Excerpt from History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The next day, Mr. Grierson asked me to stay after class. He sat behind his desk and touched his lips, which were chapped and flaking off beneath his fingers. "You didn't do very well on your exam," he told me.

He was waiting for an explanation and I lifted my shoulders defensively. But before I could say a word, he added, "Look, I'm sorry." He twisted the stud—delicate, difficult screw—in his ear. "I'm still working out the kinks in my lesson plans. What were you studying before I arrived?"

"Russia."

"Ah." A look of scorn passed over his face, followed immediately by pleasure. "The Cold War lingers in the backcountry." I defended Mr. Adler. "It wasn't the Soviet Union we were talking about. It was czars."

"Oh, Mattie." No one ever called me that. It was like being tapped on the shoulder from behind. My name was Madeline, but at school I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak. I pulled my hands into balls in my sleeves. Mr. Grierson went on. "No one cared about the czars before Stalin and the bomb. They were puppets on a faraway stage, utterly insignificant. Then all the Mr. Adlers went to college in 1961 and there was general nostalgia for the old Russian toys, the inbred princesses from another century. Their ineffectuality made them interesting. You understand?" He smiled then, closing his eyes a little. His front teeth were white, his canines yellow. "But you're thirteen."

"Fourteen."

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry if this has started off badly. We'll get on better footing soon."


The next week he asked me to drop by his classroom after school. This time, he'd taken the stud out of his ear and set it on his desk. Very tenderly, with his forefinger and thumb, he was probing the flesh around his earlobe.

"Mattie," he said, straightening up.

He had me sit in a blue plastic chair beside his desk. He set a stack of glossy brochures in my lap, made a tepee of his fingers. "Do me a favor? But don't blame me for having to ask. That's my job." He squirmed.

That's when he asked me to be the school's representative in History Odyssey.

"This will be great," he said, unconvincingly. "What you do is make a poster. Then you give a speech about Vietnam War registers, border crossings to Canada, etcetera. Or maybe you do the desecration of the Ojibwa peoples? Or those back-to-the-land folks that settled up here. Something local, something ethically ambiguous. Something with constitutional implications."

"I want to do wolves," I told him.

"What, a history of wolves?" He was puzzled. Then he shook his head and grinned. "Right. You're a fourteen-year-old girl." The skin bunched up around his eyes. "You all have a thing for horses and wolves. I love that. I love that. That's so weird. What is that about?"


Because my parents didn't own a car, this is how I got home when I missed the bus. I walked three miles down the plowed edge of Route 10 and then turned right on Still Lake Road. In another mile the road forked. The left side traced the lake northward and the right side turned into an unplowed hill. That's where I stopped, stuffed my jeans into my socks, and readjusted the cuffs on my woolen mittens. In winter, the trees against the orange sky looked like veins. The sky between the branches looked like sunburn. It was twenty minutes through snow and sumac before the dogs heard me and started braying against their chains.


By the time I got home, it was dark. When I opened the door, I saw my mom bent over the sink, arms elbow-deep in inky water. Long straight hair curtained her face and neck, which tended to give her a cagey look. But her voice was all midwestern vowels, all wide-open Kansas. "Is there a prayer for clogged drains?" she asked without turning around.

I set my mittens on the woodstove, where they would stiffen and no longer fit my hands just right in the morning. I left my jacket on, though. It was cold inside.

Excerpted from History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. Copyright © 2017 by Emily Fridlund. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.