Trophic Cascade
The test is positive.
Amelia sits on her toilet lid, legs pushed up to her chest and arms wrapped around her knees. She had only looked at the test for a second. Maybe she saw it wrong. She feels her hands grip her thigh, her skin turning white as the pressure of each finger forces blood out of her capillaries. The small, animal reality of the gesture grounds her. It’s her blood. Her body. Her legs prickling her fingers with stubble. For a moment, she’s present in herself. Then she turns her head, glancing again at her bathroom countertop. The brilliant blue plus remains.
Amelia’s mind is built for hiking through the terrain of Yellowstone, tracking cadavers and collecting numbers on the who, what, when, and where of their desiccation. Science is a discipline of productive uncertainties—the meaning and veracity of results, their applications—but those she can tolerate, even enjoy. A scientist moves towards understanding.
The ambiguities of language are less soluble. In high school, Amelia floated through English classes, her head full of cotton and barbed wire. Her teachers, looming over dense, old texts, would say there was “no right answer,” which irritated her. In the few mandatory college composition and literature classes she took as an undergrad, what she perceived as a simple phrase could be an hour-long debate. Meaning appeared so open-ended there might as well not be meaning. Even in her taxonomy class, she felt filled with impulsive rage when she learned “fish” was not a real category of creature—fooled again by the common tongue. Language is amorphous. Slippery.
Positive: colloquially associated with optimism and goodness. Positive: denoting the presence of a condition or a disease. Wolves can test positive for sarcoptic mange; tiny mites burrowing in their skin cause relentless itching and hair loss. People can test positive for a coronavirus with crown-shaped spiky surface proteins that will latch onto their cells’ receptors and destroy their lungs.
And sometimes, mammals test positive for the presence of a group of cells rapidly undergoing mitosis in their uterus. Like Amelia. That’s if she’s lucky and it hasn’t attached itself to her fallopian tube in a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. She shakes her head. She’s catastrophizing, as her mother would say. Chances are the unwanted embryo is doing just fine.
She is the most pathetic cliché. A one-night stand with a guy she has no interest in seeing again from another grad program, a hasty condom application. A frantic trip to the drug store five weeks later. A pregnancy test.
Amelia is a scientist. Or at least, she’s trying to be. As such, she never trusts an isolated result. So, she fishes another test out of the plastic bag she discarded on her bubblegum pink bath mat.
An hour and an additional trip to the store later, there are six unambiguous, positive tests sitting on her bathroom countertop. A laugh rips out of her mouth, hysterical and untimely. There is another word with a variety of meanings and usages, all applicable here.
Fuck.
She’s got Topics in Biodiversity at 3 p.m. It’s 2:53 by the time she’s done taking all the tests, so she’s got no time to process the situation. That’s grad school. She clambers into her pants, jacket, and a mask before heading out the door. The walk to Lewis Hall from her graduate student housing in Nelson Story Towers is usually around ten minutes.
At a brisk pace, she manages to slip in just in time, certain that she looked so dignified to all the passersby as she half-ran across campus. She exhales and plops into her normal seat. She doesn’t think she’d be in trouble even if she were tardy; Dr. Connie Peters never minds when her students are a bit late. Peters and her work at Yellowstone with the Wolf Project were the main reasons Amelia applied to Montana State University to begin with. Peters’s focus is large ungulates, and they emailed back and forth before Amelia applied. When she got accepted, it came with funding as a research assistant under Peters while she worked towards her M.S. in Biological Sciences.
Amelia’s thesis is on the behavioral dynamics of wolves. Conveniently, this makes the hours she spends categorizing ungulate carcasses in Yellowstone relevant to her own research as well. Dr. Peters’s science is the science of open terrain, of dirty fingernails and things visible to the naked eye. It has a tangible quality that a laboratory lacks. Amelia and the other assistant, Macie, spend their weekends driving the hour and a half to Yellowstone, where they take notes on elk and other large ungulates’ bodies for Peters. Aside from one summer course, they’ll work entirely in the park when the semester ends in May.
