62 pages • 2 hours read
History of Wolves
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Chapters 7-9 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
As Leo’s arrival grows closer, summer brings in the annual fisherman. Linda remarks upon the ways the visitors try to remember the locals—how they call her “Jim’s girl” (73) despite meeting her once or twice. Linda enjoys their attention because it makes her feel seen and distinct. School nears an end with finals, but Linda notices that Lily misses the last week—she handed in a pink slip and hasn’t been back.
At the end of the week, Linda watches Paul reorganize his city, located on Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon. Patra walks through the capital unknowingly, distracted and excited about the arrival of her husband, and Paul throws a tantrum. Linda notices sweat pooling on the child’s chin and his pupils dilating. Patra attempts to soothe him with a familiar ritual, but she’s distracted. When she messes up, Patra asks Paul what “CS” tells them, beginning to repeat Paul’s words from the playground: “There is no spot where God is—” (76). Paul cuts her off, and she carries him up to bed. Forgotten, Linda decides to glimpse the two of them from a tree outside Paul’s window. The sight of Paul curled up in his mother’s arms, Patra tenderly kissing him, is “breathtaking” to Linda (77). Something claws at the inside of her throat, and she climbs down to go home.
The next morning, Patra unexpectedly arrives at Linda’s house, begging her to stay with Paul while she picks up Leo. Linda checks in with her mother, who is relieved to see Linda having “regular girl experiences” (80). She hands Linda four dollar bills that she’d tucked away and tells her to have fun. The interaction saddens Linda.
Linda distracts a sickly Paul by teaching him to camp and survive the woods in the living room, but he is panting and must rest between each action. When Paul wonders if Linda is an explorer or she’s married, Linda realizes he is trying to place her as either a child or an adult. Trying to impress him, Linda brings up Mr. Grierson, calling him Adam. Paul reveals that Leo was Patra’s teacher once too. They fall asleep together in the tent, until Patra arrives much later and crawls in beside them to tell Linda that Leo’s flight was cancelled. As they lay there together, Linda realizes that she’s happy. She wishes Leo’s plane would never arrive. Dawn approaches, and Linda sets out, picking up her hatchet on the way. She runs into Leo in the doorway, enjoying his reaction to the stranger in his house with “a good-sized weapon” (88).
Linda reveals the rumor about Lily and Mr. Grierson: that he’d taken her out onto Gone Lake in a canoe; that they’re shared a thermos of coffee; that he told her he was vulnerable, that “his fate was in her hands” (89) because she could tip the canoe and leave him stranded. Then, he unzipped his pants, pushed her down, and asked for a kiss.
Chapter 8 Summary
Leo makes breakfast for his family and Linda, urging Linda to stay despite her repeated attempts to leave. Patra is giddy over her husband’s return, “surrounded by a force field of pleasure” (91). When Linda is finally able to slip away, Patra follows her, offering Linda 40 dollars. Linda is uninterested in the money, so Patra calls her a “pretty funny kid” (92). Linda finds Patra to be a strange adult.
When Linda arrives at the commune, she can’t bring herself to stay, so she packs a bag and sets out for Lily’s home near the reservation. She canoes over three lakes, pays four boys a dollar each to tell her where Lily’s home is, only to find Lily’s drunk father alone at the trailer. He is too drunk to follow Linda’s words—let alone remember her visit—but he tells Linda that Lily is off with a Lawyer. Linda leaves the pair of black heeled boots that she’d stolen for Lily on the porch as a gift, but as she paddles away, she realizes that they look “accusing, blocking the entrance” (98). On her way back, loons surround her, and she obsessively perceives the number 11. She counts everything to 11, despite them being 11 “plus one” or “minus two” (99).
Linda’s only memory from when she was four is of her friend Tameka: a girl a year or so older than her with whom she’d chase animals and dodge traffic. She calls her old friend “quieter, lovelier. Mine” and watches her like “a loon” (100).
At 26, Linda totals her car on her way back home after her father’s funeral. Her phone is out of service from late payments, and she doesn’t want to deal with paying to fix the car, so she throws out the phone and sells the car for parts. She buys a rusted motorcycle and moves to Minneapolis, where she shares a studio apartment with a roommate. Linda tries to find Patra online with no luck; Patra changes her last name after the trial. Instead, Linda finds Tameka, who is now an attorney married to a doctor with twin daughters.
On the Tuesday after Leo’s return to home, Linda heads over to watch Paul, but Patra intercepts her to say they won’t need her help for a few days. Linda feigns cheer, hoping Paul is feeling better. Patra emits panic, but Linda can’t tell if its retrospection that makes her see it. Patra asks if Linda has seen their cat, and Linda says no, not mentioning that she’d let him outside on Friday.
Chapter 9 Summary
Without school or a job, the days drag on for Linda. Since Leo had been home, Paul and Patra hadn’t spent any time outside, despite the warm weather. Linda decides to test out the lake by swimming in it naked. She floats there, as she had every year, suddenly aware of how visible she was—if only someone would look out. As she paddles back in, she thinks of Mr. Grierson and Lily, certain now that Lily was not in the booth with him the last time Linda saw Mr. Grierson at the diner. When she gets home, she masturbates, “miserably” (111).
A few weeks after school let out, Linda runs into her dad on an ATV in the woods. She climbs on, and they tear through the forest together. They destroy everything in their path and, as Linda sits behind her dad, she thinks that “it was so wretched, and it was so delicious, too” (112).
