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THE STORY

Magnolia is the founder of a wolf rehabilitation program in the Pacific Northwest.  She is rescuing a wolf trapped by a mudslide when a pickup truck with a dead llama in the back screams up.  Two llama ranchers threaten the staff, pointing shotguns and shouting.

The next day, Walter, a land-management rep, informs Magnolia that her lease has ended and the preserve’s 5,000 acres are up for sale for commercial development.  Magnolia begs, “My wolves will all die.”  He tells her she can buy the land for 5 million dollars.

Returning to the refuge with a temporary court order, she is just in time to stop the bulldozers.  She has five weeks to buy the land or lose it.  She conducts an emergency legislative campaign and a massive fundraising campaign.  She mortgages her home, gives Walter the money as a down payment and promises to get the rest of the money in time.

Vanook, a philanthropist on her Board and an old friend, offers her a job in his Internet startup.  This is 1998, the middle of the “dotcom” boom, and he assures Magnolia that her stock options will allow her to buy the land.  “How else are you going to make five million dollars in five weeks?”

At the office, Magnolia suffers culture shock.  The dotcom life is absurd, almost hallucinatory.  Intense academics lecture to surfer dudes; pierced teenagers in Mohawks shriek at Chinese-speaking software engineers.  Foot massage is provided hourly; caviar is served in the kitchen; big-screen TVs, motorized scooters and cave bear skeletons are delivered.  Vanook is interviewing brides in Bangalore.  Magnolia cannot get anyone to actually work—but if they do not work, the company cannot have an IPO and she cannot cash in her stock options.

At night, exhausted, she drives to the preserve for chores.

She tries to make the company successful by doing all the work herself, spending more emotional energy at the office, and has less and less energy for the daily preserve duties.  Eventually, she is sleeping on a cot at work and has stopped going to the refuge in the evenings.

She is served with a civil lawsuit by the ranchers.  She asks Marta, a staff biologist, to prepare the response.  While Marta is in the law library, the refuge is vandalized: fences are chain-sawed, the biologist shack is burned and Alphie, a mother wolf, is beaten and her leg broken.  Marta calls Magnolia at the office, but Magnolia doesn’t return the call: she is in a meeting with investors.

The date of the court hearing arrives and Magnolia forgets, arriving after the case has been heard and lost.  Magnolia calls Marta; Marta slams the phone down in her ear.

Now owing ½ million for her mortgage, 5 million to buy the land and 3 million to the ranchers for the lawsuit judgment, Magnolia goes to Vanook. He says, “Get me on the cover of Time Magazine and I’ll give you more stock options.” Magnolia gives up the last of her old ethics and lies to stock analysts and the press.  She succeeds in getting Vanook an interview with Time; he gives her the extra stock options.

Now all she has to do is get the company to go public.  At the party for the company’s initial public offering, Magnolia quietly counts her stock.  She has 8½ million dollars.  Holding a glass of champagne, Vanook tells her she is laid off and he withdraws her stock options.

Magnolia is crushed, defeated and penniless.  She loses her home and moves to a campground.  After weeks, she gets the nerve to visit the wolf refuge. She walks 70 miles on dusty roads, arriving to find turkey vultures circling barren ground, picking at bones.   Lifting her head, she sees newly constructed luxury homes and a sign, “Vanook’s Estates.”

Marta calls Magnolia from a new, well-funded, larger wolf preserve in Idaho.   Magnolia will not answer.  She stares at the houses and the bones.  She gets down on all fours and howls.  Vanook's secretary Abby calls from her new job to offer Magnolia a position there.  Magnolia looks at the caller ID and throws the phone into a construction dumpster.  The phone rings again, unanswered in the trash, as she continues to howl.

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