Amelia opens her laptop. Peters nods to acknowledge her and then coughs roughly, announcing that class has begun.
“So,” she starts, looking around. She balances against a large table at the front of the room, her posture the affected nonchalance shared by many professors. “What did we think?”
For class today, they listened to a podcast about the results of wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone. It was a subject with which Amelia, due to her thesis and work with Peters, was intimately familiar. On another day, she might have chimed in with her thoughts about hydrological regime changes due to wolf influence. Instead, she searches “pregnancy effects on body” in a private browser.
After a second of silence, Peters starts the conversation. “Well, since that podcast came out, I’ll acknowledge wolf populations in Yellowstone have become even more of a hot topic politically, which I find interesting.”
Despite the mask Connie wears, Amelia can tell she is smiling because her crow’s feet deepen. “Yes, a lot of you-know-who’s,” she mock-whispers, meaning Republicans, “they want to increase hunting rights—have increased them—to take care of the wolf problem, quote unquote. Now, maybe I’m just old, but I remember the eighties and nineties. I was working at Yellowstone even then. And I’ll tell you, from a scientist’s perspective, we had quite a lack-of-wolf problem.”
On Amelia’s computer, a GIF shows an animated illustration of a baby in utero as it crowds the organs up the ribcage, collapsing them against a straining heart. The website describes how the heart rate elevates and blood volume increases thirty to fifty percent. The body swells, a balloon of blood and hormones.
Peters keeps talking. “I specialize in grazing habits and behaviors of large ungulates. Elk, deer, and the like. So, I was at Yellowstone to study them. After seventy years without wolves, the place was a wreck. The valleys were bare, overgrazed to hell. Genetic diversity dropped. No vegetation means no animals who eat that vegetation! It was just yellow-gray yuck. Here, I’ll pull up my photo album.”
Babies absorb the calcium in their mother’s bones if they aren’t offered enough through food. They kick at her sides and push down on her bladder. The websites say it begins to feel like you can’t breathe around week thirty-one. Amelia’s only five weeks in, but she feels the tiny gasps now—her breath hiccups as she tries to fill her lungs.
She looks up to see Peters, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, place the album under a projector to display the images all blown-up. All of this was touched on in the podcast, but she loves to repeat things with different emphasis and detail. Amelia’s seen these photos half a dozen times.
“So,” Peters continues. “No nesting for birds. No habitats for fish because the water started running broad and shallow. The damn aspen stopped growing up. Little twig-trees.”
She flips through three photos labeled “1997,” “2004,” and “2020.” The first shows thinning trees, long stretches of grass, and not much else. The next has thicker foliage, bushes dotting the ground. The final photo is the money shot: a rich field, full of all different vegetation and wildlife. Appropriately, it even has a lighter sky.
The worst would be after. Yes, her stomach would bear stretch marks and her bladder control would shrink, but the true worst would be when the child existed. Its demands would only grow after birth. Her life would be forfeited to service.
“So, people have a wolf problem now.” Peters opines. “They say with too many wolves, there’s not enough elk left for hunters. Actually, there’s more elk now than there were then. No, in my mind, it’s this old, European feeling—hatred of the wolf. White guy lawmaker, French peasant fearing the beast along the Seine. Potato, po-ta-to. It’s a deep-rooted thing. If you ask me, these guys fear wolves, and they hunt them to feel power over what they’re afraid of. Plain and simple.”
Peters pauses, throwing her hands out like a victorious debate team captain. Silvia, the PhD candidate, raises her hand to say something about trophic cascades. From there, the discussion takes off as it always does. Amelia sits low in her seat and tries to distract herself from the pregnancy blogs by taking notes. Peters looks at her a couple of times where she’d normally speak up, but doesn’t pressure her.
