The Wild (19 page)

Then he was through the park and finding shelter in some reeds. A police car screamed past.

Ahead was the invincible barrier of the New Jersey Turnpike, eight lanes of certain death. He trotted along, trying to see a way across. But there was no way across. The turnpike stretched for miles. From his vantage point low to the ground he could not see a single break in its featureless expanse. He had to cross, and at once. He'd never seen so much traffic, never realized just how fast cars could go, never understood the barrier of the road. Not far away lay the stinking body of an opossum, skinless, torn, its jaw gone. The school bus, his dog screaming, the shotgun in the gentle afternoon.

There was hardly even a median here. He would have to find a lull on this side and cross, then jump the divider and huddle on the other side until another lull. Only then could he manage the four southbound lanes. He'd come dozens of times along this route, dozens and dozens of times, never thinking how totally devoted it was to human needs, how indifferent to the needs of other creatures. Had they bothered to build a few low tunnels under it, the opossum need not be dead, nor the wolf trapped.

He stepped onto the shoulder of the road. Cars roared past. Then he encountered a terrible and unexpected phenomenon. One of them swerved onto the shoulder, aiming directly at him. He could see the driver hunched over his wheel, a young man with a green smile. Beside him another man had just raised his head and was beginning to laugh.

Bob leaped back, catching a blast of hot exhaust fumes and the angry wail of a horn.

They hated his freedom, or perhaps it was their own helplessness that made them do it. Crushed, oppressed, miserable men—killing something granted them power. That they could take life pushed back the fear that they themselves had lost their value.

A hole appeared in the traffic. He darted out into the road, one lane, two. Then he felt the pavement trembling like a hot pan. Bearing down on him was a huge thirty-two-wheeler, its grille a wall of steel. Its driver sat impassive over his wheel. Bob was transfixed by the face, the slow, steady chewing, the plug of tobacco bulging in the jaw, the aerodynamic sunglasses. Beside him a woman smoothed her hair with her hands, looking down, a smile on her face of almost ineffable purity, her lips slightly parted, the sunlight shining on her fresh skin. Then the truck was upon him. There was no escape. He crouched, pressing his body against the pavement as it screamed over him, blasting off down the road, its slipstream almost lifting him into the air. Behind it a Buick was coming up fast. Seeing him, the driver swerved away.

Bob wasn't hit, but he had lost the lane he had gained. Another space between cars, perhaps three seconds to a VW Sirocco. He dashed forward, his tail slapping against the car as it passed him. The impact sent a shock wave through his body that made him yelp. Then he was at the median, crouching flat along it as the traffic billowed by in both directions. He raised himself, leaning against the steel fence that separated the lanes, found purchase, and drew himself to the foot-wide space between the beams.

He was tempted to trust luck and just dash out into the traffic on the far side of the median. He felt trapped here, and the rushing of the cars confused his eyes. It was easy for him to observe details up close, or to follow a single, moving object against a still background, but this was just a blur.

Under these circumstances his nose and ears were useless. To function in the world of man requires a sharpness of eye most other land animals do not possess. This place was as dangerous as poison to a creature such as himself. Even his instincts fought him. Being trapped here was like being cornered. He wanted to lash out at the cars, to run wildly.

He fought himself, begging the wolf to listen to the man this time. Standing where he was, he could see another opening in the traffic, this one also in front of a big truck. They tended to be slower than cars. Ahead of them the road was often clear. Behind them, though, there would be a glut of traffic.

The wolf did not listen to him. He was just tensing himself to jump when he popped off the median like a spring. It was too early. He landed in front of a van, which tried to miss him. Desperate, he rolled. The van passed as hot wind. Now he felt nothing. He was on his back against the concrete base of the median. There was no more than an inch between him and the tires of the cars. He couldn't even turn over without risking his paws being smashed.

