Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 22

  At last I gulped air, and then with powerful strokes I pulled myself toward shore.

  Johanna was gone. It was the worst thing that could have happened. I would never see her again.

  My night self was forever changed. As my human shadow had wanted to die, my beast self wanted to live, but to do no more harm. All hate was gone. I wanted to take what I needed, no more. The love I felt for every leaf, for every pebble under my paws as at last I treaded shore, was enough to stop me, panting, and make me stand, gulping the pine-spiced air.

  I shook myself, water flung around me, and then I lifted a song. It was a cry for Johanna. I had lost my mate, and the inconsolable must speak. It was as though the darkness, the void itself, needed a voice.

  So I sang.

  I sang for Johanna, into the cold that starts with the stones of the earth, and stretches forever, to the edge of space.

  And then I was not alone.

  A trim, gaunt shape, like a dog but sharper-faced, trotted to the shore, joined by two others. They left paw prints in the snow, or I would have wondered whether they were real. I sniffed the air, but the heavy flakes dragged down their scent, and I could barely read the wind.

  One took a step forward. He yapped, a solemn bark of greeting. I spoke back in kind. I had lost my mate. The night was empty for me. All nights would be forever empty.

  The three coyotes turned, and glanced back. Come run, they seemed to say. Run with us. But keep your distance. You are too big.

  I ran. Each icy breath was a tribute to Johanna.

  They were quick, these coyotes, trotting ahead of me, more and more swift, as though challenging me to follow. Following them was easy. But as we ran we left the scent of men and their machinery, their fires and their garbage, far behind.

  At last the coyotes halted, looking at me with their steam-plumed silent laughs. They were tired. No farther, they seemed to say. We will not run any farther with you.

  I was not tired. The injury to my hindquarters had healed, and the ice-chill of the lake had long faded. I might be a creature of nature, but I was a fast-healing one, and strong. This was a special power: To heal quickly meant, I thought, that I did not have to be as careful as the other creatures of the night. I could do anything I wanted here.

  Saint Peter had wanted a creature of his own, one as strong as the saint’s faith, a beast as durable as stone. I ran in a way new to me. It was a great bounding, cadence of leaps that covered ground effortlessly, and fast.

  Fallen Leaf Lake shivered in the starlight. My breath was white in the cold, my chest fur starred with ice. I vaulted a log, and bounded deeper into the wilderness, Desolation Wilderness, where few men came, especially in winter. I would lose myself in the forest, and I would work my way through the woods, up into the north, following the mountains as though they were a trail. My future would not be among the swarm and confusion of humans.

  To my surprise, when the sun glittered on the ice I remained as I was. There was no transformation back to a human body. I should not have been surprised. My determination to be a beast ruled what happened to me now.

  I fed on rodents, mice, both the kind I had seen before, a quick-darting slip of beast, and another, springing sort of mouse. Both were easy prey for me, as were the chipmunks, who seemed to expect me to snap and miss. I snapped but never missed, although the first rabbit I attempted was so well camouflaged with its white fur that I did not see it until it was close to its hole. From that time on, I watched for the perfect black of its eye.

  I ate when I had to, and only killed what I needed, crunching bones, fur, the entire beast in my jaws. I needed to eat often, and was half-hunting every hour of the day and night. I was running without rest, without a moment of drowsiness, ever northward. I was never lost. I knew exactly where I was, and what I sought.

  Sometimes a coyote or two joined me, running with me for sport. They did not hold the pace for long, and I left them easily behind. For three nights I ran, and then, the following morning, I skirted a ranch, a spiral of chimney smoke and the distant bark of a dog. I caught the scent of a man and a woman, and hurried up-valley, plunging into the black firs.

  I was leaving a trail of paw prints and rodent blood, and the occasional, inevitable cat. But the wind would close my tracks. I sensed no hunters, no fear around me. There was only winter stillness.

  Later that morning I came to a cabin. There were no people inside, my nostrils told me, and it had been empty for weeks. I broke the door latch, and sniffed the dusty table and mildewed walls of a hunter’s cabin.