After they are let out, Peters goes up to her desk. “Alright?” she asks. She’s the kind of gruff old academic who loves talking about her field and not much else; Amelia appreciates the attempt at concern.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just tired from studying for the Qualifying Exam.”
It’s the second-semester requirement she’s been most anxious about, so she’s technically not lying. An oral examination on four areas of specialization. It’s a trial by fire, and if she can’t hack it, she’ll be screwed. She’s scheduled to speak in front of the committee on April twenty-sixth, only six days from today.
They talk for a few more minutes. Peters promises she’ll be okay while Amelia’s foot taps a record of every second until they wave goodbye.
Back in her apartment, she spends several hours researching her situation online. Then she paces in circles from her oven, around her kitchen table, to the window of her living room, and back. She slams her toes on the curved foot of her green loveseat and curses.
She won’t do anything until she makes the call. She doesn’t need to involve anyone; the miracle of remote medicine means the process will be entirely within her own home. But for whatever masochistic reason, she’s decided to call her mom.
Amelia knows her mother will tell her to keep the baby. She also knows that’s not what she wants to hear. Her mom is fairly liberal, so she won’t say it out of moral conviction. No, the real reason is that, like many mothers, Donna Roberts sees her daughter as an extension of herself. It’s not a conscious or malicious thing, but she does. She’s always styled Amelia in her image. And Amelia knows Donna will want her daughter to replicate the choice she made.
When she was younger, Amelia could feel her mother’s discontent. Her young brain took a tally each time her mother’s busy hands passed her on to a bus driver, babysitter, or grandmother. She felt her mother exhale with each transfer. The inches between her parents radiated with repulsion, like two magnets of the same polarity being forced together. Amelia doesn’t resent her because of that—far from it—she knows Donna performed motherhood with admirable diligence. Vitamins, checkups, Christmas presents, forehead kisses, all were given with absent-minded grace. Her mom offers love like it’s her personal form of jury duty.
Donna is the type of woman who goes to church every Sunday, though Amelia has never once seen her read the Bible or pray in her free time. A social believer, not a private one. It was the same with her practice of motherhood.
It wasn’t until Amelia was in her teens that she finally heard the story of her conception, retooled by time and affection into a ‘happy’ accident. It was fate, her mother cooed, but it kept Donna from touring with a prestigious ballet company. The pregnancy itself had been a horrendous struggle that almost killed her. For Donna, there is always some greater purpose. It’s how she justifies all she’s chosen to endure. Mother: a martyr for causes that only present themselves after the fact.
Now that she’s older, Amelia can relate to her mother more. She’s a vibrant woman to be around. There’s still some awkward, unmotherly feeling between them, but it has ameliorated with time. The umbilical cord of obligation has begun to unwind. They work better as friends.
She collapses onto her loveseat and presses her top contact.
The phone rings four times before her mom picks up. “Hello?” she asks, voice robotic and echoey over the phone. “Amelia?”
“Hi, Mom,” she breathes out. Her shoulders lower from where they’ve bunched up around her ears.
“Hey, honey. How’re you doing up there?”
“Um. I-I’m alright. School’s good.”
“What’re you not saying?” Donna cuts to the point. She can probably hear it, the faltering assurance in Amelia’s voice. It’s the same as when she called Amelia out on totaling her car last year or almost failing U.S. History as a junior in high school.
“Well. Um—I don’t—I hooked up with a classmate a couple of weeks ago. And I swear, Mom, we used a condom, but—”
“No,” she moans. “You’re pregnant.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
Her mother is quiet for a while. There is only the sound of breathing on the line. Donna must be planning out a new future for her disappointment of an only child. Drop out, come home, and get a job. Nothing fancy, just something for the baby’s expenses. Amelia can stay home with them until she gets married someday to a guy with a nice house.
“What do you want to do?” her mom asks.
Visions of suburban picket fences vanish. “What?” Amelia gawks.
“What do you want to do, now that you know? Because nothing isn’t an option. We’ve got to do something. But what, well, that’s up to you.”