He was a creature at war with himself. The instinctual part was not in touch with the intellectual. It seemed unaware even of the existence of reason. Out here in the middle of the turnpike, though, either reason was going to win or instinct was going to get him killed.

Thanks to instinct he was lying on his back, his tail curled over his stomach, his paws clenched against his body. He could no longer see the cars. Now he had to go by the vibrations of the road and the sound of the traffic. The trouble was that there was so much noise that his ears didn't work right. What would in a human ear have been an ebb and flow of sound as each vehicle passed was to his wolf ear a continuous roar.

Because there was no other way to deal with the situation, he finally did the only thing he could and rolled over. Cars were whipping by so close he could feel heat pulsing up from the road. He managed to get to his feet. Leaning against the barrier, he waited. The cars continued. Twice people swerved toward him, but they missed because they were afraid of scraping the barrier.

Then an ancient van came rattling along, much slower than the rest of the traffic. Its lights were on, it hung askew on its frame, and it was being driven by an old woman who looked as if she was dressed in handkerchiefs. She slammed on her brakes. He would have gone to her but he simply could not trust human beings. Probably she stopped out of kindness, but it might be out of fear, because she realized that he was the terrible wolf. Maybe there was a bounty on his head and she was fumbling for a tire iron. Unlikely, but he could not know. He ran in front of the stopped van and, using it as a barrier, managed to cross to another lane. Now he could see clearly, and his progress to the far side of the turnpike was smooth.

Before him was a sea of reeds interrupted far to the north by the tall bulk of the People's Gas and Electric power station, and to the south by the rusty hump of the Pulaski Skyway. He stepped into the marsh. At once he sank to his knees, but fortunately no further. He took a step, then another. Like an envelope closing, the world of the marsh embraced him. It might be in the middle of a brutal traffic pattern, it might be viciously polluted, but it was alive, and as long as it lived it spread its magic over all who entered it.

The roar of the highway was replaced by the click of insects and the busy fluttering of birds. Driving along, he'd always thought of this as an empty world, reeds, muck, that was it. He now found rich life pouring into his ears and nose.

The smell of the man's world dwindled fast. For the first time since he had entered this new life he did not smell a single human presence.

He sloshed along, thinking that he might soon scare up a rabbit or another rat. Given how the last rat had gone down, he no longer found this a particularly unpleasant notion, although he did hope to find a cleaner victim.

Soon he was moving through shallower water. Then he came to a bald place. The sun was high, the day warm for autumn, and it occurred to him that he was free to lie down. He curled up in the reeds, drawing his tail almost to his nose.

It was peaceful here, but he knew that these marshes did not extend very far. Beyond them were suburbs full of peril, then the Poconos and beyond them the Catskills. He would have to go far to the north before he found the forest that his wolf soul and wolf blood sought.

Lying still, he could hear the traffic's faint wail, a hungry ghost half a mile away. When he slept he dreamed that a helicopter was nosing about in the reeds, looking for him. Then his dream changed, and in it he was matching the turns of a rabbit, delighting in the prospect of a meal.

He awoke sometime past sunset. The western sky was deep orange, and the evening star hung on the edge of the horizon.

For a long moment he considered the young woman on the palisades. Had he
really
been able to turn her into a wolf? No, surely not.

But it had happened to him.

When as a young man he would lie on the ground in the deep country and look at the stars, he would think that their light must have been purified by its journey. So also souls are purified by journeys, and it was time for him to move on.

He set out to cross the marsh, moving toward the jeopardy of the lights, and the dark promise of the hills beyond.

Chapter Sixteen

I
T MIGHT BE TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING BUT HE WAS
a fool to be standing on a street corner in Morristown, New Jersey, peering at a newspaper through the wire of a rack. He was aware of a car cruising slowly up the street, but he was so fascinated and horrified by his picture in the paper that he didn't retreat. It was remarkable to see himself like this. He really was a wolf, a perfect wolf. His mind had conjured a more muscular, vaguely human shape for him—a sort of man on all fours with the head of a wolf. He wasn't like that. There was nothing at all human about him.

