Lone Wolf A Novel by Jodi Picoult

look at my mother, and then at the cop. “I guess . . .”
    “Do you remember the crash?”
    I remember every second of it. “Not so much,” I murmur.
    “Who was driving the truck?”
    “My father,” I say.
    “Your father.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Where were you headed?”
    “Home—he picked me up from a friend’s house.”
    My mother folds her arms. “I’m sorry . . . but when did a car accident become a criminal offense?”
    The officer looks up over his notepad at her. “Ma’am, we’re just trying to piece together what happened.” He turns to me. “How come the truck swerved off the road?”
    “There was a deer,” I say. “It ran out in front of us.”
    This is true, actually. I’m just leaving out what happened before that.
    “Had your father been drinking?”
    “My father never drinks,” I say. “The wolves can smell alcohol in your system.”
    “How about you? Were you drinking?”
    My face goes red. “No.”
    Officer Whigby, who’s been pretty quiet, takes a step forward. “You know, Cara, if you just tell us the truth, this will be a lot easier.”
    “My daughter doesn’t drink,” my mom says, angry. “She’s only seventeen.”
    “Unfortunately, ma’am, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.” Whigby pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to her. It’s a lab report.
    “Your daughter’s blood alcohol content was .20 when she was admitted,” Officer Whigby says. “And unlike your daughter, blood tests don’t lie.” He turns to me. “So, Cara . . . what else are you hiding?”

LUKE
    My adopted brothers in the Abenaki tribe believe that their lives are inextricably tied to those of wolves. Years ago, when I first went to Canada to study the way Native American naturalists tracked the wild wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor, I learned that they see the wolf as a teacher—in the way he hunts, raises his children, and defends his family. In the past it was not unheard of for Abenaki shamans to slip into the body of a wolf, and vice versa. The French called the Eastern Abenaki in Maine and New Hampshire the Natio Luporem, the Wolf Nation.
    The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.
    Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.
    That would fit for me, I suppose. I grew up with parents who were so much older than my friends’ parents that I would never think of inviting a friend home from school; I would purposely forget to tell my parents about open houses or basketball games because I was always embarrassed to find kids staring openly at my dad’s white hair, my mother’s soft wrinkles.
    Since I didn’t have a thriving social network as a kid, I spent a great deal of time alone in the woods. My father had taught me the name of every indigenous tree; what was poisonous, what was edible. He took me hunting for ducks when the moon was still high in the sky and our breath turned silver in front of us as we waited. It was there I learned to be so still that the deer would come into the clearing to feed, even if I were sitting on its edge. And it was there that I started to be able to tell the deer apart, to know which ones traveled together and which ones returned the next year with their offspring.
    I cannot remember a time I didn’t feel connected to animals—from watching a fox play with her kits to tracking a porcupine to letting the circus animals out of captivity. But the most amazing animal encounter I have ever had came when I was twelve years old, just moments before the most disappointing human interaction of my life. I was in the woods behind our home when I saw a female moose lying beneath the ferns with a newborn calf. I knew the cow; I’d seen her once or twice. I backed away—my dad had taught me never to get near a new mother and its young—but to my surprise the moose