“I,” she starts, “well…”
“You’ve got school. You’re good at it, Amelia. This science stuff.”
Another deviation. Amelia has no mental map to guide her through this possibility. She can’t remember her mother ever speaking to her like this. Offering nothing but support.
“And,” her mother continues, “I know you like it. I think it’s crazy, running around in the mountains with bears—you know it makes me worry so much—but you’ve always liked it. You used to turn on those nature documentaries after school, and I’d just watch you. So cute.”
“I do…I do love it. I love what I do. I want to work at Yellowstone someday. I want to help conservation efforts, study the wolves there.”
“And do you think you can finish school next year if there’s a baby?”
“You want me to get an abortion?” Amelia shouts. She didn’t mean to, but it punches out of her mouth like an accusation.
“No!” her mom insists. “Not unless you want to. It’s your choice.”
“But you’d be okay with that? With me choosing?”
“Of course! I’ve always told you I’m pro-abortion, if a woman needs one.”
“No, I know. I just…” she pauses, rubbing at her face with the back of her hand. “I don’t know what I thought. Thanks, Mom.”
“So, you think you’re gonna—”
“I’m going to, yeah. I caught it so early, I’m only five weeks.”
“That’s good, honey. I’m glad. Do you have money to pay for it, or do you need help?”
“No, that’s okay. I’ve been looking into it, and there’s this telehealth service I can call. They send the pills straight to me. It’s less than 300 dollars.”
“How much do you have saved up?” she questions. “You’re not going to have to skip meals, are you?” Amelia can feel her mom staring down at her through her reading glasses, judging each coffee order and night of takeout.
“It’ll be enough. I just wanted…I don’t know.”
Her mother gives a sigh. The small sound is different from how Amelia thought it would be. Not condescending, not disappointed. Just sad. Just tired. Amelia feels a hot prick behind her eyes, and her throat tightens. She gulps, trying to hold back tears. She hates to cry, especially in front of her mom. It feels childish.
Donna responds after a small pause. “You wanted to talk to someone. I understand. It’s a difficult decision for any woman.”
Amelia sobs, a loud and unexpected loss of control. She’s been misunderstood. She didn’t want to talk to someone. Well, not just someone. She wanted to talk to her mother. But how can she make Donna understand that?
While she cries to her mother, Amelia realizes why she called. Why she had to call. The inescapable feeling, the pressure. It was guilt. She wanted to confess to the person she was failing to become. Sorry, Mom, that I’ll get to do what you must regret not doing. Sorry, I won’t sacrifice myself for someone I don’t know, like you did.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Donna says, her voice warm and cajoling. Amelia hasn’t heard her mother speak like this since she was six and dropped her ice cream at the county fair. “You’ll be okay. You’re making the right choice.”
“I know,” Amelia responds, her voice croaking. “Thank you. Thanks.”
“Of course.”
“I think I’m going to book my appointment with them now. Get it out of the way.”
“That’s smart,” she agrees. “You were always so good with that stuff. Appointments, getting places on time. Self-motivated.”
“Yeah,” Amelia says. “Good thing. It helped me notice it early, too.”
“It’s a great thing, honey. Now, is there anything else? You sure you don’t want me to send a check?”
Not with the expenses they had. Modest jobs, Dad’s heart condition, and the mortgage. No, she wouldn’t be another burden on their plate. “I’m fine, really. Thanks for listening.”
“Any time,” she assures. And Amelia can tell she means it.
They’re two women who trust one another, whatever else they are.
“Thanks,” she repeats, and almost goes to start her goodbye when she thinks of something. “Oh, and Mom? Please don’t—”
“I won’t tell your father, Ames. Don’t worry.”
She doesn’t know why it concerns her. Her dad would’ve been accepting and non-judgmental. He’s always been warm where her mother has been distant. Maybe he should know. She just has a compulsion, like the compulsion to call her mom, that this was something to keep between her and her mother. Now it belongs to the two of them alone.
