Travels with Casey Read online

  The next day, we left Casey in the Chalet before meeting Kirk and Todd again. Casey was fine and had seemingly forgotten about his trauma, but he wasn’t allowed where we were heading. “I can’t believe we’re meeting wolves today!” Sam said as Kirk, who wore a sweatshirt of a stenciled Husky covered with a coat of fluffy dark hair from Kirk’s shedding dogs, drove us past Hell for Certain Road, and then up a narrow, rutted dirt road called Wolf Tail Way. Kirk continued up a steep hill, past boulders and trees that opened up to a pristine stone house and, behind it, a small cedar smokehouse.

  We were greeted there by a short, silver-haired man built like a tree stump. His name is Rob Gudger, but some folks in these mountains call him Wolf Man. “Good thing you didn’t bring your RV—you’da died before you got here,” Rob said with a broad smile, peeling off a pair of thick, dirty work gloves to shake our hands. He spoke with a friendly mountain drawl, the kind that should narrate every story.

  Though it’s illegal to keep wolves as pets in this country, some states, including North Carolina, allow wolfdog hybrids. There are some 300,000 in the United States, far more than any other country. Rob has four—we could hear them yelping and howling from behind his house.

  “For it to be legal in North Carolina,” Rob explained, “you gotta call ’em hybrids.” He said his are 97 percent wolf, 3 percent Husky.

  “How often do they howl like that?” I asked, eager to see them.

  “Well, you know, in the twenty-five years I’ve lived with wolves, I don’t think I ever heard one howl,” he said. “They sure can sing, though. I try to explain to people that the difference between singing and howling is like the difference between bluegrass and opera. I’m an ol’ flatfoot clogger who happens to like bluegrass, so I happen to think they sing. But you can think they do whatever you want.”

  He brushed some bits of bark from his heavy red flannel. “Thing is, it’s easy to get ’em started singing. Not so easy to get ’em to stop.” He chuckled. “What do y’all say we go meet ’em?”

  As we rounded the house and approached their fenced-in enclosure, the wolfdogs paced, yelped, and head-butted each other in excitement. They were long-legged, beautiful animals. Two were dark gray. One was pure white. The fourth—the youngest—was brindle. We watched as she climbed up the pen’s fence, hooking on with her claws and dragging herself up.

  “She wants to say hello,” Rob said.

  Or eat us, I thought. I remembered reading somewhere that the ASPCA has called for an end to wolfdog breeding, which it considers dangerous and unpredictable.

  “I didn’t know wolves could climb,” Sam said, mesmerized.

  “Yup, they do that,” Rob told us. “They’re always trying to escape, so you just gotta stay a step ahead of ’em with wire and a little bit of electricity.”

  Rob picked up a shovel. “Now, don’t y’all worry, I’ve never had to use this for what you might be thinking,” he said, his breath visible in the crisp mountain air. “These guys won’t hurt you. People see wolves and they stick their own misconceptions on ’em. Wolf’ll try to be playing and they freak out and say, ‘He tried to bite me!’ Bullshit! A wolf don’t try to bite you. If he bites you, yur’ coming back to me with a stump. Wolves are shy, and misunderstood.”

  Rob encouraged us to put our hands against the fence. “They’ll lick you to death,” he said.

  “Go try it,” I whispered to Sam.

  He shot me a look. “Oh, nice, use me as a test case.”

  Kirk and Todd didn’t share our reluctance. They’d met these animals before, and they sauntered right up to the fence and gave up their hands. The wolfdogs shouldered each other out of the way to lick them.

  “They ain’t gonna bite you,” Rob assured us.

  Sam proved braver than I. And after watching the white wolfdog—the pack’s Alpha female—take a liking to the back of his hand, I shoved my notebook in my coat pocket and surrendered my own. The two gray wolfdogs each went to work on one of my hands with warm, soft tongues.

  “Okay, I’m gonna head in,” Rob said a minute later, opening the first of two gated doors to the pen. The wolfdogs promptly lost interest in us and started play-biting each other, yelping with anticipation. The brindle wolfdog climbed up the fence closest to where Rob was making his way inside.