  There were some shabby flannels, and a pair of well-worn hunting boots. Standing in a habitation, I could not keep myself from remembering Johanna. As I panted there, observing all this evidence of humanity, man’s needful, poorly shod body, I felt myself asking my own soul: shall I?

  And at once I crouched, shivering and naked, human again. A bad mistake, I told myself. A very bad mistake. I was naked, weak, and freezing. Immediately I told myself to quit this quaking manshape, and I bounded from the cabin, a beast once more.

  So the transformation is that simple, I marveled. So quick. But I had proven to myself, without planning to, that I was finished with my puny, human self. And I was discovering something else.

  One dusk I heard the rattle of a pickup truck, and hugged snow as a sole figure climbed from a truck and pulled a rifle from the gun rack. There was a brief fume of exhaust fading in the cold. This was a bright red four-wheel-drive truck, and the man was burly and unshaven, smelling of tobacco and coffee. He sighted down the barrel, and the rifle made the clicks which, even at a distance, were startling and cruel in my ears.

  We were far from any highway—I could barely scent a road. This was a poacher, I thought, lying still within a thicket. A man who handled his rifle easily, and who had parked his truck out of view, far into a forest. A man who knew what he was doing here, on this cold late afternoon.

  It was a short walk in the twilight to a slope overlooking a long wrinkle in the snow. The wrinkle wended to a yellow rock, the size of a man’s torso, at the edge of a clearing. I sniffed the air, and knew what it was.

  A deer trail to a salt lick. The salt may have been put there by a man, perhaps this man. There was something untrustworthy about its appearance. I caught a whiff of the man again, leather, armpit, tobacco, crotch. The man sighed as he knelt somewhere in the snow, and I scanned the brown thickets until I saw where he crouched.

  The man was an excellent hunter. He had his quarry timed exactly. As soon as he had settled, and gathered himself in silence, a figure like a tree transformed into an animal stepped into the clearing. The air seemed to still around it, as though this lean creature were the focus of the entire landscape. The figure felt its way along the trail as though cutting it for the first time.

  The scent of deer was a resonant one, a fragrance of the leaves he had fed upon, and wet hair, and a lingering scent of rut from months before. He was a young buck, and stopped to turn toward me, his ears focusing on where I was hidden.

  My bark shivered fir needles in the tree above me. It shook the sunset glow on the snow before me. The deer sprang away, bounding, and there was the clear, high ringing report of a shot.

  He never saw me. The report was echoing and reechoing among the trees when I fell upon him. My paw/hand slammed the crown of his billed cap. His jaw snapped shut, and his knees buckled.

  I had carefully struck him just hard enough to stun him. He was more than stunned. He lay, his hands outstretched and his eyes closed. I cupped my paws around his neck. His pulse was strong. Blood welled where his teeth had sunk into his lower lip. The smell of the blood made me drool, and I was instantly hungry.

  I sprang to the gun, picked it up, and hurled it high into the air. It spun in the twilight, disappearing, and then I heard it fall far off, a single sharp crash on the ice.

  I rushed to obliterate my prints, and as I finished the chore I heard the man waking, grunting, swearing to himself, and then sweari
ng in earnest when he could not find his gun.

  As I ran that night, stopping to snout out mice where they dove, I puzzled over the change in me. As I understood the change, I woke again to my loss.

  I was without even a trace of anger. I felt only compassion, even for the man. I wanted to do no harm. This must have been how Johanna had felt, wanting to nourish chipmunks, and even ants. Our kind of creature evolved into a beast who could commit no cruelty. In losing Johanna, I had lost more than a mate. The world had lost an amazing creature.

  That morning I saw an animal as large as myself.

  I had been trotting north, above the timber line, on a vast bald dome of rock and ice. I swung down at last into the trees to avoid the wind and the glare of the unblemished perfect gray of the sky.

  He had the rich odor of warmth. Warm fur, warm fat, thick warm tongue and slow, ponderous breath. He had dragged himself from sleep, and still wore an aura of the den. He did not want anything fast, or harsh. Merest curiosity turned him to face me. His eyes were small and dark, and he thrust his snout toward me, and rose to his full height.

