Charlotte McConaghy

Once, it was birds who gave birth to a fiercer me.

GREENLAND NESTING SEASON

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.

—ANGELA CARTER

“Waste is the true enemy of the planet,”

I had always known there was something different about me, but that was the day I first recognized it to be dangerous. It was also the day, as I stumbled out of the shed into a long violet dusk, that I looked to the trees’ edge and saw my first wolf, and it saw me.

So we are four—three biologists and one vet—stealing, moonlit, into a forest with our precious cargo

Silent and unseen. Without permission. The way it always should have begun.

But we are placing them in a pen together in the hope they will decide they like each other. We need breeding pairs for this to work.

It’s just as likely they’ll kill each other.

Today, wolves once again walk upon this ground, which has not seen their kind in hundreds of years. Does something in their bodies remember this land, as it remembers them?

He places his head over the back of Six’s neck in a sign of dominance and I feel, with exquisite vividness, his muzzle pressing onto the back of my neck. His soft fur tickles my skin, the heat of his breath brings bumps to my flesh.