Running With the Pack (15 page)

“Well, it may have been a bit out of the ordinary,” I said soothingly, “but as long as you don’t lift your leg on the furniture, I don’t suppose anyone’s gonna object too strenuously. Especially since if they object at the wrong time of day, there’s a strong possibility they could wind up getting et.”

“You are the most understanding and compassionate man I’ve ever met, Doctor Jones,” he said, “but I am at the end of my tether. I don’t know what to do. I have no one to turn to. Only these accursed Gypsies will tolerate my presence, because it amuses them. I think very soon I shall end it all.”

At which point the Lord smote me with another of His heavenly revelations.

“Seems to me you’re being a mite hasty, Brother Basil,” I said.

“What is the use of going on?” he said plaintively. “I will never be able to remove the curse.”

“First of all, you got to stop thinking of your condition as a curse,” I continued. “What if I was to show you how the werewolf business could be a blessing in disguise?”

“Impossible!”

“You willing to bet five thousand dollars on that?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“You see,” I said, “the problem is that you ain’t never really examined yourself when the moon is out. You ain’t simply a werewolf, but you happen to be a damned fine-looking werewolf.”

“So what?”

“On my way into town, I passed an arena that holds a dog show every Saturday. The sign said that the prize money was ten thousand dollars.”

“You just said five,” he pointed out.

“Well, me and the Lord have got to have a little something to live on, too,” I said.

“What makes you think a wolf can win a dog show?” he said dubiously.

“Why don’t you just concentrate on being a handsome, manly type of critter and let me worry about the rest of it?” I said.

Well, we argued it back and forth for the better part of the morning, but finally he admitted that he didn’t see no better alternatives, and he could always commit suicide the next week if things didn’t work out, and I went off to buy a leash and some grooming equipment at the local pet store, and then stopped by the arena for an entry form. I didn’t know if he had an official werewolf name or not, so I just writ down Grand International Champion Basil on the form, and let it go at that.

The biggest problem I had the next two days was finding a vet who was open at night, so I could get Basil his rabies and distemper shots, but finally I convinced one to work late for an extra fifty dollars, which I planned to deduct from Basil’s share of the winnings, since the shots didn’t do me no good personally, and then it was Saturday, and we just stuck around the hotel until maybe five in the afternoon, Basil getting more and more nervous, and finally we walked on over to the arena.

Basil’s class was scheduled to be judged at seven o’clock, but as the hour approached it began to look like the moon wasn’t going to come out in time, and since I didn’t want us to forfeit all that money by not showing up on time, I quick ran out into the alley, grabbed the first couple of cats I could find, and set ’em loose in the arena. The newspaper the next morning said that the ruckus was so loud they could hear it all the way over in Szentendre, which was a little town about forty miles up the road, and by the time everything had gone back to normal Basil was about as far from normal as Hungarian counts are prone to get, and I slipped his leash on him and headed for the ring.

There were three other dogs ahead of us, and after we entered the ring the judge came over and look at Basil.

“This is a class for miniature poodles,” he said severely. “Just what kind of mongrel is that?”

“You know this guy, Basil?” I asked.

Basil nodded.

“He one of the ones who’s mean to you when you walk through town?”

Basil growled an ugly growl.

“Basil?” said the judge, turning white as a sheet.

Basil gave him a toothy grin.

“Now, to answer your question,” I said, “this here happens to be a fully growed miniature poodle what takes umbrage when you insult its ancestry.”

The judge stared at Basil for another couple of seconds, then disqualified the other three dogs for not looking like him and handed me a blue ribbon.

Well, to make a long story short, old Basil terrorized the judges in the next three classes he was in and won ’em all, and then the ring steward told me that I had five minutes to prepare for the final class of the day, where they would pick the best dog in the show and award the winner the ten thousand dollars.

Suddenly Basil started whining up a storm. I couldn’t see no ticks or fleas on him, and he couldn’t tell me what was bothering him, but something sure was, and finally I noticed that he was staring intently at something, and I turned to see what it was, and it turned out to be this lovely looking lady who was preparing to judge the Best in Show class.

“What’s the problem, Basil?” I asked.

He kept whining and staring.

“Is it her?”

He nodded.

I racked my mind trying to figure out what it was about her that could upset him so much.

“She’s been mean to you before?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“She’s got something to do with the Gypsies who cursed you?”

He shook his head again.