Amelia books an appointment with Abortion on Demand for the next day. The physician she speaks to on the telehealth video is forthcoming and pleasant. She explains the service, all that they provide, and how Amelia can reach out at any time with her concerns. It’s far from the nightmare movies and television make it out to be. Maybe that’s because she does it in the comfort of her own shitty apartment, where protesters and religious zealots are unlikely to descend on her with last-minute guidance and condemnation. She raises her hard seltzer to the miracle of video health care that night, one of the small improvements made by the pandemic.
Abortion On Demand has next-day shipping, so the pills and the rest of the care kit arrive bright and early Friday morning. She had asked the doctor if it was okay to wait until after her exam to take them. According to her, it was.
But when she opens the box, she knows she can’t wait. Something about having the life-saving medical marvels in her hand. Besides, it’s the weekend, and the doctor said the cramps would only be bad for the first couple of days after she takes the second pill. She takes the first pill, mifepristone, minutes after she opens the package. Nothing much happens, and she spends the day with her textbooks.
The next day, she takes the misoprostol pill like the doctor advised. Around two hours after, when the cramps begin, she pops the anti-inflammatory they sent in her care kit, puts a heavy-flow overnight pad on, and takes a nap.
When Amelia wakes up, her mouth is dry, and her stomach is churning. She crawls out of bed, relieved that she doesn’t have roommates to watch her as she lurches to the bathroom. The pad is already dark with blood, so she replaces it. She massages her stomach to relax it while she uses the bathroom. When she rises to flush, she sees a blood clot the size of her palm. It’s not dangerously large, according to what the doctor said, but she gets a sudden wave of nausea and dizziness looking at it. The congealing, scarlet mass stains the porcelain red. It is a well of her fresh blood. She sits back down.
She never had a problem with blood before. Nature documentaries could be very explicit. She once wiped out while biking downhill and tore her knees open on the pavement. She whined about the pain, but the sight itself did not distress her. She’d flicked the dirt out of her open wounds without a hint of discomfort. Her mother shrieked at the sight of her, and only then did Amelia cry, more because she had upset her mom than anything.
She can barely do more than flush and rinse her hands in the sink. She’s warm, probably from a slight fever. It’s the worst cramping she’s ever had. She knows she won’t be able to study until her mind has cleared. It makes her chew her bottom lip to think of the committee staring down at her, but she also feels giddy relief. The frightening mass amidst the porcelain shows the pills have performed their essential function, their bloody miracle.
The weekend goes by in the usual haze of a mild fever. Her constant companion is the blood. She’s not allowed to use tampons for seven days, and it makes handling menstruation messier than usual. It gets on her hands, it leaks through the sides of her pad to destroy two pairs of her underwear. It paints a bloody blot on her white bedsheets. It’s nothing compared to a surgical abortion, but it is the heaviest period of her life. All of her symptoms are entirely normal, though. She’s lucky. She feels tired and achy, but not out of control.
Her mom calls her several times, a precipitous increase from their usual once a week, and offers worry and support in equal measure.
Amelia snaps out of the mental fog on Tuesday, the morning of her Qualifying Exam. The bleeding has reduced to half of what it was in the beginning, and her mind is clear enough while she stands in front of the committee. She still gets the feeling she should’ve studied more when she flubs several times during the landscape ecology section. Afterward, though, Peters takes her and Macie out to lunch. It’s nice. When she looks at Connie Peters, her gray hair tied back in a ponytail and her fingernails stained with dirt from collecting herb clippings on a trail she hiked that morning, Amelia imagines herself. Her future.
In another world, she says goodbye to them today over an unsweetened iced tea. Instead, she orders the diner’s embarrassingly juvenile chicken tender meal deal. Macie smiles and Peters mocks her for her poor taste.
