The Wild (20 page)

Another drum of chemical exploded. Intense heat made Bob skitter forward, then gallop. The whole place started thudding and popping. The fire was furious and spreading wildly. The helicopter rose into a billowing mushroom of orange-black smoke and disappeared off toward Morris-town. Bob wondered if the citizens of that worthy community even knew that this mess was here, leaching slowly into their water supply. Well, they were certainly going to find out.

He managed to stay ahead of the flames by running himself hard, finally reaching a high Cyclone fence. He ran along beside it, thinking for an awful moment that it was going to trap him. But it hadn't been maintained; he managed to go through a hole as big as a Lincoln.

He rushed back into the scrubby woods. The area had been logged within the past ten years, and the hemlocks and white pine were still saplings, and stunted by the near presence of the toxic dump. He kept moving, always choosing the uplift of the land, seeking less populated regions.

He was tired and hungry and wanted badly to hunt. As if on command, his nose and ears promptly became hypersensitive. All he could smell, though, was birds. They seemed to be more able than ground dwellers to survive near the chemicals, probably because they spent relatively little time exposed to the poison. He'd seen one of the coydogs in Central Park catch a bat, but he didn't think his own paws were adapted to such extraordinary skills. Nature had created coydogs in the past fifty years or so, breeding the new species from the best of the dogs and the coyotes. The coydogs belonged to the future. They were smart enough and supple enough and adaptable enough to live right in the middle of the human world. People had them in their backyards and never knew it. In the small hours the Central Park packs probably hunted midtown from the Hudson to the East River, and nobody saw them, not ever.

Bob stopped long enough to lift one of his paws and examine it. It wasn't going to grasp anything. The toes were long, but not as long as those of the coydog. And he could not move them independently. He would eat no birds.

There was a flutter and a sudden pang along his spine. Snapping, he twisted around just in time to see a jay flying off with a tuft of his fur in its beak. As a child he'd disliked them because they got to his feeders and scared away the songbirds.

To rid himself of the jay Bob moved into a thicker copse. Screaming, the bird flew off.

Then Bob became aware of a pungent and absolutely magnificent aroma. As it filled his muzzle he trembled with delight. He was hungry, very hungry, and he smelled bacon.

The odor was warm, too, meaning that the bacon was being fried nearby. He followed the scent up a low rise and through a thick copse of saplings. It wasn't long before he saw a ruined cabin with smoke coming from the chimney. The roof was half-off, the walls were peeling tarpaper, there was no glass in the windows. Bob approached warily. He could hear the bacon sizzling, smell the two people clearly. Bob was a reticent man, but he could not ignore the fact that he smelled the odors of human sex. There was also an odd smell of fresh earth. He stole forward on his belly, trying to ignore what he was smelling, all except the bacon.

Then he heard a female voice, softly pleading. "Please, please ..." He pricked his ears. Something told him that this was not right. Close by the cabin wall, he could hear deep male breathing, very soft female breathing. It was almost the gasping of a child. Bob raised himself up on the window ledge and looked in. There was a man of perhaps forty frying bacon and eggs in a skillet on the hearth. Behind him there were some dirty, crumpled sheets on the dirt floor of the cabin, sheets that stank of sweat and the uses of night. Bob was horrified to see, hunched into a corner, a terrified and naked girl of perhaps thirteen. Her arms clutched her beginning breasts, her legs were twisted around one another.

Around the front of the cabin Bob saw a hole, a shovel lying beside it. On the man's hip was a .45 automatic. But for his pistol belt, he was as naked as the child.

Bob had never seen such a depraved situation. The poor girl was in awful trouble. This vicious monster had obviously raped her repeatedly. Bob was no longer one to waste time about these - things. He leaped at once through the window and knocked the man on his side.

"Aw! Holy shit!"

He grabbed at his gun but Bob bit his wrist hard. The man yelped, twisting and turning until Bob felt his own teeth scraping bone. Then there was a crunch and the man shrieked. The girl sat absolutely still, staring. With a snarl the man came at Bob, swinging his closed left fist. The blow connected with Bob's nose, causing him a fierce blast of pain. He screamed, thrusting his head up, snapping, trying to reach the man's throat. Instead he connected with his chest, took a gouge out of his skin and fell back. The man also fell, but in the opposite direction, landing with a high scream on his dangling right arm. He kicked at Bob, who was trying to straddle him.