  I was called upon to respond, but I did not know how. This was the bear’s territory, and yet the bear was indifferent to his rights. He was, though, almost too curious. My size kept him standing, and kept him both from turning his back on me and from approaching. He was tall enough to look down on me as I trotted on my four paws closer to where he stood.

  He made a “woof!” through his nostrils, nearly like a sound I myself could make. So, he seemed to say: you.

  As though we had met, as perhaps we had, in some lost century, or in the secret country of our genes. You, he seemed to say, lowering himself, hunching his shoulder fur.

  You do not belong here. This was not a thought to me, but a thought to himself. A caution. Watch this beast, he thought. This is something strange. Something strange, and dangerous, and hard to predict. Something wrong.

  Of all the creatures I had met, he was the only one who guessed that I was not an animal.

  I left the bear, and passed on, continuing north. But the bear stayed with me, a reminder that in truth I did not belong where I was, or where I was going.

  It was as I left the bear behind that something caught me, as certainly as a branch might snag me, and forced me to stand on my hind legs, and look back. It was not a scent, and not a sound. It was like a change in the weather too subtle to see and yet a change so real one’s hand closes the collar at one’s throat. I did not register the nature of my foe, if indeed that is what it was.

  But I was being followed.

  In the next valley, a pair of foxes, in silver gray winter coats, nosed a fresh kill—a rabbit. There was only the blood and the open black eye of the rabbit to give any sharp color to the cold. Wind filled the branches of every tree for a moment, as though the woods were a great lung.

  Then a burst of animal was upon the two foxes, and the two small carnivores showed teeth, snarling. Snarling, but retreating before this thick, shaggy, fanged animal that swept itself over the body of the rabbit, and snarled ugly, throat-tearing gutturals.

  Growling, their voices high and fierce, the foxes retreated, counter-feinted. But there had not been a struggle. The wolverine had owned the rabbit as soon as he had scented it. I stepped through the wall of firs, and the wolverine sniffed toward me peeling back his lips, exposing his teeth.

  He skulked to one side, and then another, complaining. “You’ll die for this,” his growl said. “Die die die go away and die.” Then he was gone, leaving the still scarcely damaged rabbit in the torn snow.

  The smell of the rabbit made me hungry, but I wished that I could feed both foxes and wolverine, and at the same time restore the rabbit to life. Compassion could be confusing, and I saw that even the miracle of loaves and fishes was unkind to the wheat, battered and crushed into bread, and to the fish, who multiplied into yet more unliving fish.

  Later that day I smelled strange blood, blood that told me at once that I should stop right where I was. There was not much of it, a stain here, and far up, on a knoll, a sprinkle of it in a ragged line. It had been days, now, since I had felt sharp fear. The sensation was unfamiliar, and I did not understand what was wrong.

  This was not a human scent. This was not the scent of bear, or any other predator I could guess. And yet each drop was a screech: leave this place. The blood itself did not tell me enough to guess what hid ahead of me in the snow.

  The scent was, however, familiar. If I had lingered, circling back to consider, I would have recognized what it was. But I was confident, and I made a mistake.

  There was no reason to be afraid, I told myself. I was so large, and so swift, no creature would even try to combat me. I did not like this mystery. This forest, I seemed to think, was mine. I had not enunciated this scrap of hubris to myself in so many words, of course, but it was plainly what drove me to trot up the slope, following the stipples of blood.

  All along I had been thinking that there was a place for me here in the north. I would be among my kind. I was not a human being any longer; I would be an animal. A supreme animal, more compassionate, certainly more powerful, than any of them.

  At the last moment, just before it happened, I knew what it was. The thought did not cause me to falter. It did, though, make me slightly less curious, and I wondered if I should continue trotting as I was, slipping along the glass of a frozen creek.

  There was a shriek. A rasping, whip-cry, like the shattering of a plane of glass. I heard it only when I was already down, and fangs sank into my neck.