On the tenth, and what looks to be the last, day of bleeding, something historic happens. A Supreme Court decision leaks. She’s making herself scrambled eggs, shuffling through the cabinet above the sink to find her pepper, when her cell phone dings.
They’re going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
She laughs. She always laughs when she’s nervous, at talent shows and project presentations. She feels outright skittish now, hackles raised. Then her logic kicks in, trying to curtail the panic. Oh, you’ve already had yours. Oh, control will go back to the states and Montana will probably uphold choice. Oh, it’s not happening yet. There’s still time. Her foot taps as she scrolls Twitter.
Women are going to die because of this. What can she do? She has class; she doesn’t have time to process. That’s grad school.
A nebulous sort of protest has broken out in front of the college union. On one side, a throng of clearly left-wing undergrads. On the other is a handful of people from the Students for Life Club. Amelia almost pities them for their underdog status here. They clutch at signs and stand against a mounting wave of disapproval. She’s unsure why they need to protest at all. They’ve won, haven’t they? The crusade should be over.
She’s going to have to cross them to get to Lewis, and for a moment she wonders if they’ll be able to sense her supposed crime. If they can smell the last spots of blood on her like police dogs sniffing for drugs.
As she walks through the crowd, she’s buffeted on one side by chants of “My Body, My Choice.” The other side tries to talk directly with the people passing by. One man’s sign reads “Abortion is Murder.” He used a blocky red font. Neither side feels like it’s for her, or about her.
Amelia fiddles with the strap of her backpack as she reaches the other side of the crowd. Before she’s fully passed them by, one man from the anti-choice side calls out to her, “Ma’am, would you like a pamphlet on the truth about abortion?”
Before, Amelia would’ve raced right past him on her way to class, avoiding eye contact the whole way. Today, she freezes in place, then turns her body as if she’s receptive to him. She knows that’s stupid; she knows she’s opened the door for him to mow her down with a barrage of misinformation. She stops despite herself and giggles.
“I wouldn’t laugh,” he scolds.
Amelia stares up at him. He peels away from his crowd, taking steps towards where she stands a yard away. Her grasp on her shoulder strap tightens reflexively. He’s a pasty-looking white man, lanky and not particularly muscular. He’s dressed like a Sunday school teacher, with a pressed shirt and thick-rimmed glasses.
He maintains an unflappable expression and reaches into a tote bag to pull out some drivel on glossy paper. “Regardless of what others may tell you, nobody needs to have an abortion. It’s not a victimless crime. There’s more to it than they know,” he preaches, thumbing in the direction of the pro-choice crowd.
One person from the pro-choice group gives Amelia an odd look—maybe sympathetic, maybe judgmental. They must wonder why the hell she’s entertaining this conversation. She nods again, feeling like the lead detective in a sting operation. But what’s the gotcha moment? Too late, I already flushed the roughly pea-sized embryo down my toilet a week ago? She takes the pamphlet.
“There’s all sorts of studies,” he continues, “on the science. When the baby can feel, hear, and think. And there’s so many loving homes waiting for an infant to call their own. Babies in the womb are conscious. They are a human life. And the emotional aftereffect on would-be mothers is an unsung epidemic in our nation’s history. A tragedy on top of a tragedy. It may seem frightening, but this Supreme Court decision is a good first step. It will wake people up.”
Amelia highly doubts this man has read any studies on the topic, but she has a wry admiration for his commitment to the pretense of a logical approach.
“They’re alive,” he repeats. “They have a right to life as much as you or I. I hope you’ll consider the sanctity of life today.”
The sanctity of life.
“I don’t care,” Amelia blurts out, handing him back the pamphlet. She’s harried, her hurry returning to her. She needs to get out of here. He splutters, refusing to take back his misinformation, so she drops it on the yellow grass at his feet. Some of their observers on the other side laugh at her shut down, but Amelia doesn’t find it funny.