“I can’t figure out what the problem is,” I said. “But what the hell, as long as we let her know who you are, it’s in the bag.”

He pointed his nose at the ceiling and howled mournfully.

“She’s from out of town and doesn’t know you’re a werewolf?” I asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

He whimpered and curled up in a little ball.

“Will the following dogs please enter the ring?” said the announcer. “Champion Blue Boy, Champion Flaming Spear, Champion Gladiator, Champion Jericho, and Grand International Champion Basil.”

Well, we didn’t have no choice but to follow these four fluffy little dogs into the ring. The judge just stared at us for a minute with her jaw hanging open, and I figured we were about to get booted out, but then she walked over and knelt down and held Basil by the ears and peered into his face, and then she stood up and stepped back a bit and stared at him some more, and finally she walked over to me and said, “This is the most handsome, rugged, masculine dog I have ever seen. I have a female I’d love to breed to him. Is he for sale?”

I told her that I was just showing him for a friend, and that she’d have to speak to the Count de Chenza Lupo about it later. She scribbled down his address, and it turned out that she was staying three rooms down the hall from me at the Hotel Magyar.

Finally she examined the other four dogs briefly and with obvious disinterest, and then she announced that Grand International Champion Basil was the best dog in this or any other show and had won the ten thousand dollars.

Well, Basil and me stuck around long enough to have a bunch of photos taken for the papers and then high tailed it back to the hotel, where we waited until daylight and he became Count Basil again and we divied up the money. Then he walked down the hall to talk to the judge about selling himself to her, and he came back half an hour later with the silliest grin on his face and announced that he was in love and she didn’t mind in the least that he was a werewolf and all was right with the world.

I read in the paper that the other dog owners were so outraged about losing to a wolf that they tore the building down, and with the dog shows canceled for the foreseeable future I couldn’t see no reason to stick around, so I bid Hungary farewell and decided to try my luck in Paris, where I’d heard tell that the sinners were so thick on the ground you could barely turn around without making the real close acquaintanceship of at least a couple of ’em.

I never saw old Basil again, but a few months later I got a letter from him. He’d married his lady judge and left Budapest for good, and was living on her country estate managing her kennel—and he added a proud little postscript that both his wife and her prize female were expecting.

THE DIRE WOLF

GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

The bone is worrisome.

“It’s huge, Lia,” says Christopher over the phone. “The guy who found it thought it was a bear jaw.”

“What’s the quality of the joint?” she asks, like she’s stumped.

“Great condition on one side.”

She guesses the other side has been broken off. (When werewolves fight, it’s almost always a dive for the throat—the skull gets in the way.)

“I’m sorry to call you,” he says, “but I figured if anyone would know—”

“I’ll come out tomorrow,” she says.

She hangs up the phone, her palm pressing flat against the receiver as if she can keep the news from spreading.

Velia doesn’t really worry, the whole journey up to Fairbanks. People find bones from time to time. She can find a place somewhere in the Canis family to put almost anything. She’s identified the remains of more rare species than any other xenoarchaeologist in the country.

She doesn’t worry when Christopher shows her the jawbone and says wonderingly, “I’ve never seen anything like it—I mean, there’s no meat left, but it’s so . . . ”

“Fresh?” she asks, and Christopher pulls a face that means
Yes.

“I’ll take a look,” she says, as if she’s planning some tests, but she’s already planning the paperwork. It’s only a bone fragment. She’d name it a gray wolf already and call it a night, except that it was good to put on a show of working hard.

(The jaw is missing a third of the left mandible, snapped clean away. She had forgotten how powerful a werewolf could be when it was cornered.)

Velia isn’t worried at all, until Christopher says, “We called in someone else to help speed up the identification. If there are dangerous animals in the park somewhere, we need to know.”

Then she sets down the bone with trembling hands.

She doesn’t listen to Christopher after that. No need; she knows who they’ve called in.

She would have called him in, too, if they were still speaking.

The dire wolf did not survive.

The fossil record says the dire wolf vanished. It wasn’t clever enough to live in the age after ice, after the mammoth was gone. It was all force, no cleverness. It was too large to live in the close, tight foliage of the world’s new spring.

The skulls line the walls of the Tar Pit Museum, tidy rows of dead.

Velia had spent one summer carefully brushing dust away from the piles of bones in La Brea, picking tar from around the eye sockets and the incisors, edging the little furrow that ran from nose to neck. By the end of August they had eleven skulls.

