Wolf Hollow

“At times, I was so confused that I felt like the stem of a pinwheel surrounded by whir and clatter, but through that whole unsettling time I knew that it would not do to hide in the barn with a book and an apple and let events plunge forward without me.” 

Annabelle here relates that she learns the meaning of personal responsibility during the difficult time that engulfs her community. The simile where she compares herself to “the stem of a pinwheel” indicates that events are moving so quickly that she experiences a loss of control and that developments progress against her will. 

“A wolf is not a dog and never will be […] no matter how you raise it.” 

When Annabelle’s grandfather tells her that Wolf Hollow was named for the wolf-trapping pits of their ancestors, she questions why the wolves could not have been tamed and raised as dogs. Her grandfather answers that wolves and dogs are fundamentally different, and no amount of nurture will make a wolf resemble a dog. Later, as Annabelle begins to befriend and understand Toby, the lone wolf of the community, she will learn this lesson for herself—that some creatures are not suited to the settled lives of agrarian communities.

“I cleared the trees and made my way onto the field that was empty apart from her footprints, which were deep and sharp and suggested that she was more freighted than she could possibly be.” 

While Wolk gives the reader numerous insights into what makes Toby strange and different, she elaborates little on Betty’s motives. Here, however, is a rare moment when Annabelle notices that terrifying Betty could potentially have fears of her own. Betty’s footprints are “deep and sharp,” like those of an animal who flees. Annabelle, who sees the field as “empty” apart from Betty’s footprints, is hyper-vigilant to the latter’s presence and to the changes she has made to the community’s landscape and life. 

“Even though I was only eleven, I knew enough about fear to conclude that being completely afraid, body and soul, was probably enough to make a person strange forever after. And that’s what Toby was. Strange.” 

At a young age, Annabelle has the wise insight that traumatic lived experiences can influence a person’s character. She knows that Toby was likely not born strange, but what he had seen and done at war had made him that way. This attitude, which eludes many of her elders, enables her to look past Toby’s exterior to his flawed, but essentially good, character. 

“I left her there, musing in that patch of poison, and prayed that she would wake up tomorrow with scarlet boils and hard scabs. I prayed for a rash to veil her face with pustules and scales […] I prayed for scars on the hands that had killed that harmless bird. And I wasn’t sorry that I did.” 

Annabelle is furious about Betty’s sadistic killing of the quail, and she channels this into a prayer that the poison ivy will have its worst effect. Here, she wishes that Betty’s deformed insides will show on her pretty exterior so that the rest of the world will see her for the evil creature she is. Annabelle is so convinced that she is right and that Betty is wrong she displays no remorse over her feelings, thereby overturning the endlessly kind and forgiving feminine ideal of her times.

“Ruth was stunned the way a bird is stunned when it flies into a window full of sky reflected. She lay still, but her hands and feet twitched in the dust kicked up by her fall.”

The dramatic moment when Annabelle’s friend Ruth is hit in the eye is heightened by the trope comparing her to a stunned bird who flies into a window because it misjudges the glass reflection for the sky. Like Betty’s earlier victim, the quail, delicate Ruth is entirely unassuming in the face of the malice that was inflicted on her. The detail of the twitching hands and feet in the dust kicked up by her fall create pathos; they show how small Ruth has been entirely overcome and victimized by forces larger and more powerful than herself.

“Everyone knew about the Turtle Stone. It was in a little clearing as if the trees had not dared get too close, and the ground around it was covered with ferns and flowering weeds […] We always figured that the Indians had used it for ceremonies. If we hadn’t a church for our ceremonies, we probably would have chosen the Turtle Stone, too.” 

Here, Annabelle recognizes that Turtle Stone, the turtle-shaped rock in Wolf Hollow, has a sacredness that transcends culture and religion. She anthropomorphizes the trees, pointing out how even they had an intrinsic awareness that they should not grow too close to the awesome site. Both her people, who were colonizers, and the Native Americans they sought to distance themselves from, recognized the natural holiness of the site. She goes as far as saying that if her people had not been cultured into using churches for worship, they too would have been drawn to Turtle Stone.

