Summer of the Wolves by Polly Carlson-Voiles

Author:Polly Carlson-Voiles
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

And Pearl did. She had dealt with this problem many times over the years. She made a mixture of peroxide, baking soda, and dog shampoo and carried it up to the hill pen.

“Better let me do this.” She put Khan between her legs with his back end sticking forward, dumped the solution on the smelliest spot, and rubbed it in. “Okay, Nika, look how he loves to grab the water coming out of the hose. Keep spraying him, let him play, then spray him some more, aiming at his backside. If we need to, we’ll do it again.”

Two hours later the smell was mostly gone, but a trace shadowed Khan, hovering where he rested like a swarm of gnats.

Pearl returned to the house to start dinner. During the whole process she had not asked one word about why Khan had encountered the skunk. While Khan rolled in the dirt and dug in his cooling spot, Thomas and Nika sat across the pen from him, side by side, swatting at mosquitoes.

“Thanks, Thomas,” Nika said. Thomas was her first new friend in forever. In some ways she had always felt more comfortable with boys as friends. Olivia felt that way, too. It was one thing they had in common. Boys were more matter of fact, not always thinking about other people’s business. And it was nice how they didn’t need to talk every minute.

“Thanks for helping,” she repeated, tearing up some weeds.

Then as if the idea had dropped from the sky, she said, “Do you think I could ever keep Khan, you know, as a pet, sort of? “ It was a question she hadn’t dared ask anyone.

“Well, if I were you, I’d want to, for sure. But I don’t know—wolves are kind of different, you know. They’re cool, but they aren’t like dogs. You can’t have them in the house or they’ll eat your couch. I read that somewhere.”

He looked carefully at Nika, then went on. “I wrote a report last year in school about how dogs came from wolves. It’s pretty neat.” He told her how over a hundred thousand years ago, wolves, scavenging from human camps, began to alert people to other dangers. Humans watched wolves hunt and learned. Wolves ate what people wasted.

“Cool,” she said. “They cooperated and sort of tamed each other.”

“Those wolves became the first dogs.” He’d read that humans had come to North America with dogs. And that dogs and humans maybe even changed each other’s brains. He said from those first wolf-dogs, humans bred every kind of dog, to hunt, to work, to be our companions.

“Even Chihuahuas and Great Danes?” Nika couldn’t believe all those sizes and shapes of dogs came from those long-ago wolf genes.

“Yup. All of them.”

Nika was impressed. Thomas knew a lot. And he seemed to be thinking about her problem with Khan. At least he didn’t say flat out “No way.”

“Next time we go to the Big Island,” Nika asked Thomas, “will you come with me? You can take pictures, too.

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