Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  Tracking back to the cabin with pine-sticky hands, I felt it again: I was being watched. I gazed about me in the vermilion sunset and could see nothing but glowing snow-field.

  I saw him at last.

  His winter camouflage was not suited for this ruddy light. He was a silver-bright figure on a slope. He did not turn to run, nor did he shift to move closer. Dark Ears watched me, knowing well, I could tell, exactly who I was. I knew from the first moment, he seemed to say. Look at him hauling branches. This is no wolf.

  Then he spoke, a bark, a single word across the silence. The word was unmistakable, and the import of it stopped me.

  He had greeted me.

  I spoke, quietly, but I knew his cupped ears could hear my every breath. “Good evening, friend,” I said, in my thin, human voice.

  He made his open, silent laugh. Then he turned, and trotted away.

  His greeting might have been a blessing, or a farewell. But as I returned, Johanna was sitting up. Her cheeks were flushed, but her eyes were clear.

  “I heard a wolf,” she said.

  By the next evening she was strong enough to stand, and the next morning she was gone.

  We were out of firewood again, and I had returned with the few, scraggly bows I could wrest from the trees. I saw her tracks before I entered the cabin.

  I dropped the branches. I called her name. Surely she would not leave me here. Surely she did not not intend to join the wolves herself and let me return to my human kind. This would be like her—another abrupt sacrifice.

  The sky was empty except for a high, white skim of cloud. I called her name, calling with my puny man-voice. She was gone, off to attempt a life she knew would fail, among the wolves.

  A step broke the snow behind me, and a golden wolf waited at the step to the cabin.

  In my excitement, I fell down. She was with me at once, her forelegs helping me up. “I thought you’d left me.”

  Her chiming bark made me ashamed that I had doubted her.

  Inside, she huddled in the quilt, shivering and human.

  “It’s time to go,” she said.

  “Are you sure you’re—”

  “You must know by now how quickly we recover. We should go this very moment.”

  I had grown a little too fond of this A-frame. It had been a hiding place for us, and I had grown to feel we could stay here for weeks. But I knew that she was right. Now was the time to begin.

  The sun dazzled me. I had, just then, and for the first time, a sense of where we were in terms of geography. Canada, I supposed, although the idea of political boundaries struck me as absurd. The wind was from the south, colder, strangely, than a north wind, but flavored with the places that called us. I willed myself back to my wolf shape, commanded myself, held my breath.

  Nothing happened.

  Again, I willed myself to change, and once again—nothing. I could not be anything but what I was. I held my hands before my eyes. Was my power gone? And if I could no longer transform myself, would the power ever return?

  Johanna hugged me. “You’re still learning, Benjamin.”

  But I remained what I was: a human being. I had forgotten how to change my shape, just as in dreams I had forgotten how to fly. There was, however, something very bad about my failure. “If I try to travel as a human,” I said, with chattering teeth, “I’ll die.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. Her faith continued to astound me. I was a poorly garbed, huddling human being, kept alive probably because of some vigor my wolf self lent its human counterpart, and I was unable to return to the power that got me here.

  “We can wait,” she said.

  Her presence had distracted my power. My power was drawn toward her, as a sea is pulled by the moon. I was stranded, hopeless. And yet her faith stirred me. I was not afraid.

  It happened at dusk, and it was agony.

  We were enjoying the fire, and finishing the last of the freeze-dried food, a packet of turkey tetrazzini which had been sampled by mice.

  I was huddling near the fire, while Johanna read me snippets of the baseball encyclopedia, surprising me after reading for a while by asking me what a pinch hitter was. I was baffled that an adult could endure without having ever brushed into the term before, and, jokingly, told her that she was not quite the expert at languages I had assumed her to be.

  “Let’s say a manager wants to remove one batter and send another one to bat in his place,” I said.

  “Yes?” she said, expectantly.

  “It’s possible that a certain batter is likely to be ineffective against a particular pitcher.”

