‘Once There Were Wolves’ Charlotte McConaghy

Inti Flynn has come to the Scottish Highlands to lead a team of biologists on a mission. They are releasing a pack of fourteen gray wolves in an attempt to restore the ecological balance that has been badly upset by lumbering and killing of the wolves. The local rural community is up against the project as they fear for the lives of their sheep and themselves too, for wolves are a much maligned and feared of animals.

Inti and her twin sister Aggie grew up splitting their time between their father, who was a lumberjack turned naturalist in Alaska and their police officer mother in Australia who deals with crimes against women day in an out. This background pretty much sets the stage for the entire story – intimacy with nature, excruciating mental and physical pain that follows them through life, crime and its gory details, the impact it has on the victims and the perpetrators.

All the characters have shades of grey, and there are specific and plausible reasons for what they have done, have gone through. Aggie is catatonic, Duncan, the local police chief is obviously hiding some past trauma, Lainey, the local sheep farmer Stuart’s wife is being abused by her husband regularly but everyone seems to turn a blind eye towards it. The mysteries are solved one by one as the wolves are slowly reintroduced and start acclimatizing themselves to the wilderness. Inti and her team walks on a tightrope, for they know one misstep and the wolves would all be killed. Things come to a head when Stuart disappears. Foul play is suspected, Inti knows what happened, but she cannot disclose it to anyone. It is when Duncan is attacked in a similar manner that even Inti figures out what exactly was happening.

As in her earlier book Migrations, the theme is climate change, destruction of nature, extinction of species and so on that is the thread that holds the narrative together and takes it forward. The protagonists are similar, they are haunted by their past, they are so attuned to their natural surroundings that their trauma at nature as they knew it getting destroyed is visceral. In Inti’s case, it is even physical, she is afflicted with “mirror touch synesthesia,” a rare condition that causes the individuals to feel the same sensations that another person feels. Whether it is the wolves, Aggie or Duncan, the effect on Inti is devastating.

The intense connect that Inti and Aggie has with nature is directly related to their childhood that was spent with their father,

“The forest has a beating heart we can’t see,” Dad told us once. He lay flat on the earth and we copied him, placing our hands on the warm ground and we copied him, placing our hands on the warm ground and our ears to the underbrush, listening, “It’s here, beneath us. 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 though their roots. They warn of danger and they share sustenance. They’re like us, a family. Stronger together. Nothing gets through this life alone.” He smiled then, and asked, “Can you hear the beating?” and we could, somehow we could.”

This is ultimately what the story is about, that like the trees, we cannot remain isolated. our redemption is in our connections, in understanding and supporting each other, and turning to each other to find solace, peace and redemption.

McConaghy’s forte seem to be in transferring the pain of nature and animals that are vulnerably left to man’s follies, to the reader. All the characters are flawed, many of them have had acts of criminal nature in their past. She addresses the matter of domestic violence in a subtle manner, yet it is so graphic in nature at times that it leaves you extremely disturbed. I wouldn’t recommend reading it just before you go to bed. Yet, it is hope that it conveys at the end. It will be a rare human whose heart will not beat with Inti and her wolves.

It is obvious right from the beginning that the inspiration for the story came from the Yellowstone Wolf Reintroduction Project. Wolves might very well be one of the most misunderstood species of animals. They are considered wild, yet they are so close to us, humans. We too were wild once. And we still are, just that we have learned to camouflage it well. McConaghy makes us live with the wolves, feel their thoughts and emotions. Even after a few months of reading the book, I can hear their heartbeats, sense their smell, even see them in their cave.

At the end of the second book by this author, I so wanted to meet her and ask her a hundred questions. “How do you feel so deeply? How do you find your stories? How deep does it drain you? Because if reading your stories shakes us to the core, how much more intense it would be for you? Have you lived in these places? Have you lived with wolves? Have you know such deep heartbreaks? Why is it that your protagonists are always running from law? How do you write like this?”

(note to self: time to pick up Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’ again)