“By the time we got to the schoolhouse, it was raining in earnest. We had worn oilcloth ponchos, hoods up, and boots, so we were plenty dry and warm, but many of the other children came in soaked and shivering. For the first time that season, Mrs. Taylor lit a fire in the stove at the front of the room and gave the wettest of her students a chance to dry out before lessons began.”

This detail, which shows how Annabelle and her brothers arrive at school dry because their parents had outfitted them for the rain, while other children are soaked through, exposes the poverty of some families in the Depression-struck community. As the parents are occupied with farm work, their children are neglected and some of their pastoral care falls to Mrs. Taylor. 

“Our old barn taught me one of the most important lessons I was ever to learn: that the extraordinary can live in the simplest things. Each season meant a world refashioned inside its stalls and storerooms.” 

Annabelle’s cavernous barn, with its diverse and multiple storage units, is a wonder that can hide and nurture different forms of life, depending on the season. Although the barn’s purpose is to be a simple aid to farm work, it has many incidental functions which enable it to go from being predictable and ordinary, to “extraordinary.” In this passage, Wolk builds up the space that Annabelle will put so much trust in when she decides to hide Toby in there. 

“Here was a big man in a black oilcloth coat, three guns slung across his back, long gnarled hair and beard, a black hat, a white face barely visible in the shadow of its rim. A man who lived mostly on game and berries in a smokehouse in the woods.” 

This passage highlights Toby’s wild, unusual appearance and so exposes why he may seem like a threat to people who do not know him. The profusion of the color black both in his hair and beard makes him a shadowy presence, while the “barely visible” nature of his face makes him difficult to relate to. While Annabelle’s society is agrarian, Toby, with his reliance on game and berries, has the diet of a hunter-gatherer. Like the Native Americans who occupied the hills before the white settlers, Toby has the aura of a man from a previous point in history. 

“I watched the two of them at their work for another moment. So different. So much the same. The room filled with things they’d made. All of it worn down to softness. The second wave of sorrow, now, was for Toby, too long deprived of such things, if he’d ever had them at all.” 

Annabelle observes her mother and grandmother wash sheets and darn socks. She notices the soft nature of the items they are handling and their work. The “worn down” room is a product of Annabelle’s female ancestors’ nurture and industry over time. Annabelle is at first comforted by the space and then mournful that Toby has lacked contact with such feminine softness in his harsh life on the run. 

“He’d taken off his coat. Without it, he was thin as a spring bear. Hatless, he had no shadow in which to hide. His eyes were blue.”

Even before he is shorn of his beard, Toby transforms by simply removing his coat and hat. Far from being a great threat, he is weedy and vulnerable as a bear coming out of hibernation. Wolk’s allusion to spring indicates a change and a blossoming in Toby’s character. Without the shadow of his oversize hat Toby’s face is visible, and Annabelle notices a new detail that humanizes him: his blue eyes. The previously obscure nature of Toby’s appearance is also a plot aid, as no-one in the community really knew him. 

“He creaked with leather: belt, boots, holster, chin strap. There was a row of long, sharp bullets tucked into loops in his belt. The handle of his gun was a smooth wood—almost pretty—his uniform stiff and sharp from hem to hat, except from some goofy pouches that stuck out from the sides of his trousers.” 

Annabelle knows that the investigation to find Betty has become serious when Officer Coleman turns up with Constable Oleska. Annabelle takes in Officer Coleman’s tough, almost depersonalized appearance. His uniform is of a military neatness and a stiffness so overpowering that its sturdy leather material makes noises. The detail of the goofy pouches, which indicate that the uniform is ill-fitting, indicate that there is a fallible human behind the disguise, while the smooth handle of the gun is an aesthetic detail that counteracts the brutality of the object. Annabelle allows herself to admit that the gun is “almost pretty”—“almost” indicating that she will not allow herself to be fully taken in by its appearance. 

“He talked about what it was like to eat grass in a field, as if he were a horse, and to sleep in a tree, his gun belt a cinch, and to want to stay there forever, to starve there, his rib cage a home for nesting birds, his bones falling, one by one, as gravity released them, like dead branches.” 

