A Courtroom of Wolves

This is the second time I've found myself in court, accused of not following the rules. The first time was by the British Ecological Society’s photography contest, and now it's by the rangers at Yellowstone National Park. Jone looks sweaty. When she represented me as my defense attorney the first time. I was accused of photoshopping animal photos and entering them into competitions. The charges didn’t stick, but I never entered a competition after the backlash and the snubbing from other photographers hurt. This time is worse. I made up a new species of wolf, and it might come down to telling a whole courtroom I lied about the wolves or trying to convince a room full of pencil-pushing scrutinizers that I have magical powers. Neither path feels appealing.

“Your Honor, we have several witnesses who can attest under oath that they saw the wolves while walking on the trail. No one knows any other specific details about the wolves and how they got there, and that frankly isn't Casey's job,” said Jone. 

My toes pinch together in my boots, and I hear Alais Mooreset’s song Ironic blare in my mind as Jone says, “Her job was to increase park tours and positive reviews, and now she’s accused of doing just that too well.”

“Objection!” Barron, a barrel-shaped prosecutor, blurts out, “She’s being accused of making up stories and sightings of rare animals to create artificial hype, putting the public in danger!”

The judge calls for a recess, and my lawyer disappears behind a closed door with Barron to determine who's best at cutting the other off mid-sentence. The bailiff hovers over me as I sit with a pen and paper. I begin to doodle a small deer, then think better of it; drawing animals is what got me into this mess.

When I was twelve years old, I was sitting on my roof, outside my bedroom window, trying to sketch the moon when I saw a northern hawk owl. It was perched in the tree feet from where I sat. Its yellow eyes glinted as it searched for prey. White dots dappled its silky long feathers cascading down its back. Silently, it took flight, skimming the snow below before disappearing into the shadows. I was mesmerized. Not only because I saw it, but because it’s one of the rarest owls on the planet. Then I tried to recreate it, knowing this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But each sketch came out wrong: the eyes were too close, the feet too short, or the wings too long. My final drawing that evening satisfied me enough that I wished I could see the bird one more time, if only to confirm I got it right.

The drawing still had proportional issues, but it brought back the spirit of the night every time I looked at it. The next night, I crawled back out onto my frigid roof to try my luck again. Astonishingly, the northern hawk owl was back. I scooted an inch slowly to get closer. But as I gazed upon this rare creature, something felt off. The likeness was there, but aspects of the bird felt flat. Its wings expanded, and to my fright, the inside feathers looked incomplete, as if God left the animal half-finished. God may not have, but I did. I flipped the pages back to my sketch. The owl glided slowly past me, as if presenting my work, and I saw the minor imperfections: narrower eyes, short tail, one claw missing on the right foot, exactly as drawn. I nearly slipped off the roof, dumbfounded. The bird drifted into the snow below and slowly disintegrated into thin air.

As with any teenager, the second drawing jumped from owl to unicorn and dragon. While they did appear to me, it wasn’t as exciting as I hoped. The dragon appeared as a rock formation in my front yard, and the unicorn as a cloud that floated by my window while I was driving to school. The magic drawings only came to life if the animal drawn existed in my world. Then I tried non-native species like a lion and a kuala. They did appear, briefly, but because they’d disappear into the shadows so quickly, it was hard to determine if they were truly there or a figment of my imagination. Concerned I was going crazy, I tried other sketchbooks, pencils, and paints. I also pointed out some of my live illustrations in the yard to my parents, who confirmed they too saw a three-legged deer or an elk that suspiciously resembled a giraffe. However, by the time they stepped out to confirm what they saw, the animals disappeared, making them question if it was ever there. I possessed a strange magic I wasn’t sure how to use.

During high school, it wasn’t as useful as I'd hoped. It took over twelve hours for any of my sketches to come to life, and I had to get the surrounding details right for it to appear where I wanted it. This meant scoping out the location first, drafting the scenery, and then adding the animal. I learned to study three-dimensional images so I wouldn't miss limbs or other crucial body parts. I once planned a zebra jumping over a fence at a friend’s party to impress Chad. He drunkenly corrected me: it wasn't a zebra, but a bobcat that jumped over, and I was stupid. I didn’t know what felt worse, being corrected on the animal I drew to life or that my crush couldn’t tell the difference between a zebra and a bobcat.

Given this magical talent, I went for a degree in visual arts, hoping I’d find the perfect job for someone who could make animation from thin air. I got a D sophomore year from an ass of a professor who said my animal drawings lacked imagination and realism, which felt contradictory. I spent a month coming up with a way to get him to watch animals march across the quad from a drawing I named a Parade of Patterns, only for him to say the visual effects were lackluster and clearly executed by a hidden projector. It defied logic given the animals pranced in broad daylight. Everyone assumed I used some technology to make it happen, but none had enough interest to reach a plausible conclusion.

School felt isolating. At night, I’d treat myself to little visitors. At my loneliest points, I always picked a hippopotamus, whom I named Bau. He'd wade through the tall grass to nuzzle his nose against the window. I was the only kid who requested a ground-level dorm every year, but it was the only way I could enjoy all my creations. I couldn’t touch them. Like holograms, they turned to shadows almost instantly if I touched their pencil-lined fur, but the way they looked at me, intimately, as if knowing I breathed a brief bit of life into them, was worth it. I learned that the more detail I added to each drawing, the longer my magical creatures would survive. In one case, I kept a bunny alive for a day, continuously adding poses in my book like a flipbook. I loved my magic, but being the only person I knew who could make live animals from drawings made the experience lonely, and the dismissive conclusions that my gift was some parlor trick burned. I wondered if I were more outgoing, if my art would be received better. Being such a wallflower made it hard to advertise my work and even get people to pay attention to my creations.