  “They’ll calm down in a minute,” he assured us, though we didn’t mind at all. “They’re crazy right now ’cause they think they’re getting fed, or going for a ride in the truck.”

  Rob occasionally transports the animals to one of his “Wolf Tales” educational events at churches, schools, or private events. All of his wolfdogs behave around people, he explained, but he usually showcases the gray ones. “That’s what people expect a wolf to look like,” he said.

  “Wolf Tales” is part history lesson, part wolf myth busting. He tells his audiences that wolves in the wild are afraid of humans, and that they’re significantly less dangerous than coyotes or dogs. But he’s up against what he calls the fallacy of the Big Bad Wolf. As Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods argue in their book, The Genius of Dogs, “no other animal has been portrayed so ubiquitously as the Bad Guy throughout history.”

  It’s surprising that wolves get such a bad rap. Without wolves, of course, there would be no dogs. The history of that evolution is still largely up for debate, but most current estimates place the start of domestication about fifteen thousand years ago in East Asia, while one recent study suggests a much earlier start date, with a change of location—as early as 32,000 years ago in Europe.

  Rob’s wolfdogs go to the vet several times a year, just like regular dogs, and each animal is named “Wolf” in a different Native American language.

  “Do they know their names?” I asked.

  “Nah, wolves don’t care what you call ’em,” he said. “The only reason I named ’em is ’cause the vet said he needed names for his records. You can call wolves by their names all day long, and they won’t even look at you. You can’t train these animals like you can a dog. Wolves don’t want to please you.”

  Though one of Rob’s neighbors keeps a wolfdog as a house pet, Rob doesn’t recommend it. “For one thing, I’m a neat freak,” he told us. “But these guys are just not meant to be inside. I respect ’em and they respect me, but they’re not going to sleep in bed with me.”

  That echoed what I’d heard from Amanda Shaad, who has worked with pure wolves at Wolf Park in Indiana since 1995. “With a wolf, you’re getting an animal that hunts for a living,” she said. “With a dog, you’re getting an animal that likes to be around people. So with a wolfdog, you’ve created an animal that’s not afraid of people—and hunts for a living. Does this sound like a good idea? You can end up with an animal that likes hanging around humans but will guard the couch from you so they can disembowel it, or guard the refrigerator from you because food guarding is part of their behavior.”

  But Shaad conceded that it’s difficult to generalize about wolfdogs, who can have wildly varying percentages of wolf and dog. “A lot depends on the breed of dog the wolf was bred with,” she said.

  Rob told us he’d never want to see a wolf bred with a German Shepherd, or a Malamute. “Mine have Husky in ’em, and you can depend on what Huskies are gonna do,” he said. “They weren’t bred to be aggressive or protective. If a wolfdog goes after a human, you can bet it’s the dog part of ’em that’s at fault.”

  Playful as puppies, the wolfdogs romped around with Rob in the pen as he talked. We watched as they leaped toward his face and play-bit his gloved hands. When they got too rowdy, he would swat them away with his forearm.

  “Are you ever worried they’ll hurt you?” I asked.

  Rob shook his head. “Nah—they know who feeds ’em,” he said. “Besides, they just want to play. People get all frightened by ’em, but you gotta realize that they’ve got this big head full of teeth, and these big ’ol paws with big claws on ’em, and that’s all the equipment they’ve got to play with. What hurts us don’t hur
t them, so they don’t know any different. So as long as I’m not so stupid as to stick my face down at ’em, all they can do is chew me a little. Ain’t so bad.”

  I wondered what drew Rob to these animals. He told us he considers himself a cross between a caretaker and a warden, doing his best to keep them alive, healthy, and far from the neighborhood cats. But why wolves? Wouldn’t some run-of-the-mill dogs make better companions for a man who lives alone in the mountains? Though the wolfdogs were playful with Rob during our visit, he told us they aren’t affectionate animals. And he rarely enters their pen, except to feed them.

  “What does a wolf bring you that a dog doesn’t?” I asked.

  “Man, dogs have been dumbed down so much by humanity,” he said. “These guys, they’ve still got all their senses and faculties about ’em. You watch ’em, and they’re always sniffing, looking around, watching. And that’s what I want from them. If I could ask one thing of ’em—and obviously I can’t—I’d just ask them to act like a wolf.”