The girl, who had seemed almost catatonic, now rose from her corner and moved to the hearth. The man grabbed Bob's muzzle with his good hand while he forced his bad one to fumble for his pistol. It was no good; Bob was heavy and took full advantage of his weight. Again and again he hurled himself against the struggling man.

At the hearth, the girl took the skillet in her hands. Bob felt a blow from the man to the side of his head. Another one, much harder, landed on his skull. The man was built like a tank. Despite the pain of a broken wrist, he was becoming a wheezing, furious juggernaut. He crashed into Bob's side, throwing him to the ground. A spike of pure fury made Bob roar. He dug his teeth into the man's floppy belly, feeling the little pops as his incisors broke through the flesh to the fat within.

There came a clang. The man sank down. He and Bob were both covered with sizzling bacon and eggs. The girl stood over the inert form of her captor, the skillet held in both hands. Then she dropped it and, grabbing a dirty sheet, took off into the woods, looking like a ghost as she swept off among the trees.

Bob ate the bacon, which was only a little burned, and lapped up the eggs.

Chapter Seventeen

W
ITH A DETERMINED JAB
C
INDY STUCK ANOTHER RED
pin in the map, at the location of the smoldering dump site northwest of Morristown. "I'm convinced," she said to the others. "It was him."

Monica still disagreed. "The police say it started during a high-speed chase. They don't mention Bob."

"Of course not, he got away. But look at the media. 'Killer Wolf Invades Silk Stocking Suburb.' We know Bob's in the area. Who else would they have been chasing out in the woods? The poor guy is heading directly away from civilization. He's trying to escape, he must be so scared!"

Joe Running Fox stared at the map. "My guess is he'll go back into the Poconos, up through the Shawangunks to the Catskills, then on into the Appalachians and Canada." Monica stared at Cindy, a slight smile flickering across her face. "I'll bet he's going to the hunt club!"

"To meet me," Cindy said. She even thought it might be true. Even Bob had the occasional flash of practical insight.

Joe Running Fox put his hand on Kevin's shoulder. "What about you, Kevin?" Her son was comfortable with this man. Joe Running Fox had told Kevin about the Way of Silence and won his heart. The two of them had spent hours together sitting face-to-face, totally silent, their eyes locked. Last night Kevin had told Cindy that it was the most intimate experience he had ever had. "We can all see each other's souls any time we want. We just have to look at each other. Not for a minute or two, but the way the Fox does it, for a couple of hours. Then you see the soul."

She had managed to share her eyes with Kevin for about three minutes. Her love for her vulnerable, inquisitive little boy had burned high, but there had come a point when what she saw, and what of her she felt was being seen, was simply too much to bear. You see the whole of a person's time in their eyes, from the first shattering infant moment to the darkening swells of age.

Over the past few days Kevin had undergone almost a complete change. Although children shine very bright, it doesn't take much to dull their fragile spark. More even than the loss of his father, Cindy thought, her son was suffering from a loss of his own faith in reality. His Kafka shelf was now abandoned. Instead he read the Bible. She found him absorbed in Ecclesiastes and Job, and the Book of Revelation. He had also bought a book about multiple personalities, and another about the Spanish Inquisition. He sat sometimes for hours staring at this last book, looking at a facsimile of a poster announcing an auto-da-fe in which thirty people were to be burned at the stake.

His identification with the persecuted had always been deep, arising, she liked to feel, from the powerful ideals that animated her own and Bob's thinking. Yesterday she had discovered him staring into the eyes of a picture of a wolf. "Can you share anything with a photograph?" she had asked.

"No, but I think I know how the wolves captured Dad. They did it at the zoo. Remember that old wolf staring at him? That was when they captured him."

"It's that dangerous to look into another's eyes?"

"'A child goes forth each morning, and whatever that child first sees, that thing he becomes.'"

How many times Bob had read Whitman's poem to Kevin. "Whitman was referring to a change of spirit, not a physical change."

"How do we know that? Maybe he was talking about a real change. I think Kafka was talking about a real change in the
Metamorphosis."

"Whitman was writing about a child. Dad isn't a child."

"You never accepted that a child is exactly what he was. In some ways I'm more mature than Dad."

Fox came over. He folded his arms, looked down at Kevin, who had tossed aside the wolf photo and was examining a woodcut of a man having his feet burned off in an Inquisitional dungeon. "Few people are more mature than your father," Fox said. "Maybe now, nobody."