  “Likely.”

  “That’s it—likely. Baseball is all likelihood, thinking you know what will happen and being, usually, surprised.”

  Surely, I thought, the transformation will come soon. It is night, and I need my night self or I will never survive.

  I put my doubts out of mind, and continued, but my explanation was more obtuse than I had intended, however, and wandered off into the defects of the designated hitter rule.

  I stopped speaking. I moved my lips, worked my tongue, but there was no sound.

  “Benjamin! What is it?”

  My entire body burned, and I found myself trying to reach toward her. I tried, straining, but for several heartbeats I could not move.

  I lurched to my feet. I reached for a shelf to keep from falling, and missed. I tumbled onto the floor, and my skin seemed to peel from my body. I howled, a long, blue-white streak that spilled from my mind, outward into the stars. The floor beneath me expanded, and I fell through, drifting downward, barely able to hear Johanna as I fell, calling her name.

  Thirty-Five

  Snow broke under our paws, and our breath was bright in the starlight.

  We raced before a storm, and at last it rose over us, a black shelf of cloud. This dark sheet pulled itself over half the sky, and then all of it, leaving a tangle of gray far to the south. And when it caught us, a tsunami of blizzard, it carried us with it.

  I had never felt so alive, so triumphant. At times we seemed to fly, great leaps that vaulted frozen streams.

  When the storm died, we plunged through the ice-blasted stillness, the only things moving. Each breath was sharp with life.

  One morning a crow followed us, high above, calling a warning. Once we downed an elk, killing him mercifully, a gray male who turned at the sight of our approach, and never knew what had him, so swiftly, by the throat.

  We bounded fallen trees and ice-choked rivers, and someone spying us would have seen two shadows streaking across a field of stubble. We flushed coyotes, and rabbits, and from time to time we jogged to a crest to survey where we were going, and consider where we had been.

  A beagle caught our scent one dawn, and fled us, yapping. A man on a tractor, delaying before he began his day’s work of plowing a bare field, nearly tumbled from his perch as we dashed past him, one on either side, and I doubt he ever understood what had torn past him on crust so hard it left no prints.

  Every bound was pleasure. We took a route that Johanna seemed to know, and it was strange to cross a highway scented with oil and hear the whir of an engine far away. Cars, and all machinery, seemed to belong to a forgotten age.

  Wind whistled around a telephone cable that arced above us like a slice in the sky. A spin of blackbirds ascended as we broke through them, and horses looked up from where they drank their own shadows.

  Until one night we reached Lake Tahoe.

  Home, I thought—where I belong. Where we both belong. Familiar, safe territory. We paused, panting great clouds of vapor. The lake was black, and so were the trees, the scene a stark photograph. Ahead of us was the black hulk of my family’s cabin.

  Go on, I urged myself. This is your refuge. Why are you waiting?

  Something kept me where I was. I did not allow my doubts to thicken into actual suspicion. It was simply much better, I felt, to be cautious.

  We shrank to the side of the long-disused ci
stern, where, as a boy, I had discovered the drowned bat. The otherness of animals, how unlike us they are, and yet how intense their lives are, touched me as I knelt there beside my golden wolf.

  This was the cabin where I had played as a boy, and had walked with my new wife, when I knew nothing of night and blood, and the world was a place of false promise.

  Perhaps the discovery of the drowned bat had been the beginning of my life as a rational creature, the beginning of my awareness that the real world was as treacherous and unfamiliar as the world of dreams. A bat knows the tiniest voices, and the fingers of his wings hold, like a man’s, what they can never have, through the air that cannot love him, his flight an endless cursive, hollowvoweled, hunger’s secret name.

  A bat never imagines that he might someday die. His entire body, his entire life are fashioned by the need to stay alive. And what, I wondered, fashioned the two of us? Perhaps, I allowed myself to believe, the need to become a new creature, no longer a human wolf, but an animal of compassion, a creature who had killed and learned the evil of it.

