About Wolf
by Sarah Wolf
39 pages
/ 17000 words
Available file types - lit, pdf, prc, html
After finding out he's HIV positive, Jake retreats to a life of isolation in the New Mexico mountains. His quiet life his shattered when his daughter Lisa, a grad student in wildlife biology, launches a rescue mission for a family of wolves.
When Lisa gets in trouble, Jake teams up with biology Professor Nathaniel, to find Lisa in the Blue Range Wolf Recovery area, determined to save the wolves and bring his daughter safely home. What he doesn't count on is falling for Nathaniel. Can Jake let himself give Nathaniel a chance?
Sample
Jake stepped out onto the front porch of his cabin. The air was fresh and cold, ground mist rising in the early-morning light. The coffee was perking in the old red enamel coffee pot on the little propane stove inside.
His daughter’s cat, Max, came strolling up to the porch from out of the dark. Jake raised his middle finger in Max’s direction, but Max ignored him, sat down, and began cleaning a paw. Jake went back inside the cabin for one of the kitchen chairs. He set the chair next to the porch rail so he could prop up his feet and looked out across his land.
He had a hundred and forty acres of rolling hills just west of the Continental Divide in central New Mexico. It was old rangeland, alligator juniper and pinon pine, with elk and fox and deer and the occasional wolf, and more jackrabbits than he had ever imagined could live together in a group, a skill he did not possess. The land was empty and paid for, and he could sit on his porch and drink coffee in the morning and not see another person. Most days that was enough.
Max walked over to the tiny CD player plugged in next to the door and patted it with a paw. Jake turned the music on low; Willie Nelson’s Teatro. “If you weren’t a Willie Nelson fan, you’d be out of here.” The melancholy Spanish guitar sounded like heartbreak and the futility of chasing happiness in this life. The music seemed to belong to this little corner of New Mexico.
He hadn’t been living out here alone for very long; six or seven months, but he’d had the cabin since he finished vet school and started practicing. He'd bought it so he could go camping on the weekends and spend some time with his kids.
Lisa had left Max here. She'd been worried about her dad being alone, though how she thought the cat was going to help he didn’t know. He went back into the cabin and poured a cup of coffee, then rejoined Max and Willie on the front porch.
Lisa liked to fix people with problems, especially those in her own family. She was the only kid left still talking to him, so he’d let her dump Max on him. She’d been on her way down to Las Cruces for grad school, and had given him a lot of pop-psych lectures with detailed instructions for personal fulfillment. She must have spent weeks doing internet research and reading self-help books. And she’d told him she loved him no matter what about twenty times.
The phone rang in the cabin. He brought it out to the porch before he answered.
“Dr. Miller? This is Nathaniel Briggs. I’m Lisa’s faculty advisor in wildlife biology.”
“You’re the wolf guy, right? Lisa’s really excited to be studying with…” Jake felt his stomach contract with a sudden spasm of fear. It was six o’clock in the morning. “What’s wrong? Where is she?”