I Am Wolverine
I Am Story

I’m in fourth grade, I believe, though could have been fifth. Either way, it’s long, long ago on a continent far, far away. My school (Mo Skola, just outside Hudiksvall in northern Sweden) was only a few years old at this time (say, 1958) and everything about it still seemed, because it all was, shiny and fresh.

Also, in those days education was a national priority and well-funded so each year we received a brand new, also shiny and fresh, set of textbooks that smelled great and the covers of which we had to wrap in protective paper as soon as we received them. Mom always helped with that. She was a wizard cover wrapper.

We always had a discussion, Mom and I, about what quality of paper, what pattern, and what colors to use for the new books. This was an important decision and Mom let me weigh in on it. Once we had settled on the paper, Mom went to work cover-wrapping and I was always proud of the result, though I probably never gave her official credit.

In class, where extraneous chatter was frowned upon, I was a chatterer. Loved to talk. Always had something to say to someone or other, in front of me, behind me, or on either side. This to the point where the teacher had no other option but to move me up to the first row, just in front of her desk, so that she could keep a close eye on me and shush me up as soon as I opened my mouth.

A little embarrassing, but I got over it soon enough.

I also loved writing.

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Every few weeks, as part of our Swedish Language curriculum, we were given essay assignments (“Uppsats” in Swedish, which goes a little beyond “essay” to include short fiction as well) that most of the time came with a subject (including the obligatory “What I Did This Summer” as the first assignment of the fall semester), and while I enjoyed writing on these given subjects, I really enjoyed, as in loved, the “free choice” essays—you pick your own subject, fact or fiction, and write away.

This particular assignment was just that, pick whatever you want and write a page or two or three about it—in the classroom, mind you, no books to look in or consult or plagiarize, and at that time, of course, we had no Internet (not even a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye yet; come to think of it, Tim himself was barely a glint in his father’s eye at the time) to copy stuff from to then claim as our own.

For this essay, and I don’t know from where, the story sauntered in and sat down next to me and insisted on being written. By me. It was a story about a wolverine and a reindeer.

About hunter and prey.

The remarkable thing about writing this story (which I wrote from the wolverine’s point of view) was that, in writing it, I became the wolverine.

I don’t remember how it started, nor do I remember how it ended, but I still vividly remember, mid-story, sitting in a tree (as the wolverine) seeing one of the younger reindeers approach my tree where I was just waiting for her to come close enough for me to drop down on her neck and rip it open, to drink her warm blood, to feel her falter and stumble and fall to the ground, dying, dying, dead while I drank my fill of reindeer blood and helped myself to morsel after morsel of fresh reindeer neck.

I was not even aware of writing this, I lived it while the lead in my pencil traced and accurately reported the happenings. On a level I was not even aware I had, I blossomed into this fantastic sensation all the while writing and killing and writing and eating.

And then, somehow—as I said I don’t remember how—I came to the end of the story. Perhaps the wolverine killed some more reindeers (for he likes to kill for the sake of killing, does the wolverine, not only for the sake of eating), or perhaps the reindeers got wise to him and stormed away.

There goes the school bell. Time was up. With the rest of the class, I handed in the assignment and headed out for recess.

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Next day, after the first class, again heading out for recess, my teacher asked me to stay behind.

Oh-oh went those who heard that. He’s in trouble.

Oh-oh, I thought to myself, though I couldn’t imagine what bad thing I had done this time. Trouble though, I could tell. A teacher’s voice is incapable of disguising trouble to come.

There would be speculations among my classmates during recess.

I turned to my teacher who by now had sat down at her desk. There were some papers in front of her, she looked at them. I looked at them too, and then recognized my wolverine story. She looked back up at me.

I must have looked the question mark I felt like at that point.

“You don’t know why I asked you to stay?” she said.

“No, Miss, I don’t.”

She sighed, looking very much like a teacher not enjoying what she had to do—but this was obviously for my own good sort of thing. “It is very bad,” she said, “to plagiarize.”

I remained a question mark which the saw and then realized that I didn’t know the meaning of that word.