  We crept across the snow. Here was the window, neatly puttied into place. We could peer through the glass.

  Here was the civilized world, the world of human beings, the world that would kill us.

  Danger.

  The thought froze me. I could only sniff the air, thinking: danger here.

  We both withdrew, trotting to the edge of the lake, where we sat. There had been no dangerous scent, and no sound. But the time of joy was finished. The cabin was perfectly quiet. But something warned me away from it. There was something wrong.

  Johanna sensed it, too. She rose high on her hind legs, and sniffed the air. I joined her. I could map the cabin by scent alone. And there was something that did not belong, the smell of ozone, plastic, and electricity.

  What was this scent? Very faint, and yet quite unlike the scent of the weathered telephone wires and the old fuse box beside circuit breakers. The wiring of the cabin was outdated, but there was the taste of new copper in the air, some new device connected to the mature wiring of the building.

  There was the scent of human beings, too. Mr. Laurel, very faintly. He had repaired the broken glass. But other smells, too, as distinctive as different voices.

  Johanna growled, a song that rose and then stopped, a minor-key tune that meant: there is something wrong here.

  Something very wrong. My hackles rose and I heard the rumbling baritone of my own growl. I could think only: mouse poison. Mouse traps. The dead mice in Laurel’s hand, in his paper bag. Dead mice, dead animals, creatures scurrying, whose crime was that they were alive.

  Animals which were killed for no reason except that a man wanted them dead.

  But why, I found myself wondering, was I thinking this thought now? Was it the mere presence of the cabin, with its reminder of humanity, that swept me with dread?

  Then I saw it.

  It looked like a gun, a pistol with a long barrel. When it first caught my eye I fell flat and Johanna instinctively did the same. It was aiming right at us. When I rolled across the coarse sand, it followed me.

  But it was not a pistol. Nor was it a microphone, which it also resembled.

  It swiveled nearly silently, trailing us with its aim. My incisors must have glittered in the darkness when I recognized the cowardice of our enemy. They were afraid to wait for us here, in this cabin. They had no idea when we might arrive, but their fear had made them crafty.

  They had a camera, and no doubt several others, so they could spy on all the approaches to the cabin. This was the deceitfulness of men: to take a place of refuge, a sanctuary, and disguise death in it.

  Because that was another part of the scent: the building was wired with explosives. It was a trap.

  To be so suddenly exposed to the nature of men was especially bitter after such great freedom, and yet I was not afraid. Watchful, wary, and trusting nothing in this place, but not fearful. We would seek some other place. We had a cunning which men could never imagine.

  And then I heard the thudding far from where we crouched. It was a noise a man would hardly notice. But in my present state I could not understand what it was. Something metal, I knew. Something iron and monstrous. Something growing nearer, along the edge of the lake.

  Something bearing men, carrying them just above the surface of the water, and then sweeping them high. I had forgotten the existence of such machines, and I was as dazzled by the sight of it as a very young child would have been.

  The helicopter’s propellers thundered, punishing the cold and then our ears with the slashing that kept the machine aloft. I could not help gaping at it, wondering at the sight of this great insect that grew more and more gigantic, and hovered directly over us.

  Johanna clutched at me, and tried to drag me with her paw/hands. She cried out, like an injured creature: wrong wrong wrong we can’t stay here.

  The first rocket was a plume of sun-yellow that burst from the side of the machine and speared the dark. When it struck, I went deaf. I could hear nothing, and the light was blinding.

  In our shock we lunged toward the cabin, our ears down. Just as my vision began to return, a second spear of fire gave me a sharp, surging shadow, and the rocket landed ahead of us, ripping the cabin.

  There was a sizzle, the hiss of something electric spitting sparks, a short circuit somewhere in the walls.

  It was day everywhere, and a blast flattened me. There was no air, and the heat lifted the hair of my body, and I was certain both of us were about to explode into flame.