Below the picture he could see the first few words of the accompanying news story. "After critically injuring one man, the animal escaped across the Hudson . . ."

The words froze his blood. He stared, stupefied, as his shadow defined itself beside him. Even the gentle rumbling of the car's engine did not break his attention. He had injured somebody, hurt them bad. But who? Maybe the man he fell on in the alley. It had all happened so fast, he wasn't sure.

The poor man.

When Bob looked up, it was into a flaring explosion of brilliance. These eyes were wonderful in the dark, but he discovered that they did not work at all well under an assault like this. He was staring into a glaring, impenetrable curtain, behind which he could hear an engine idling, doors opening, and the shuttle of weapons from holsters to hands.

He shrank back, one ear cocked toward the clicking of the pistol.

A shot seemed to explode in his face. He reeled, twisted, scrabbled wildly to the middle of the street. Then there was another shot and the slap of wind against his head.

He ran for all he was worth. Up the street he raced, past an Italian restaurant with a full garbage bin waiting for dawn, past a hobby shop, a drugstore.

Then he stopped, panting. Behind him there were pattering footsteps. He crouched behind some trash cans. What was in them? They smelled like heaven. Then another police car swept past, its lights flashing. There was no siren, not in this suburb of high executives and broad, quiet lawns. Nixon had once lived around here.

Bob went on, trotting close to the storefronts, slinking across streets, taking advantage of every bit of foliage he could find. He left Morristown on a long, straight road. Every so often he would see a police cruiser and crouch down. The car would glide past, and he could hear the men inside. "Man, I haven't had this much fun since deer season."

"Who gets the head, the guy that does the shooting or the mayor? That's my question."

Horrible!

As he neared Morris Plains Bob turned west and began to make his way through a more densely populated neighborhood.

Something happened that he hadn't taken into consideration, something very bad.

The houses around here were closer to the street, and the dogs inside were going mad. One, which had been asleep on a porch, came running up and went into a paroxysm of barking, leaping, and snapping. Its lips wrinkled back over its teeth as it crouched down, ready to attack. He watched its hackles, its muscles, waiting to absorb its charge. The creature went off like a shotgun, blasting into him with the full force of its body.

He let himself relax into the blow, dropped his chin to protect his throat from the fury of the jaws, then followed the dog down as it fell in a scrabbling heap at his feet. Once he would have merely wounded it, and sent it screaming away into the night, but he knew he could not afford the attention the screaming would attract. Sadly, he tore the dog's throat open. Its barking at once ceased, replaced by the sound of air whistling and bubbling in the wound. The creature bit wildly, running in the air as it did so. Bob jumped away from it, his heart beating hard, and then he heard a boy's voice call "Frito." The dog shook and gibbered. The voice repeated, "Frito?" Bob slipped into the shadows, miserable but safe.

Scared now, the voice repeated, "Frito!" Bob could see a profile in a front door, a boy of about eleven dressed in pajamas and floppy sandals. "C'mon, Frito, come home." Sadness now, the voice cracking.

An engine muttered beyond the trees at the end of the block, and a squad car wheeled around the comer, its lights searching through the thin fog of the night. Concealed in a bush, Bob stood very still.

The boy waved and the car stopped. "There was a dogfight," the child said. "My dog is hurt!"

The two policemen got out of the car, their guns drawn. The pistols smelled cold. This was not the same pair that had shot at him in Morristown. A flashlight worked the ground, coming to rest on the body of the dog.

"Frito!" The padding of small feet across grass, the sobs. There is no love like this, Bob thought bitterly, no love so noble or so true as that between a dog and a child. He hated himself. His only excuse was that life was sweet also to the wolf.

The flashlights began to poke about in the bushes. One of them swept the bush he was in, paused, came back. "Go inside, son."

"My dog—"

"It's the wolf. Go inside." The boy needed no more prompting. Bob heard the slippers pattering frantically on the dew-wet grass.