“Plagiarize means to steal someone else’s writing and claim it as your own.”

I heard what she said, understood what it meant, but didn’t quite follow. Still a question mark.

“This story,” she said and pointed at the papers in front of her, “was not written by you.”

“It was,” I said. How could it not have been? My handwriting.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. Yes, you wrote it, of course you wrote it, I saw you write it. But,” and here she looked at me very sternly, heralding—in my experience—the really bad thing now to come, “you must have read this story somewhere else and here,” pointing at my essay, “written it down from memory as your own.”

“I didn’t,” I said.

And then she sighed again, pained by the unpleasantness of her task. She looked at my essay, folded one hand in the other. Looked at them. Shook her head. Sort of sadly.

“Lying only makes it worse,” she said, looking back up at me.

“I am not lying,” I said. “I never read that story anywhere. It just arrived,” I added.

“Arrived?”

“Yes, Miss. I was the wolverine, you see, and I was hungry, and cold, and saw these reindeers poking about in the now for something to eat so I snuck up on them and climbed up into a tree at the edge of the clearing and waited for one of them to pass by underneath so I could drop down on it and kill it.”

She was shaking her head again, presumably at my elaborate lie. And, yes, I was very good at lying. Mom, I’m sure, had warned her about that.

She did look sad, I noticed that.

“I will have to talk to your parents about this.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

Not only was I a good liar, I was also a very good stealer, which Mom might also have spilled, so in retrospect, this was probably not the best combination to offer up as a defense.

“You did, Ulf,” she said—and that was final. And she did look sad. Sort of quietly sad. As if she had lost something. I noticed that again and it didn’t quite compute.

Then the bell rang. Recess over.

“Miss, I promise. I did not,” I said.

She did not reply to that.

The rest of that day went by in a sort of blur, like living a modern-day version of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” By this I mean that by this time, my career as a stealer was already well underway and my reputation as an inveterate (though brilliant, if you ask me) liar was well established. Yes, I lied a lot and often, and I took liberties with truth both to garner interest from friends and grown-ups (other than Mom and Dad, that is)—who always seemed to find my tales amusing—or to deny, vehemently and elaborately, that it was not, not, not me, this time, who had stolen whatever had gone missing, either at home or at some neighbor or other’s house.

Bottom, wolf-crying line: the whole town knew that I lied, so never bothered to check on the sheep anymore, and the whole town knew that I often stole, pilfered, lifted, borrowed (my favorite euphemism) so would never believe that I hadn’t.

But now, here and now, for once, I neither lied nor had I stolen, pilfered, lifted, or borrowed. But who on earth would believe me?

Meanwhile, the wolf ate all the sheep.

And to make matters worse: somehow, news of my crime had leaked and was now common knowledge. Walking home that day with a friend of mine he, out of the blue, said, “You stole that story.”

“What?”

“Your Wolverine story.”

“How do you know about that? I mean, where did you hear that?”

“That you stole it?”

“No. That I had written about a wolverine and that the teacher thinks that I had whatever that word was.”

“Plagiarized?” Said my smart-assed friend. Must have learned that today, too, but he also remembered it.

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“Everyone knows.”

Which explained the whispers behind my back that afternoon during recess; which explained the titter among the girls in my class and even some among the other grades, too, and perhaps there was even a small, girlish finger pointing in my direction here and there. Explained that, as well.

“Well, everyone knows wrong,” I said. “I made that story up myself, just as I wrote it.”

“Teachers don’t think so.”

“They think wrong,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. Half-teasing, half-serious.

“I wrote that story. It is my story,” I said.

This went back and forth until we parted ways, me heading left up the birch-lined road to the church for my home out in the field beyond it while he headed straight on by the main road to his house half a mile or so up ahead.

Mom looked concerned when I stepped into the kitchen, so concerned that I knew that my teacher had already called.

“I wrote that story,” I said. “I made it up. I did not steal it.”

“Your teacher thinks you did.”

“I didn’t.” I knew that flat-out denial never worked with her, so I had better come up with a better strategy. Hit on one.