"You never knew him," Kevin replied in an intensely charged voice. "He could get excited about the same flower every time he saw it, day after day, until it died. Then he forgot it so completely it might as well never have existed. Dad had no mature emotions."

Cindy could not agree. "He loved us."

"We frightened him, I think. Life was too much for him. And we drove him. We created the conditions that enabled this to happen."

It was grief that was behind these hard words. His brilliance was working against him now. Cindy sensed that what he really wanted was to cuddle up in her lap and cry.

Fox might have known it, too. He touched the boy's cheek. One thing the man knew was when not to talk.

In the silence Monica drew a line on the map, connecting the red pins. Beyond the last pin she continued the line to the hunt club deep in the Catskills. "Maybe we ought to just go up there and wait for him."

"Unwise," Fox said. "We're better off tracking him. If he doesn't go to the club, we won't miss him that way."

"You can do this?"

Fox nodded. "I can track a wolf, if I can find the trail."

"And you're sure you can? I'd hate to be traipsing around Ulster County while Bob sits at the hunt club. He might not wait long. It's bird season and we got a huge stocking assessment, so the place is full of grouse and therefore hunters."

Cindy interrupted. "We'll split up. You go to the club, Monica. The three of us will do the tracking."

"I want to do it alone. With the boy."

Cindy wouldn't have that, not for a moment. She wasn't going to agonize the days away at the club. The miseries of camping and hiking would keep her preoccupied. Anything was better than the ordeal of waiting. "I'm going."

"Women have other power. Not this."

"Oh, nonsense. I won't hear that. He's my husband."

"I won't track with a woman." She almost couldn't believe what she heard. The man was worse than a chauvinist, he was an unreformed Neanderthal. "You have no conscience," she said. She'd always found personal discrimination surprising and confusing. His eyes were brown and flint hard. She pleaded on her own behalf. "He'll respond to me. If he knows I'm there, he'll be much more likely to stop running."

"His son will be there. A man will do anything for his son."

That was it. He'd have to learn here and now who was in control of things. "If you imagine for one moment that my boy is going without me, you're very much mistaken, Mr. Fox. You're not lord and master of this house, no man is, not even my poor husband, God help him. I intend to go out there into that wilderness and find him."

"A northeastern second-growth forest is hardly wilderness, ma'am. I want my medicine to work, and with a woman around it might not. It's no reflection on you. It's just the damned Indian culture. Woman has her role and man has his, and the two are different. Equal but different. I know it's another stupid Indian idea, but I can't help respecting it, dummy that I am."

"The hell it's an Indian idea. I don't hold with all this idealization of the old Indian culture. You say you've got Mohawk blood? The Mohawks considered their women slaves."

"They loved them. It was all stupidity, though—"

"Shut up, and can that false self-deprecation. It makes you seem like a bigger ass than you probably are. Now, let's quit bickering and lay our plans. The more we talk, the farther away Bob gets."

Fox didn't say much more after that. It took only a few minutes to plan their journey. Largely it was a matter of making sure that the available hiking boots passed Fox's meticulous inspection. "I thought Indians used moccasins," Kevin said. "I don't mean to be condescending, but it is what I thought."

"Boots. Indians used moccasins because they couldn't afford anything better, not to mention the fact that the dopes never invented the shoe on their own. Indian high-tech consisted of beaded wampum. Life was diseased, dirty, violent, and short."

Cindy wondered if the man was trying to be insufferable, or if he was so involved in his posturing that he really couldn't see himself at all. She needed him to track Bob, and she wasn't going to let anything stand in the way of that.

"We have no camping equipment," she said, "beyond the boots and Kevin's sleeping bag."

"I need a blanket. What do you need?"

It was a dare, she supposed. At best she found it boring. "I need everything I can get. A tent, preferably air-conditioned and equipped with a full kitchen and all necessary supplies. Why?"

"Just asking. So I'll bring two blankets."

"Waterproof."

He nodded. "Let's go."

"You're kidding. Right now, at eight o'clock at night?"

"We can stay in a motel tonight. In the morning we start. Early, four A.M."

She found herself eating a fatty breakfast in an all-nighter on Route 202 at 3:30 in the morning. Her head was pounding. Poor Kevin looked like a corpse, he was pale and very slow. Cindy made sure he drank a couple of cups of tea. Fox advised a big breakfast, and she obliged with scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, 40% Bran Flakes, coffee, and a slice of melon that tasted like dishwasher detergent. "You can eat," Fox said. "That's good. Once we're tracking, there won't be much time for food, and game's scarce these days."