She means it. She has always been driven by evidence, but when he talked, she just kept thinking I don’t care. Even if all the science in the world proved his claim, she wouldn’t have changed her mind. She wanted her life the way she planned it. Her uninhabited body. The pseudoscience and moral grandstanding she could dismiss, but she couldn’t be so unaffected by her own unflappable desire.
She feels like the kind of woman conservatives panic about on the evening news, one who would just as soon eat a baby as raise it. Vicious and unfeminine. She adjusts her backpack and walks away from both sides of protesters, continuing to class.
She passes her Qualifying Examination, though the examiners require several follow-up papers on landscape ecology. Considering her state in the week leading up to the exam, she decides to cut herself some slack. Finals also go well. She and Macie agree to sublet an apartment together near Yellowstone for the summer, as they did over winter break. They track ungulate behaviors and deaths throughout Yellowstone, log hundreds of hours hiking, and record where and when they find scat, herds, and bodies. They work with the Yellowstone Wolf Project team of volunteers and professionals, whom Amelia enjoys getting to know. One day, she hopes, she’ll be in their shoes, helping students with research.
For her own thesis, she spends extra time with the volunteers and other researchers specializing in the different pack dynamics of the roughly one hundred Yellowstone wolves. Amelia goes on extra hikes alone.
Many of the wolves in Yellowstone are identified with a number and tracked with a GPS collar, and even those who aren’t are recorded in the lists available online. Amelia becomes familiar enough with them to identify some individuals. She is impressed when she recognizes a particular wolf from Mollie’s pack one day, and another from Phantom Lake the next.
She’s on a hike, around mid-summer, with her usual supplies: a camera, clipboard, and bear spray. Macie wasn’t feeling up to going this morning, period cramps keeping her down. Before, Amelia believed that women should ignore the pain. Power through. Now she knows that sometimes one must lie down in surrender with a heating pad and ibuprofen.
She walks along a stream in Junction Butte pack territory. The water is banked on either side by verdant vegetation. It’s hot; even with her hair tied up, she feels her neck grow damp with sweat. She’s thankful for the shade brought by a few tall trees as she hikes up a steep incline. Amelia rises until she reaches a plateau, a bright clearing with fewer trees. It gives her an open view of all the different bushes and flowers dotting the grass.
And three wolves huddled around a dark mass on the other side of the clearing.
The wind blows, bristling the gray wolf’s thick and sodden fur. The juveniles, likely the adult wolf’s offspring, feed on a large elk. The mother watches her pups eat, the dark brown one on her left, the midnight black one on her right.
Long, bright pink tongues lick at the fur of the elk. Amelia is far enough away that the fine details are blurry, but when the skin is sufficiently tenderized, she watches them tear at it, revealing blood and muscle tissue. She hears a slight growl as the black pup’s eager munches bring it too close to its sibling, who tears at a hind leg. The brown pup snarls, nipping in displeasure, until its smaller sibling leans its head down in submission. The two find peace with the ease of children and return to the task at hand. They pull off small pieces at a time, chew with relish, and drag larger pieces a few feet away from the cadaver to consume.
Amelia doesn’t recognize the trio. There are only so many possibilities of who they could be, but she hasn’t memorized all the wolves yet. Either way, she feels the threat of her situation. Despite all her hiking, and these wolves being highly socialized by tourists, she feels the intimate threat they present. The group being a mother and her pups makes it even worse, as a mother will display heightened aggression to protect her young.
The animal will not risk uncertainty around her offspring.
She should record the sighting for Peters’s research, but she can’t move yet. Normally, she finds the bodies sans murderers.
The gray wolf begins to eat when the pups have had their fill. She moves with more precision, gnawing at a bone and tearing off larger strips than the pups were able to.
Amelia takes a few steps backward. She plans to hide behind a large tree at the edge of the clearing. She doesn’t want to take her eyes off the wolves, though, and shuffles backwards inch by pained inch until she trips on something. Her backside makes a dull thud on the grass. She scrambles onto her hands and knees and crawls behind the conifer.