  Thirty-Two

  Each fang was a dagger. Each plunged into the fur and flesh behind my skull.

  There was an explosive sound, and I did not recognize it, at first, as my own roar. My hind legs found new footing. I spun, and flung the beast from side to side, but the creature dug claws into my flesh, and I could not throw it.

  I reached behind with my own handlike claws, but they were helpless against this savaging. Then I found myself grasping a hind leg. I was surprised at the tawny skin, and the flexing, searching claws. It was as though I had time to linger over the aesthetics of this carnivore paw. Then my own paw/hand dragged the leg, pulling the flesh off my neck in ribbons as the beast could not maintain its grip on me.

  The cat released its hold, and at once found a better, deeper bite. The stench was sharp. A cat had me, and it was killing me. Cat—the word itself was like a cat’s hiss. I could not pull the beast off me, so I leaped, and fell backward heavily into the snow.

  The cat bunched beneath me, and one of its ribs snapped. Its scream made me cold, and then the cat leaped away, a blur, and would have been gone entirely, except that I had not released its hind leg. I wanted to, and strained to let go, but I could not command my muscles.

  I could not let go of the cat. It screamed. I reeled, snarled, and tried to free the leg. But I could do nothing but hang onto it.

  The feline visage shrieked into my face. I bellowed, and fell upon it, helpless to do anything else. The fangs had disabled the muscles of my shoulders and both arm/legs were weaker than ever before.

  I pinned this whirl of teeth, and its hind legs clawed my belly. There was a wound in its flank, a black-red hole. A bullet wound.

  This cougar was dying. Again, I struggled to force loose my grip on its leg, but I could do nothing. I had no desire to harm it, and yet I had to kill it or watch its hind claws gradually disembowel me.

  My jaws were all I had left. One foreleg was for the moment powerless, and the other paw was frozen around his leg. I took the spitting snarling dervish of a head in my jaws and bit, hard.

  A crunch, and a spitting, hissing burst of blood. Then I rolled away, still dragging the kicking corpse. I was thankful that the snow was so numbing. I left streaks of scarlet that blotted into it, melting it as they spread. But the cold soothed the pain. Good snow, I thought. Good, lovely snow.

  At last I freed myself from the bloodied, contorted cat. I coughed up one of
its teeth. I was shuddering, and even as I trotted away, the snow around me swayed, shimmered, and vanished.

  I nose-dived into the crust. I was up at once. Don’t stop, I told myself. And whatever you do, don’t sleep. Where there are bullets there are men, and even worse—dogs. Keep going. Down the frozen creek, and up the keel of the valley, always north.

  It won’t be so difficult. Remember: you heal quickly. Remember: you are powerful. I repeated these phrases to myself. With each panting breath I saw how foreign this place would always be to me.

  I had no home here. I did not belong.

  It was a cold night. The snow glowed beneath me, as though it alone were a source of light. Don’t stop, I told myself as I ran, more and more stiffly. Must not stop. You’ll heal soon.

  I climbed a rubble-field. Wind was blasting out of the north, and where my fur was gouged away the cold probed a steel finger. I even growled at the wind, snarling at it. I was learning that animal speech, that talk which is not communication so much as an utterance complete in itself.

  Wind, I growled, you will die for this.

  Die die go away and die.

  I managed to snout out several mice, and crunch them up, warm and squirming. I did not feel quite ready to attempt a rabbit. I clambered to the crest of hillock, a scabrous dome of granite and snow, when I heard, far to the north, a sound. A voice. More than a word: a message.

  We are here.

  I lifted a call in answer. As soon as I did, however, the wind made an even fuller cry, a chord of sound that swept my cry, and any answer, away from me. I could hear nothing, from any direction, but the wind.

  I had the sense—or perhaps only the hope—that there were other calls to me in the night, but for me there was only the battering of the wind. I ran hard all night, so hard my vision faded, and I ran on scent and strength alone. I wobbled and fell, twice, but was up at once each time. I was not hurt, I told myself. Not hurt. I heal quickly.