Inside the house the child's voice was raised:

"Mom, Dad, it's the wolf! It's here, it killed Frito!" Lights came on, joining other lights from houses where dogs were still barking. Bob had already understood that his end might come anywhere, down any innocent street, anytime. It could come down this street, now. He wanted to be reconciled to this but he could not accept it.

There was in him an almost overwhelmingly urgent need, one he had never felt in such a raw, terrible form. Bob the man might be tired and sad and ready to give up. But the wolf didn't feel that way at all. The wolf wanted to live, and he wanted it desperately. Bob was still his gentle old self. But the wolf had tasted blood; the wolf would kill to live.

The two cops had already radioed for help and lights were now coming on in virtually every house in the neighborhood. These wealthy families would probably be well armed. The police, with their notoriously inaccurate .38 Specials, might miss a quick target in the dark, but the hunting rifles and target pistols that were about to be brought into play would not miss.

"Work around to the other side of the hedge," one of the cops said softly. "It's just standing in there. Maybe it doesn't realize we mean it harm."

As soon as the second cop came around the bush Bob was going to be trapped. Without another thought he jumped up and took off down the street, causing a massive upsurge in barking. Doors slammed, people shouted. A shotgun roared, its pellets whining over Bob's head.

"I hit it," a man shouted, "I got the wolf!"

The tip of Bob's tail stung, but the old wound in his thigh was far more painful. His tail might have been grazed by a pellet, but as injuries went it was minor.

He dodged down a driveway and jumped a Cyclone fence into a yard inhabited by two cats, which began shooting around like fur-covered hockey pucks, their tails fat with terror, their eyes blazing. Then he was through the yard and into the alley, trotting fast, but not running. This could be a long chase and he had to preserve his strength.

As be moved along he realized that he was not nearly as scared as he had been before. The wolf and the man had come together again. He had begun to be very interested in the process of combining his reason with his instinct, which was the key to preserving this unique life.

He smelled not only woods around here but flowing water. There was a stream where he could drink, maybe even enough woods to harbor a meal.

He trotted to the end of the street, throwing himself under a car as the police and a crowd of enraged citizens came puffing around the corner. Powerful lights plunged about, seeking the tawny spot of fur among the fallen leaves and the naked bushes. A little earlier in the season and it would have been a lot easier for him to hide. They passed him and he started off again, heading for the smell of the water.

Soon he came to the stream. There was nothing behind him to suggest danger—no smell of dogs, no off-the-road vehicles. He lowered his muzzle and began to lap the sweet, iron-tasting water.

A shot split a limb a few feet to his right. Far off in the street he saw a man with a rifle and some bulky equipment: a starlight scope.

Bob hastened up the middle of the brook, trying to run in the water as much as possible. He was worried about dogs being put to his scent. As a boy he had seen the Lone Ranger ride down streams to throw them off, a trick taught to him by Tonto.

He left the stream bed for a jumble of rocks. Another shot echoed in the woods, but farther away. Starlight scopes or not, people couldn't follow Bob into this tangle. Beyond the rocks the land sloped steeply upward. He was soon on a ridge, looking down over the wood he had just crossed. His ears and nose told him that he was alone. Without trained dogs, they were helpless.

Bob loped now, following an abandoned deer path. There wasn't a fresh scent along its whole length, not even droppings. The deer had died out on this ridge. As he moved he glimpsed a dark hulk off to the right. Then, through the trees, he saw that it was a house. This one was huge, a great, Gothic monster with a dozen chimneys and hundreds of blank leaded-glass windows.

He altered his course toward thicker woods. He wasn't precisely sure where he was anymore, just that he was moving in a northwesterly direction, and his nose told him that the human population around him was growing less dense.

He trotted steadily, easily, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the human world.

As the western sky began to grow light he lengthened his stride, trying for a final burst of speed before he stopped and hid until dark. He was also hungry.