"We'll hunt?"

"I make traps. You'll see. They work good."

The detailed area map showed a road ringing the dump site. It was a lozenge-shaped two hundred acres of smoldering, noxious ruins when they arrived, their headlights dispelling the faint glow that persisted from the fire. The car moved slowly along, Fox peering out into the dark as he drove.

"Somewhere on this side, I figure." He drove for a time in silence. "I hope your husband had a good sense of direction. He's not a fool, is he? He wouldn't go south?"

Bob was not a fool in the sense that Fox meant. She did not think he would go south. He knew the direction of the wilderness in New York. His love of it had taken him deep into the Catskills and the Adirondacks. If only he could get away from civilization, he might well have a chance to survive. "He knows the country."

"Can Dad kill things with his mouth, like rabbits? And I wonder if he can eat a raw rabbit?"

They were upsetting questions. "I have no idea how your father is coping. I can't even begin to imagine it."

"They acquire the secrets of the beast," Fox said. "That's why men try shifting in the first place. They want to learn the secrets of the animals. Such secrets used to be very valuable."

"The cave paintings at Lascaux," Kevin said. "They don't show any people because the people are the animals."

"It's an ancient way. In all my life, in all the legends I've known, I've heard of only one other case where it really happened. Where somebody really,
really
changed into an animal. And that was many generations ago." He stopped the car. His hands went toward Cindy, took hers. "I want to thank you. You've given me a chance to meet this man in person, the man who was seduced by the wolves."

The three of them got out of the car. Cindy could see absolutely no trace of him in the dark blotchs of undergrowth that hugged the ground this side of the woods.

"There." Fox gestured toward a place that seemed no different from the others. "He went in right there. He was moving fast, you can see that by the number of leaves that are broken." Bending low, he hurried over to the spot. "He's favoring his right rear leg, toes digging in left to right. That says he's got a thigh wound. The way the left foot is hitting, I'd say the bone's not broken. It's a flesh wound, probably infected. Hurting him, but not too dangerous. He's moving very strongly for an animal that's lost weight."

"Now, how can you possibly tell that?"

"The paper said he was weighed in at one-sixty. These tracks in this dirt—he weighs more like one-fifty." He stood staring at the ground, thinking.

"Where is he?" Kevin asked.

"Your father is well away from here. He passed this spot at least twenty-four hours ago."

"The dump fire started at five-fifteen yesterday morning. That's when he was here."

"Well, nearly twenty-four hours then. With his thigh and general weakness, he's covering about twenty miles a day. That's if he hunts on the run. If he can."

"What do you mean, if he can?"

"If he has the skill. You're hunting like he's got to hunt, running the animal down, it doesn't go in a straight line. It goes in circles, backtracks, anything to get away from you. Once he's killed and eaten something, then he has to reorient himself and cover lost ground. So we can assume he's getting maybe fifteen miles a day out of it. Moving sunup to sundown, maybe a couple of hours at night. My guess is he's about thirty-five miles from here."

She didn't want to ask the next question; she felt Bob slipping through her fingers. But she did ask, she had to ask. "What are our chances of catching up with him?"

"We can cover maybe fifteen miles a day. Twenty, if we work like mad. We don't have the four legs, that's our trouble. And we're tall. The undergrowth will slow us down."

Maybe they should all go to the hunting camp and just hope for the best. Bob would know the camp was crowded, though. There was a good chance that he would bypass it. He was hurt, she knew he was scared. If it was her, she'd be desperately unhappy and in a state of extreme panic. She would not make rational or courageous decisions. Her tendency would be to get to the most isolated place she could find, and hide there until she died.

It had occurred to her that he might commit suicide. She could only hope that the thought wouldn't cross his mind. Sometimes, though, he had fallen into deep, deep troughs. His despair was pitiful, at once bitter and full of sardonic humor. When he got an especially good poem back from one of the magazines, or endured some epic business humiliation, he could drop into one of those states.

She kicked a stone.

"There might always be another sighting," Fox said. "You never know."

Wave after wave of sorrow broke in Cindy's soul. She hunched her shoulders, fighting back the tears until her throat felt like it was being wrapped in leather thongs. Then she burst out with huge, gasping sobs. Kevin clapped his hands over his ears. Fox stood impassive. When she stopped, he merely headed into the woods. They moved along easily at first, passing between tall trees and through stands of mountain laurel.