Saint Peter’s Wolf (28 page)

The rush of winter air did not slow me. I plunged through the remaining glass, not caring whether I cut myself, hoping that I would, wanting to tear myself, the world itself, to shreds.

She had offered herself as a sacrifice. She had never intended to come here. She wanted me out of town so that she could draw the dogs and, eventually, the bullets, and liberate me from all suspicion.

She had surrendered her life, but in my anguish and my grief I could not consider this a gift. The thought of double suicide had occurred to me earlier, and now my sorrow over Johanna's destruction, and my now incurable remorse, drove me in a fit, virtually unaware of what I was doing.

The water was cold. So cold that my heart stopped for a moment. I wanted it to stop. I wanted it to turn into a stone. I swam with great sweeping strokes. I wanted the great black center of the lake.

I wanted to strip this life, and let it fall, and as I swam toward the lake's center, a goal I knew I could never reach, all feeling receded from my hands and from my feet. The life was retreating from my limbs, shrinking upward, inward, toward my core.

I swam toward Johanna, toward the empty permanence where she waited for me. Surely we would be together in that shared emptiness. I struggled, with my now unfeeling hands, and wrestled out of my shirt, my shoes, all of my clothes, fighting clear of them. My legs were slowing, the cold turning my body into iron.

My arms could not lift. I swam awkwardly, ever outward. The shore was far away, the few cabins pricks of light, the cold of the water seeping inward toward my heart.

Thirty-One

When I could swim no more, I sank.

I spiraled, head downward. The weight of the water squeezed me. There was a tingling in my skull, a simulacrum of warmth. There was a peculiar lucidity. I could not move my arms or my legs, and spun downward, statuelike, dimming into sleep.

Then—feeling. Like a voice after long, perfect silence. Unwanted, harsh, but real. It was pain. Pain in my teeth, and in the bones of my arms. My skin began to burn. My marrow seethed. I twisted, groaning as I drifted downward, the last oxygen consumed in my lungs.

I was alive, and I was not going to die. Not now, not tonight.

My paw/hands lashed at the water. My hind legs kicked. I plunged upward, toward the invisible surface. Not tonight, I said with every stroke. Not die tonight.

But it was too late. My muscles screamed for oxygen. I was still buried in the lake, far below the surface. I hungered to live too late. Air was a memory.

Not die. Not die—the thought, a hammer, the word the heart is saying every pulse of our lives, drove me. I battled the cold water. I powered through the dark.

Too late, my lungs screamed. Too late.

I crashed through the surface, so cold, so starved for air that I could not inhale. Stars faded and surged in my vision. I gaped, but could not draw a breath.

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 swearing 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.