Sniffing as he moved, he sought the rotted-grass odor of a rabbit or the garbage smell of rats. The woods seemed empty, though. He would have considered bugs, but it was past their season.

Was this to be his new life, scuttling through the woods searching for food or seeking escape? He wanted to lie back on a grassy hillside and think. He wanted to have a discussion with his son, or go out with his wife and talk and sip espresso.

He was the running wolf, the wolf of desolation, lonely wolf. To man he was now the gray cloud in the morning, the shadow worrying the bones. Overhead he heard a helicopter popping. He ignored it. They weren't going to spot him from that thing, but its presence meant they were really hungry to catch him.

The helicopter circled back, louder this time. As a precaution he stopped in a dense copse of hemlock. As far as he knew there was no way for them to detect him. Unless—what about infared, or a starlight scope?

A bullet whizzed down through the trees, splitting a fat branch not three inches from his face.

There was no time to hesitate: he started running.

He tried to remember the terrain he had crossed. Were there any gullies that went down to the stream? No, he thought not. As a matter of fact, he didn't remember any place he might hide from starlight scopes or infared, unless it was behind the waterfall he had seen on the creek. The waterfall was miles back, though. Slow as they were, even his human pursuers would have reached there by now.

He did the only thing that he could do, the thing any ordinary animal would do: he ran blindly, hoping for the best. Maybe he would reach deeper woodland, maybe he would be shot. All he could do was hope that his nasal and aural technology would somehow outwit man's sight technology.

The helicopter kept with him, fluttering like a massive insect in the glowing sky. From time to time a bullet smacked through the trees.

When he mounted a rise, he knew exactly why he was alone here. The wind was blowing from behind him or he would have known much sooner. Before him there was a pit full of rusty steel drums, some of them leaking stinking orange goop, others intact, still others surrounded by scums of green jelly. This close he could smell them despite the direction of the wind, and the odors were awful: powerful acidic scents as if of Clorox mixed with gasoline, airplane glue, and roach spray. A rivulet trickled sadly along, scummed with silver oil, making its way through tired, brown grass. There was a smell of death: two buzzard corpses lay twisted beside the fulminating ruins of a 'coon that had apparently dropped dead while drinking the water. Then the buzzards had died while eating the 'coon. Nature is designed to work in cycles. It dies in cycles, too.

The dump seemed to have no borders. Bob had no time to get around it. He would have to cross it, out in the open, the helicopter on his back. There was no reason to wait; caution would gain him nothing. He moved into the clear space. The land was just being touched by the gray light that precedes the dawn. The eastern sky was now a faint green, Venus low on the horizon. Grackles and jays were beginning to scream in the woods; the feathers of a dove lay in a puddle that Bob carefully avoided.

Inside the dump the smell was shocking. The ground was spongy and his paw prints quickly filled with scum. The odor reached deep into his muzzle and clung there. He was sure that it was in itself poisonous, it was so strong.

Then the helicopter came in low, raising a mist from the standing pools. Bob ran hard. He was more afraid of getting exposed to that mist than he was of the bullets that now came steadily from the copter. In his mind's eye there was an image, maybe from a
National Geographic
special or a Sierra Club program, of a wolf seen from above clambering through a snowbank, being chased down by a helicopter. And then the wolf's head explodes and it tumbles back down the bank, its tail gyrating like a broken propeller.

Behind him there was a terrific thud. For a mad hopeful instant he thought the helicopter had crashed, then he felt heat on his back. One of the bullets had caused a drum of chemicals to explode. So much for their infared scope now. That blaze would white it out. Unfortunately, dawn was on their side. Shimmering lines of light were spreading from behind low eastern clouds. Bob could hear birds rising from the trees on the distant horizon, and could smell even above the stink of this dismal place a sterling, rich burst of autumn breeze, the beautiful dry odor of the hanging leaves, the sweetness being exhaled from the ground.