The Lone Wolf

FISHER STARK, 26, an Australian war photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner, travels the world to take photos of brutal wars and unspeakable atrocities, then gets captured and tortured for a long time. Luckily he's saved by a squad of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne. He comes home angry, scarred, and finally suicidal. It's only the idea of a horse with whom he had a chance encounter on an equine therapy ranch that keeps him from pulling the trigger. He goes to his family's sheep station, Stark Haven, where that equine therapy ranch, STARRY, is situated. Fisher gets into fights and is rude to others and can’t sit still in his own skin, but finally bonds and connects with that older horse, a massive blue roan draft horse named BLUEBELL, who recognizes in Fisher the same anger and pain her horrifically-abusive previous owners caused her. We share in how Bluebell sees her past and present via “Bluebell-Vision”. Over time, Fisher and Bluebell help each other heal as each gives the other permission to let down their internal and external guards. Unfortunately, this means reliving in nightmares what they’ve experienced and witnessed. His parents, CHARLIE and ELSA, show up to help -- Fisher and Charlie have been estranged for years, and Fisher demands why he’s there. Charlie, a Lieutenant Commander in Australia’s Maritime Border Command, tells him he asked his commanding officer for sixty days leave and she signed off on the request right off. It’s touch and go now that Charlie’s there. Fisher punches KILLIAN, who’s been assigned to him as his “little bro”, because Killian pulled a prank that flasheed Fisher back to his torture. Fisher and Bluebell spend time together in the Outback far away from the Stark Haven homestead and STARRY, in a sequence inspired heavily by the island sequence in “The Black Stallion”, and, when they get back, Fisher is thoroughly chewed out by his UNCLE TIM, who runs Stark Haven, and KIRRA, who runs STARRY. Fisher had left a gate open, and dingos got into the inner paddock and attacked the flock of sheep and the herd of therapy horses, leaving seven sheep dead and one of the Shetland ponies, a little palomino filly, horrifically injured. Actions have consequences. For the first time in a long time, Fisher can’t solve his problems from the opposite side of a lens. Fisher is chastened and discovers he wants to make amends with everyone he’s hurt, a list he discovers is long. He knows he has to start with his father, with whom he’s had problems for twelve years, ever since Charlie had had an affair and had fallen off the pedestal so many sons put their fathers on. They have a good exchange over a meal at a diner in town, but then right at that crucial last moment Charlie gets a call from his commanding officer he has to take, and Fisher has a rush of all those old feelings of being the last one in his father’s life. By the time they get back to Stark Haven, Fisher is ready to pack his bags and return to his old life as the Lone Wolf, but he finds a mailer of photographs the Pentagon had found and developed in his film camera, and Fisher has a flood of memory of the worst of man’s inhumanity to man: first, soldiers slaughtering teenagers who, during a fascist coup, stand up on a wall and wave flags of their free, democratic Romania, teenagers who know their fate; then, the four months of his unspeakable torture, when he was reduced to a piece of meat hanging off a hook. Fisher’s still going to leave, and he rushes outside with his bags, but there’s Bluebell. Leaving means, well, leaving her, and he just can’t go that far. Finally, as Bluebell has her chin on his tired shoulder, he gives voice to all the hurt and pain and grief with which his heart’s been aching. He tells all of them that he has to live every day with the truth that he’s alive only because someone else decided he wasn’t worth wasting a bullet on. So begins the healing for real, for both man and horse. Fisher’s grandfather has a heart attack, and Fisher discovers he can feel something, that he doesn’t have to hold onto that numbness he adopted as his defence mechanism in the field. Fisher tells his dad that they almost just now lost Granddad, and he doesn’t want to possibly lose him without Charlie knowing Fisher loves and forgives him. Fisher publishes a photo-essay online of a day in the life of an Outback sheep station, and he uses his first name, Glen, which he’ll go by for now on -- gone forever are the Fisher King and the Lone Wolf. The extensive Stark family gathers at Stark Haven for Labour Day, and we discover Charlie has died in a terrorist attack, where he got all his crew off his ship and he was able to save Fleet Base East, but he went down with his ship. Jake says he wishes he had gotten to know all his children better, but time goes by so fast, and he leads the gathering in a belting out of “Waltzing Matilda” for Charlie to hear in heaven. We close our story with Glen standing on the railing fence, watching Bluebell as the draft horse mingles amongst the herd of therapy horses who had for so long shunned her. Glen hops down, puts his arm around Bluebell’s neck, and takes a photo of the two of them, a photo only for them. Glen takes her lead and walks with her into the warm morning sun.