the right location for her den, then grows and gives birth to the next generation of hunters. As soon as she has recovered from delivery, she leaves her pups behind with uncles, older siblings, sometimes even the alpha male, while she hunts the rabbits, the elk, the bison, the moose, that will feed her pack. I’m hardly the only mother to head off to work.
The Inuit are one of many indigenous populations who rely on an oral history to teach new generations about the past. One of their folk tales is beautifully illustrated in Tim Jessell’s Amorak. In a fable of the beginning of the world, the Great Spirit tells the first woman to cut a large hole into the ice of the land. She does, and out of this hole come the animals, one after another, the bears and the seals, the snowy owl and the wolverine, the arctic hare, the red fox and the arctic fox, the lynx and the great auk, and lastly, the caribou. The Great Spirit tells the woman that of all the creatures the caribou is the most valuable, for it will be the animal to provide sustenance and warmth for the people of the land. And this grows to be true, as the caribou population flourishes. The children of the first woman hunt the caribou, obtaining meat to eat and skins to be made into clothing and coverings. The children hunt the biggest and best