“Where would I have stolen it from? I don’t have any books with animal stories. We don’t have any books like that anywhere in the house and the magazines we buy don’t have stories like this, you’d know that, you read them too.”

She looked more ambivalent than I’ve ever seen her, I think. Normally, she simply disbelieves me (and rightly so, considering my track record with the truth). But now there was the hint of her actually believing me. I saw that and pressed my advantage.

“Come with me upstairs to my room, you can look at all my books and magazines, and you will not find that story in any of them. I promise.”

And again: “I promise.”

She sat down at the kitchen table and looked at me long and hard as if the truth would stand up and speak out on its own if she looked long and hard enough. I tried my damnedest to stand it up, too, that truth—I mean, for once, for once I was innocent of the charges. Would have been very unfair not to believe me. Not unreasonable, mind you, but unfair.

“All right,” she said. “I believe you.”

I sighed in obvious relief.

“Well, let me tell you,” she said, and now she was smiling. “If you wrote that story on your own.”

“I did,” I interrupted.

“Yes, if you wrote it on your own, then you must be a good writer.”

I said nothing, for I could see more was coming.

“The reason your teacher doubts that you could have written it is that no one your age can write that well. That’s what she said.”

“It was no big deal,” I said. “I just became the wolverine, and then wrote down how I felt and what happened.”

“And you didn’t borrow it from somewhere?” Just making sure.

“I did not.”

“If you didn’t pilfer it, then it must be a remarkable thing, this story.”

“Wow,” I said.

“When do I get to read it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “My teacher still has it.”

“I’m going to ask for it,” she said.

And, she did. The teacher came over one night later that week (probably as the result of a phone conversation with Mom) and she had brought the story, which she then left with her so that my dad could read it as well.

Mom read it and told me more than once that it was fantastic. If Dad read it, he didn’t say, but that was Dad for you.

As it happened the story never made it back to my teacher, but instead found its way to my grandma Olga who, from what Mom later told me, loved it and cherished it for the rest of her life.

With Olga’s passing (I was out of the country at the time), the story was lost. God knows what happened to it.

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My teacher was never convinced that I had written that story. Neither, I suspect, was my dad. Mom was convinced and defended me for as long as this was an issue, though, eventually, as things are wont to do, it simmered down and then died.

The only thing to add, and a frustrating thing at that, was that a couple of days after the essay assignment and the disputed story my smart-ass friend came to visit and we went up to my room to play. On one of my bookshelves stood my collection of books called “The Lives of Animals”, an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom, very non-fiction. I repeat, very non-fiction. No stories at all in them, wolverine or otherwise.

“Aha,” almost shouted my friend (sleuth-like), pointing at the books. “That’s where you got the story.”

I spun my head around to look, “Ah, those. There are no stories in those books, just descriptions of animals. It’s an encyclopedia.”

“And you want me to believe that,” he said, sort of laughing. No, not sort of laughing, sniggering is what he did. “I’m not an idiot.”

“If you don’t believe me, take a look. Look through them all.”

“I don’t need to look. I know that you lifted it from one of those books.”

“Look, for heaven’s sake. See for yourself.”

“I don’t need to look,” the idiot repeated. “It’s so obvious where you got the story from.”

“I did not get it from there. There are no stories in there. Look for yourself for heaven’s sake.”

“I don’t need to look, I know that you got it from there,” and so on, round and round. He refused to look, while also refusing to rescind the accusation. Just flat-out refused both things and man, if there could be anything more frustrating.

He never looked, but after a few days his accusation started to wear thin, no longer any bite to it, and so it took to the hills along with the episode as a whole.

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The wonderful thing, from today’s perspective, is that I did write that story, is that it was the fruit of my own imagination and my own ability to catch and frame it in words. I was that wolverine. At ten or so, I had done it so well that no one at school, and none of the teachers apparently, believed that I had written it on my own.

My grandma Olga, never doubted me for a second, however. Then again, in her eyes, I could never set a foot wrong, I was an angel-child, so maybe hers would not be the most unbiased voice rushing to my defense.

Yes, I did write that story, and I’m very happy I did. It was my first taste of the storyteller’s delight.

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