  Rob had told us earlier that wolves are shy and misunderstood. Did he also consider himself shy and misunderstood? Was that the connection?

  He looked down at his rowdy pack. “Yup, that’s probably why I like ’em so much. I feel like I’ve been misunderstood my whole life. Ain’t nothing that drives me crazy more. It’s the worst thing in the world to be shy and misunderstood. I’ve mostly gotten over the shy part, but I’ve never gotten over being misunderstood. I used to be a people pleaser—tried to get along with everyone, make everyone happy. But that’s something even the Bible tells you that you don’t gotta do.”

  It’s also something wolves never do.

  “We bred dogs to be needy,” he went on. “Wolves are independent. They’re smart as hell. But they can’t talk, and they need someone to speak for them, to set the record straight. They get blamed for a lot o’ things they shouldn’t get blamed for. So that’s why I do what I do, trying to educate people. That’s why I save every last penny I got to feed these guys, keep ’em healthy and safe in their pack, and take ’em out and show the world that they don’t mean no harm to anyone.”

  “WHY DON’T I be the DJ for a bit?” Sam said as we departed Maggie Valley the next day for the 335-mile drive south to Savannah, Georgia.

  The poor guy had suffered through a few days of my iPhone library favorites—REM, Moby, Florence + the Machine—and was eager to broaden my musical horizons. First he made me listen to Manu Chao, an eccentric French rocker of Spanish descent who sings in multiple languages, sometimes in the same song. Then came Childish Gambino, an American rapper Sam respects for being clever—and more “emotionally honest than most rappers.” (In a song titled “Bonfire,” Gambino utters this line: “I love pussy. I love bitches. Man, I should be running PETA.”)

  While we were on the subject of rap, I had Sam listen to “Saving Seamus Ryan,” an album by a dog-loving Boston rapper named Esoteric. Though many rappers like to call themselves some variation of “dog” (there’s Snoop Dogg, Top Dog, Tim Dog, Phife Dawg, Tha Dogg Pound, and so on), Esoteric likes rapping about dogs.

  “Saving Seamus Ryan” is Esoteric’s good-bye to his dying Lab. One of the album’s best songs is called “Back to the Lab.”

  women come and go but a dog stays always

  all days, hanging by the couch or the hallways

  the simple sound of me jingling my keys

  will generate a look that could bring me to my knees

  he’s the type of friend that you can’t stay mad around

  even when you hear that shatter sound, it don’t matter now

  it’s all good, i got a lab, the love’s essential

  i saw myself as garbage he saw the potential

  and when i can’t grin or lift my chin

  there’s nobody, more happy to see me than him

  yes i’ll never turn my “back to the lab”

  and i’m always goin’ “back to the lab”

  We blasted Esoteric’s music as we drove toward Asheville, where we were going to have lunch. It was Casey’s third day wearing the ThunderShirt, to little effect. Sam and I would occasionally try to convince ourselves that we saw improvement (Didn’t Casey just seem to relax there for a second?), but he was as uncomfortable as ever. He would stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Sometimes, he would sigh loudly and plop his snout in Sam’s lap.

  As we lumbered through the outskirts of Waynesville, North Carolina, thirty miles west of Asheville, we came upon a road sign advertising a bookstore with more than 200,000 books. “We have to check it out,” I said, following the sign toward a two-lane country road. We drove for several minutes—up a hill, past some cows—before I was pretty sure we were lost.

  “I think we missed it,” I mumbled.

  “Let’s give it another mile,” Sam said.

  Just as we were about to give up, we saw a small, stand-alone blue block structure with a sign next to the front door that read BooK Store. We had to navigate a short, steep decline to reach the building. The Chalet’s nose dipped precariously; for a moment, we could see only concrete through the windshield. Sam’s body tensed as my laptop slid off the dinette bench, landing with a muffled thud on Casey’s bed.