  In the brilliant light of the ascending ball of fire the snow began to burst, several abrupt geysers. In my deafness, and with the snow under my feet still trembling, I could only guess what was happening.

  Deliberate, careful rifle fire stabbed the snow, and Johanna rolled to escape a spout of ice. She was on her feet, lunging in a ragged circle. She zigzagged, scrambling to escape the aim that followed her.

  Each shot was closer to where she ran, twisting, trying to escape. There was another burst of snow, and yet another, and at last a shot that showered her with fire-gilded ice.

  I bounded, barking into the sky, praying that I could draw the fire, but this hunter chose his targets with great care and would not be distracted. First one, this hunter seemed to think, and then the other.

  One moment she ran, more quickly than any other mammal could skim across the snow, and the next she spun, rolling over, kicking, her teeth bared in agony.

  I was nearly beside her before I glanced up. A new explosion from the cabin cast enough light for me to see who crouched in the helicopter, his rifle ejecting a glittering shell.

  Karl Gneiss smiled as he aimed at me. It was a calm smile, and a smile of great pleasure. A man could not be happier than he was, easily squeezing the trigger to send the bullet that would end my life.

  Thirty-Six

  He had, essentially, already taken my life. Johanna was all I cared for, and with her body flung into the snow, I was afraid of nothing.

  I wanted to kill.

  We live in anticipation, imagining what we are about to do, what we are about to finish already escaping us, slipping away. What keeps us alive is always the next moment, the next heartbeat, the breath to come.

  There was one thing in the world for me. It was this hunter’s smile, far above me in the flickering light from the ruins of my family sanctuary.

  I gathered my power, crouching to spring. I took my time, knowing that there would be one chance, only one, and that I could make no mistake.

  His finger squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped. I was already a blur. The propeller lashing the air around me, I bounded three times.

  The third bound was a leap, a jump that sent me high into the air, a parabola like none I had accomplished so far, high enough to lose the heat from the blaze. But not high enough to reach the smiling man.

  The thought was a silent scream: not high enough.

  I strained one foreleg far ahead
of my body, reaching painfully upward. My leap reached its apex, slowed, and I began to fall back again, short of the craft above me.

  Failed failed I can’t catch him I have failed.

  But with a twist of my body I hooked one claw/finger around a helicopter skid. And surprised, scarcely able to breathe, I hung there, a spill of fire below me where snow reflected the source of light.

  I struggled for a grasp, my weight rocking the craft, and the pilot jerked the helicopter, trying to throw me off. He was smart, and he knew his machine well, and I felt myself slipping. An involuntary growl burst from my throat. I could not hang on any longer. I was about to fall.

  The helicopter bucked, and my body swung wide. But the maneuvering of the craft forced it to dip down again, and I hooked an entire foreleg over the skid. I felt, as I rarely did while on the ground, the foreignness of my shape. My hind legs kicked at the air, and my spine lashed from side to side, my fur rippling.

  I clung to the skid, my weight hauling the craft to one side, and the machine performed a pirouette, spinning around and around, my weight holding the ballet to a single point in the darkness. The helicopter had already been fully loaded, I sensed, and my weight made it difficult to ascend, although that is exactly what the aircraft attempted to do, clattering its way over the black lake. The engine shrieked, and we rounded higher over the cold.

  I could not see the hand, or the weapon it held, but there was a flash and the almost ludicrously petite snap of a pistol in my direction. There was the dim silhouette of a man’s head hanging upside down, and the distant fire glistened off the man’s face, disclosing a grimace of great effort. This was not Gneiss, I registered with disappointment, but one of his shadows.

  The pistol was too heavy to aim in my direction for more than a few moments, and the gun hand swung itself down toward the lake, and then up again into firing position.

  With my forepaw I seized the wrist, and clutched it as I had gripped the cougar’s leg, a grip that would stop circulation and numb the nerves, a grip that had the pistol slipping from half-dead fingers. The two bones of the wrist wrenched toward each other with an ugly snap.