The Wolf Keepers Chapter Sampler

By Elise Broach and Alice Ratterree

Read a sneak peek of THE WOLF KEEPERS!


Twelve-year-old Lizzie Durango and her dad have always had a zoo to call their home. Lizzie spends her days watching the animals and taking note of their various behaviors. Though the zoo makes for a unique home, it's a hard place for Lizzie to make lasting friends. But all this changes one afternoon when she finds Tyler Briggs, a runaway who has secretly made the zoo his makeshift home. The two become friends and, just as quickly, stumble into a covert investigation involving the zoo wolves who are suddenly dying. Little do they know, this mystery will draw them into a high-stakes historical adventure involving the legend of John Muir as they try to navigate safely while lost in Yosemite National Park.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781250132994

Elise Broach

Elise Broach is the New York Times bestselling author of Masterpiece, Shakespeare’s Secret and Desert Crossing, Missing on Superstition Mountain, the first book in the Superstition Mountain Trilogy, as well as several picture books. Her books have been selected as ALA notable books, Junior Library Guild selections, a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book, a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teenage, an IRA Teacher’s Choice, an E.B. White Read Aloud Award, and nominated for an Edgar Award, among other distinctions. Ms. Broach holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from Yale University. She was born in Georgia and lives in the woods of rural Connecticut, walking distance from three farms, a library, a post office and two country stores.

Book preview

Chapter 1

WILD

A FEW FEET away, the wolf stared at Lizzie with pale silver eyes, ears pricking forward in sharp triangles. He stood perfectly still. In the space between them, she could feel a ripple of energy—a tension in the air like a string pulled taut. She imagined coming face-to-face with him in the woods, nothing between them. Despite the July heat, she shivered.

She was sitting on a rock between the low wooden guardrail and the chain-link fence: closer than the public was allowed, but Lizzie wasn’t the public. Her father was the head zookeeper at the John Muir Wildlife Park in Lodisto, California, and Lizzie had lived there all her life.

The wolves, though—they were new.

They had come from a city zoo in the north, seven of them, and this was the big male, Lobo. It was one of the zoo traditions, giving the animals foreign-sounding names; in this case, Lobo, Spanish for wolf. Did Spain even have wolves? Lizzie didn’t know, but maybe the Spanish explorers had encountered them in California centuries ago. There was something ancient about the wolves, as if they’d been around since the beginning of time, and nothing was likely to surprise or confound them.

Hey, Lobo, she said softly. Hey.

The wolf stared at her, his face alert.

She balanced her green spiral notebook on her knee-caps, and, opposite her sketch of Lobo, she wrote:

July 26. Wolf Woods. Lobo looks at me with the clearest, most pure silver eyes. What is he thinking? He doesn’t seem afraid. I wonder if he sees me as a strange kind of animal, one without fur. Or maybe he just sees me as meat. If the fence weren’t here, would he try to eat me?

She shuddered again. Was it possible the wolf thought she was prey?

While most of the zoo animals had been bred in captivity, never actually experiencing the wild places that would have been their natural habitats, the wolves were different. These seven had been separately captured and rehabilitated, some injured by hunters or vehicles, some posing a threat to livestock. They had all come from the wild, and here at the zoo, they formed a pack.

For the past month, Lizzie had spent part of almost every day sitting at the edge of their enclosure, watching them. The John Muir Wildlife Park had never had wolves before, and the new exhibit, Wolf Woods, was the largest animal habitat at the zoo—almost two acres of scrubby meadow mixed with pine trees. It was so big that sometimes you couldn’t even see the wolves. They would gather under the trees in the far corner, and for the impatient visitors who thronged into the viewing hut, the pen might as well