With months until graduation, I panicked, not sure yet what I wanted to do with my life. That is, until one day I saw an ad for a photography contest offering $2000 for an animal picture taken by an amateur photographer. This felt like shooting fish in a barrel, and I didn’t have to talk to anyone, just submit my work. I’d pick a believable but somewhat rare animal. I’d study every aspect of the animal and then snap a shot of my released drawing once it appeared. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. My sketches tend to take flight or run faster than I can set up a camera and get a good shot. After a month of trying, I settled on a porcupine because it waddled. The picture came out superb, especially since I opted for an albino porcupine in the moonlight. I didn’t win first prize, but I did get a call from a wildlife magazine to be one of their freelance photographers. I entered three more contests by the end of the year and won two. With every win, my confidence bloomed. I made friends, shared photography secrets, and got really good with a camera. I finally fit in somewhere.

Things were going great, and I made a decent amount of cash and even had my work hung in some photography galleries in town, until Griff Milton accused me of using Photoshop. He wasn’t completely wrong. I entered a beautiful photograph of a leaping salmon swimming upstream. Except I struggled with the curve in the body based on the sun's trajectory. Griff wrote a 500-word rant on Reddit about the picture, accusing me of altering my work to make the animals look more majestic. I loved that he thought my salmon looked majestic; drawing the scales alone almost gave me carpal tunnel. But the accusation led to a full-blown criminal investigation because I made more than $10,000 on a couple of my photos, and I got a flood of hate mail.

I withdrew from drawing for several years, drifting between bartending and yoga instruction. Billy Atwood pulled me out of my slump. Billy, short for Bernadette, was a ranger for Yellowstone National Park. She was the human equivalent of Rosie the Riveter, with dreadlocks, honey-brown eyes, dark brown skin, a deep-throated voice, and red lipstick. Every time she said Kiddo, the word would drip from her plump lips and I would melt. I wasn’t sure which way Billy leaned, but walking behind her, I fell in love. She’d tilt her hat left and say in a husky voice, “Don’t look now, but a herd of bison is about the round that ridge.” Sure enough, within minutes a few head-down, horned throw rugs with hooves would lumber by in the distance.

I was so in love, I decided to volunteer as a guide if only to run into Billy at the visitor’s center employee-only rec room. My heart pounded every time she’d wink and say, “See you on the trail, kiddo, don’t get eaten.” My first few guides went horribly. No animals, lots of bugs, and twice we got caught in a downpour.

My reviews were laughable:

“Casey lacks any drive to make a trail interesting, and all I saw was rocks and trees,” Ashley B., Connecticut.

“Casey sucks, and she didn’t let the animals out so we didn’t see any,” Greg T., Florida. Greg, like the bears, also struggled to open the trash; he fell in that overlap section of the Venn diagram.

I met Billy for a beer and vented, hoping she’d lift my spirits. Instead, she remarked, “Giving tours isn’t for everyone,” and paid our tab. Her comments enraged me. I stewed over it, determined to prove her wrong.

That evening, I worked out a perfectly timed sketch that would let my 1 pm tour see two bison glide through the tall grass feet from the trail before disappearing into a huddle of trees. It would scare the shit out of them, but it’d be a story, and they’d tell everyone. The plan went off without a hitch, and my tour was the hot topic at the bars. Two weeks later, I had a grizzly run across the path. Fear and excitement vibrated through the group. As talk grew, so did the number of animal sightings on my tour. I limited sightings, focused on the most common animals, and avoided any unique features that could create unwanted buzz. But the thrill got the best of me. When I did take a break, the bleak, bored, annoyed looks of tourists planning to see the wildlife in action and within range of their iPhones nearly killed me.

I had a plan to win back my tourists. I would get a pack of wolves to race through the prairie. This set off alarm bells. Photos flew across pages as hunters, rangers, and wildlife conservationists argued over where the wolves came from, how they were being tracked, and what type of wolf they were. I thought I’d done my homework. Apparently most of the wolves are tagged. My wolves weren't; there were too many, and I got the patterns on their fur slightly wrong, making some believe they were dogs or worse, a new species.

The US Fish and Wildlife Department got involved. They wanted to know where exactly I’d seen the wolves, how many, and what time of day. They wanted pictures from everyone on the tour. They wanted me to come with them on excursions to track down this mysterious pack. I panicked, my story became unreliable, and many tourists refused to cooperate, fearful they’d get fined or jailed.

Now I sit in court trying to explain how a pack of wolves appeared, then disappeared in the middle of Yellowstone on the best damn tour of the year. I really hope I don’t end up in jail. At least I proved Billy wrong; I’m cut out to be a tour guide, a damn good tour guide. The Judge steps out and walks toward the podium. I hold my breath as everyone stands. The prosecutor seethes with anger, his face ruddy.

The room quiets.

The Judge announces, “I’m going to dismiss this case, as there is no evidence proving Casy put anyone in danger when sighting the pack of wolves. As for the wolves, well, maybe it was just a bit of magic.”

I breathed for the first time, feeling understood.