Toby expresses the despair he felt whilst on the battlefield in war-torn France. After so many grueling experiences, he wishes for death and imagines himself as a corpse. The detail of the birds nesting in his ribcage indicates that Toby can only find value for his body as a recycled object that other forms of nature can use to flourish. The image of gravity releasing his upright bones indicates that Toby then, and now, wishes that he had the permission to surrender the burden of his life. 

“I tried to […] tell him that he wasn’t the terrible person he claimed to be, to promise him that God would understand, but it was as if I were one of the rock doves overhead, cooing in a language that made no sense to him.” 

The simile likening Annabelle’s comforting words to the cooing of rock doves indicates how futile her efforts are. Toby has already decided that he is doomed for his actions and does not recognize the presence of a forgiving God. 

“I didn’t tell him that I’d put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn’t unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear Toby’s stories again as they wanted to be heard. And I didn’t think that would happen for a long time.” 

Annabelle feels that she was too young to hear about Toby’s traumatic wartime experiences. She knows that the information is lodged deeply inside her brain and that she will not retrieve it until she is ready. She thus protects herself, and perhaps Wolk’s young readers, from the disturbing effects of precocious knowledge. Toby was traumatized, and they can be compassionate to him without becoming equally startled.

“I pictured Betty trapped deep in that cold well for two days, the rain pouring in on top of her, and I wasn’t sure she’d need more punishing for all she’d done. But I knew Ruth might disagree.” 

Here, Annabelle almost begins to have compassion for Betty when she imagines the physical torture of being trapped in a cold well with even more cold rain pouring on top of her. However, her compassion has limits when she thinks about Ruth and the irreparable damage Betty inflicted on her. At this stage, Annabelle cannot imagine that Betty will die. 

“They laid Betty gently on a nest of coats in the flatbed of the constable’s truck. She was conscious, but barely. When her teeth began to chatter, I was startled to find myself thinking again of a wild animal. Groundhogs chattered their teeth like that when the dogs had them cornered.” 

The boundary between the human and the animal world dissolves, here, as Annabelle cannot help likening a wounded Betty to a frightened groundhog. She has the same bodily tooth-chattering instinct when she is afraid. Also, the rescuers arrange their coats in a metaphorical “nest,” showing that birds provide the model for human nurture.

“The truth was so tightly braided with secrets that I could not easily say anything without saying too much. So I simply sat down to my cereal and waited for the day to unfold.” 

Annabelle finds that she cannot be natural in this life of secrecy, where different members of her family know different versions of the truth. The image of the tight braid expresses the control that Annabelle has to exert over her speech. This is an uncomfortable and unsustainable state.

“If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could?” 

At Turtle Stone, Annabelle contemplates the ephemeral nature of her existence. She first wonders whether her life makes a difference at all and then decides that, because her moment in existence will be so brief, she should make it count. The metaphor of the single note in a symphony indicates both how miniscule Annabelle’s life is when compared to the bigger picture, and also how much choice she has over how she plays her note. Wolk also indicates that the way one plays one’s note affects the whole symphony.

“Betty’s not going to change her story. Why should she? Everyone thinks she’s the victim. And I really can’t blame them. She looks like one. And Toby looks like a villain, whether he is or not.” 

Annabelle’s mother points out how appearances run in Betty’s favor rather than Toby’s. Betty’s youth, attractiveness, femaleness, and respectable family make people overlook the possibility that she could be lying, while Toby’s unkept vagabond appearance make them discount his side of the story. In making this speech, Annabelle’s mother is trying to get her daughter to readjust her expectations for the outcome of events. 

“I didn’t know how beautiful my mother was until I saw her in that moment as she gathered herself to tell me that Toby was dead.” 

The juxtaposition of the devastating news of Toby’s death with Annabelle’s realization that her mother is beautiful, makes the loss more moving, as Annabelle watches her mother prepare herself to deliver the blow. It is also an accurate reflection of human psychology, as people often remember an image of what they were doing at the time of receiving devastating news. 

“Think about how it feels when your hands are so cold they go numb. How it’s only when they start to thaw out that you realize how much they hurt.” 

Annabelle’s mother uses the metaphor of painful, thawing hands to describe why Toby did not find the McBride family’s love enough of a reason to live. In fact, Annabelle’s mother implies that Annabelle’s love may have led Toby to stop being numb, begin to feel all of his pain again, and decide that life was not worth living.