The gray wolf pokes her head up. Her muzzle is dark red and flaked with mud. Amelia observes clumps of fur missing from the wolf’s side. She has mange, but not a bad case. It’s a hot day, she feels even hotter from the exertion of her several-hour-long hike, but in that moment, her body chills. The wolf’s dark black nose twitches, scents something in the air, and returns to her meal. She almost saw her.
It’s nothing like the nature documentaries she used to watch. Maybe the camera work and background music do something to remove the feeling of watching a hunter at work. The sounds of tearing and squelching and the scent of blood is palpable, even from this far away. Flies swarm the carcass already, and the wolves bat them away with eager waves of their tails.
It’s not a pleasant sight. It’s not very “circle of life.” The feast itself, the brutal and unapologetic destruction of the large ungulate, is natural, but there’s no divine chorus to celebrate it.
Beneath Amelia’s feet, the grassy valley extends, bursting with flora of all sorts. Under her hand, the roots of a tall conifer tree twist and reach out. In the air, she hears the chirps of birds. Feet away, a squirrel plucks berries off a thriving bush. The river she’s following flows deep and straight, rife with beneficial riffle sections and pools where fish, amphibians, otters, and other animals make their home. The world around her is rich and diverse, a healthy ecosystem.
She thinks about what Silvia mentioned in class that day when she was busy googling. The trophic cascade. The ecological process of indirect interactions that revive the lower trophic levels, those smaller lives, through the reintroduction of a top predator. Bringing back the wolves brought elk, deer, and coyote populations under control. The aftereffect has been incalculable. Coyote control means more mice, and more mice mean more birds of prey, who build more nests with the vegetation spared by the lack of overgrazing.
The list goes on. From that one change, a wave of reorganization began. The world fixing itself.
Amelia isn’t spiritual. She doesn’t look at nature as the perfect system, far from it. Natural selection is random and cruel enough that she’s always found it hard to understand the idea of intelligent design. We’re all here by accident. A spontaneous series of interactions that produce the incredible functions called life. At the same time, she’s not unimpressed. If anything, she thinks it means more that from its chaotic origin, life brings itself into harmony.
There’s something profound in that. Her own little faith. It’s a feeling, the result of chemical reactions in her brain, but it’s also more than that.
It’s not pretty; large teeth dig through flesh and fur. But beyond the aesthetic and understandable, it is beautiful. The blood. The cessation of life and the feeding of it. All of it important, all of it necessary for the whole.
She does not rise from where she’d fallen onto the ground. Instead, she waits on all fours, not daring to move or take her eyes away from the sight. She focuses on regulating her breath. In, out. In, out. The river to her right crackles with momentum.
Eventually, the mouths slow. First, the pups leave the carcass behind to play. They tug at one another’s ears and tails while they wait for their mother to finish. Minutes later, the gray wolf’s chewing and digging slows. She takes longer between each bite, sniffing and licking the elk, until she stops entirely.
They take off in the opposite direction, and Amelia sighs. She waits until they’ve gone far enough that she can’t see or hear them, then rises to her feet. She brushes dirt off her knees and notices the green grass has stained them.
She takes out her clipboard and pen to make a record of where she found the elk. She doesn’t move any closer. She thinks she can observe plenty without intruding on a space the wolves might return to.
A small splashing sound to her right makes her turn.
An elk laps at the river. Dappled sunlight through tree leaves illuminates the elk’s brown fur a speckled gold. Only a dozen yards away lies the dead elk. Amelia remembers the comment Peters made that there are more elk now than before the wolves returned to Yellowstone. Even the hunted spread and grow better now. Death makes way for the living.
Nicole Callahan graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 2021. During her time there she worked on the Gandy Dancer staff as a co-managing editor and also for MiNT Magazine. She is currently an MFA candidate at UNC Wilmington, where she works in The Publishing Laboratory and with Lookout Books.