  We survived the descent and parked in the small empty lot, next to a battered basketball hoop with the net tangled around its orange rim. Across a footbridge was an old redbrick house. A dog barked in the distance. “This place looks too small to have 200,000 books,” I said as we approached the store’s front door, where a handmade sign beckoned us to Come In. As soon as we did, our jaws dropped.

  This wasn’t so much a bookstore as an episode of Hoarders. Everywhere we turned, we saw books piled floor to ceiling. Stacks that didn’t reach the ceiling leaned precariously into the aisles; shorter piles jutted out at our shins, nearly blocking access to certain rows. In the rear of the store, stapled to a shelf on which rested an old copy of All The President’s Men, a yellow paper with black ink read, Go on steal that book. You will not be happy when you are in hell. God is watching you.

  I heard the door swing open. “What you boys looking for?” said a woman with a mountain twang that made “Wolf Man” Rob Gudger sound like a city slicker.

  I shimmied my way back toward the front. “We saw the sign that said 200,000 books,” I said, stepping over a pile of romance novels. “We had to see this place.”

  “Oh, that’s an old sign,” she said, flicking on the store’s lights. “There’s probably more now.”

  I turned a corner and got my first look at Mary Judith Messer, who has owned the rural bookstore—and lived in the house next to it—for forty years. A youthful seventy-four, she had big blue eyes and straight, boyish brown hair with uneven bangs that partially covered her thick eyebrows. She wore jeans and a puffy blue turtleneck, and a long silver cross necklace rested against her midsection.

  Mary seemed delighted to have company. “Religion and classics are down there to your right; science fiction and fantasy is over there to the left,” she said, pointing enthusiastically in various directions. “This here on the left is war. This is mystery. This here is biography.” She led me a few paces. “Back on that through there is history. Health is down that aisle.”

  “Do you have a pets section?” I asked.

  “Of course!” she said, pointing toward a dozen shelves overflowing with titles like A Guide to Owning Goldfish, The Ultimate Cat Book, and many how-to books about dogs—How to Raise and Train a Siberian Husky, How to Talk to Your Dog, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend (by the Monks of New Skete).

  When I explained that I was driving around the country to write a book about dogs, her eyes widened. “I wrote a book, too!” she said, handing me a paperback copy of her autobiography, Moonshiner’s Daughter: Growing Up Poor in the Smokies . . . How Did We Survive?

  While Sam wandered through the store, I skimmed the first few pages of her book. They were heartbreaking. On page 6, Mary is molested by a school janitor. On the next page, she’s
beaten by a teacher. A few pages later, Mary’s father—an alcoholic moonshiner—pummels her mentally ill mother with a piece of stove wood in the small, dilapidated shack where they lived. Even the family dog (an old mutt named Brownie) has it rough. He barely survives being bitten under the eye by a copperhead, and one winter day he just wanders off into the mountains.

  “Just as well, I guess,” Mary writes. “Most people fed their dogs table scraps and we never, ever had any. I guess he took up with another family who did.” In reality, he probably left—as some dogs do—to die alone.

  “Do you have a dog today?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, her face beaming. “A little Chihuahua named Tootsie Roll, and an outdoor dog named Bear.”

  Mary told us that except for the decade she spent in New York City, she’s always had dogs. “People with animals live longer. Especially dogs.” She stood behind her cluttered front desk as she spoke, wiping dust off books with a rag. “I’m not no cat person. My mother was a cat person. It’s not like I dislike my mother; it’s just that I never really hooked up with cats. I’ll let ’em be, though. They can live or whatever, you know.” She laughed. “But a dog! I mean, they’re just everything to me.”

  “How so?” I asked, before offering the question I would ask over and over again during my months on the road. “Why are dogs so meaningful to you?”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s because they’re just always there—you can count on ’em. You can make a mistake or not treat ’em as good as you should sometimes, and they’ll still come back and love ya. I think God put dogs on this earth so that we would take care of ’em, and they would give us companionship. Think about the lonely old man or woman—every human that’s important to ’em might be gone, but they still get companionship if they have a dog. The dog’s the faithful friend that lies by their chair when they watch TV or read the paper. If they walk to the porch, the dog’s at their side, looking up at ’em like they’re the most important thing in the world. Which they are!”