Linda takes the dogs out for a walk the next day, the four of them excitedly climbing and jumping across things in the forest. There, Linda finds the cat, Drake, clinging to a tree. She climbs up to retrieve him, barely flinching as the cat sinks his claws into her. She carries Drake, with the dogs hungrily following her, to Patra’s door. When Patra opens it, Linda motions for the dogs to sit and stay, relishing in her show of power before Patra, and saunters through the door with the cat.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Chapter 7 develops the motif of illness through Linda’s burgeoning sense of Paul’s declining health. As she notices his sheen of sweat, gray skin, and inability to stay steady on his feet, Linda perceives that something is wrong with Paul but doesn’t explicitly say so. The theme of religion is briefly present with Patra’s echo of Paul’s words on the playground. However, when she attributes them to a “CS”—most likely suggesting that the quote is from Christian author C.S. Lewis—she is in fact misquoting. The quote actually belongs to the 2014 children’s book There Is No Spot Where God Is Not by Fawn Parish and Shari Burnett. This may be the book Patra reads to Paul in bed when Linda looks in on them, but if so, then the misquote is even more puzzling. What it does accomplish, though, is heightening the tension and mysteriousness around this particular quote and this family’s relationship to it.
The chapter also showcases Linda’s painful isolation from the human world, as she observes Patra and Paul in bed; rather than going home to the dogs, “who would have slobbered all over [her] face and hands with happiness” (77), Linda subjects herself to the painful vision of affection that she has never received. Throughout her life, Linda has received more comfort from animals and nature than by humans—so the display of tender human affection causes her to yearn for something she never noticed the absence of before, further evinced by her first feeling of happiness as she lays next to Patra in the tent. The complexity of her human relationships appears in her ongoing obsession with Mr. Grierson, who she calls Adam to Paul and makes a distant associate with as some former partner. There is no evidence, at this time, that a relationship occurred between them, but the implication is that she wants Paul to think so, suggesting her desire for experiences beyond the woods. The revelation that Leo was Patra’s professor alludes to a power imbalance in their relationship and speaks to Patra’s nervous energy over Leo’s return.
Chapter 7’s greatest revelation is the rumor about Mr. Grierson’s assault of Lily, though it is certainly not put in those terms. As the story goes, Mr. Grierson emphasizes Lily’s ‘control’ in the canoe to absolve himself of any guilt— “he wanted her to know she had a choice” (89). However, emphasizing that Lily is a more apt canoer and swimmer does not mean she can respond to sexual harassment from an adult twice her age. He emphasizes her “kindness and mercy” and “how grateful he was” (89) to present the illusion of power in her hands as he abuses his own over her. When he takes a picture of her, he reasserts his authority, claiming her image as his to store away with the others.
Chapter 8 first showcases Leo’s influence over the household—how the entire energy of it shifts around his presence. Patra is mesmerized, Paul is sedated, and Linda feels herself disappearing into the background. Linda’s disinterest in the money Patra offers suggests that her desires are for the immaterial things—for affection, friendship, and love. As Patra and Linda remark upon one another’s behavior that deviates from their age-group norm, they both touch upon what bonds them together: they’re both outsiders. Linda feels drawn to other outsiders, particularly Lily and Mr. Grierson. The far trek out to Lily’s trailer is emblematic of her isolation from the rest of her community. Linda’s desperation to establish contact with Lily appears in her great effort to deliver her boots, but Linda’s miscalculation of the gift’s message reveals Linda’s inexperience in establishing such relationships.
Fridlund introduces the symbol of the loon as Linda leaves Lily’s, used as a simile to describe Linda’s relationship to Tameka; a loon, a solitary bird often evoking tranquility, can represent hopes and dreams. Here, it represents Linda—a solitary creature herself—hoping to achieve some sort of lasting human connection. The birds surround Linda on the water, an element which also symbolizes dreams as well as depth of consciousness. This alludes to the layers within Linda the reader yet to discover. However, the novel immediately complicates this message by showing Linda purposefully finding 11s everywhere she looks: “You can see eleven stars appear on the horizon if you don’t look for more” (99). The line implies that Linda has, and will continue to have, a habit of looking for meaning that is not there.
The first mention of Linda masturbating speaks to her sexual awakening, cultivating the overarching theme of growing up in the novel. Linda’s masturbation, though, is not evocative of similar coming-of-age novels; it is not tinged with consuming desire or curiosity but presented “miserably” (111) because of her isolation. The act’s physical proximity on the page to her thoughts of Lily and Mr. Grierson suggests that her preoccupation with the event has evolved into sexual fascination.
The ATV ride demonstrates intricacy of Linda’s emotions in a very different way. Though she finds it “wretched” (112) to destroy the woods she so loves, the rare opportunity to be close with her usually absent father sweetens the experience for her. Chapter 9 also uses the motif of dogs to represent Linda’s closer affinity to animals than to humans; the dogs’ “pleasure at being off their chains gave [her] an ache in the chest. It was so simple to please them” (113). Unlike humans, Linda understands what motivates and pleases dogs, they are easier for her to interpret. Like humans, however, “even the older dogs in the early summer could be unpredictable” (113). This quote foreshadows an unexpected behavior from the adults in Linda’s life. The end of the chapter reveals Linda’s desire for power, particularly in front of Patra: “feeling like some mini-god, some deity of dogs. I wanted Patra to see this, the control I had” (114). Linda, who has been powerless in so many aspects of her life, can exercise authority over animals, especially the dogs. The act reminds herself—and demonstrates to Patra—that Linda is capable of more than many expect of her.
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