“God, no wonder they all died,” said Alice, holding up a skull with no jaw—the jaws never made it. When Alice held the base, the front teeth pressed into her elbow. “Smallest cranial I’ve seen on a dog. Poor puppies. Too stupid to get out of the tar.” She patted its head. “Adapt or die, right?”

Velia had more pity. She knew what it was like to be blinded by want.

He arrives late.

She’s running her fingers over the clean break on the mandible, and when she hears him coming and looks up she sees that the windows have all gone black, and her little lamp is the only thing fighting the dark.

It’s almost dark enough to hide his flinch when he sees her. (Almost; not quite.)

She’s grateful to have been the one who knew it was coming. She didn’t want to think about how she might look if he ever caught her unaware.

“Velia,” he says.

He’s only ever used her full name. (“If you ever call me Lia, I’ll know you’re under duress,” she said once, and he had looked up for a long moment before he smiled.)

It’s been six years. He hasn’t aged.

“Mark,” she says, the same tone.

Even tired, worn out from travel, his dark eyes are sharp. He glances around the room, leans against the doorway too casually, sets his bag down like it’s a trap and he’s ready to run. The draft from the outer door hits her; snow, and evergreens.

She can see his fatigue in the slope of his shoulders. She doesn’t even know where he came in from; his work takes him all over, and it’s not like they’re in touch.

After a second he asks, carefully, “Have you been expecting me?”

“Allan told me he’d called you, after I got here.”

He looks at the jaw in her hand. She’s been playing with it without noticing. Now it’s hanging from her wrist; the front of the jaw follows the curve of her hand, the teeth small pressure points against her knuckles. One has cut through the skin, and a little red bead is forming under the white.

(The teeth on a dire wolf are impossibly sharp. If you shove a pipe in its mouth, the wolf will bite clean through it and keep coming.)

She says, “The ones from La Brea are so dark from the tar, you start to think that’s just what they look like.”

He doesn’t answer. When she finally looks up, he’s watching her without blinking. He looks torn.

She remembers, too late, what it feels like to have him watching her.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, and it almost sounds like the truth. (Almost; not quite.)

There was a wolfish quality about him right from the beginning. He had a way of leaning back in a chair, tilting his head down when he was deep in thought, that answered some need she didn’t know she had.

They had been in Alaska then, too, studying the migratory patterns of wolves.

(One of the other anthropologists was in love with him; you could see it in the way she half-turned her head when he spoke.)

Halfway through the project, it stormed, and all five of them spent days sitting close together in the main room of the rented house, because it had the only fireplace.

Velia spent most of her time at the kitchen table (she didn’t mind the cold). She looked at foliage lists for the Russian and Alaskan sides of the Bering Straight, glancing absently at the sketch of the dire wolf beside the gray wolf, the gray wolf looking spindly and half-grown next to its dead cousin.

From one of the chairs near the fire, Mark asked (his first words to her), “Velia—why would you cross a land bridge when there was sufficient prey where you were?”

“The fever of pursuit,” Velia said, absently.

When she looked up, he seemed caught off-guard for the first time since she’d met him. For the rest of the night, he cast long looks her way when he thought she couldn’t see him, as if a worthy opponent had walked onto the field and taken him by surprise.

She let it pass. She didn’t get involved with people.

He stands in the doorway like he’s thinking of something cutting to say, but in the end he leaves his bag behind and approaches with long quiet steps to peer at the jawbone.

He doesn’t touch her, but as he lifts and turns the bone she rolls her hand along with it, not letting go, and he looks at her palm before he looks at the bone.

“Whoever won this fight will want to keep this under wraps,” he says, after a long examination.

She knows. It’s why she was worried about Mark’s coming. Werewolf fights—always to the death—are such a waste. Dire wolves are rare enough as it is.

She says, “Whoever won this fight woke up with bone in his teeth.”

He half-smiles, doesn’t look up from the jaw. When he runs his fingers over the flats of the teeth, the pad of his thumb just brushes her skin.

Her stomach turns over.

She ignores it; it’s residual. Old habit.

The dire wolf had a temporal fossa out of proportion to its brain cavity. It was what made the top of its skull so different from the skull of an Arctic wolf or a grey wolf; the dire wolf’s cranium was low and narrow, the caved-in temples on either side looking like two kicks from a horse.

For a long time, Velia thought the slender skull meant that the dire wolf wasn’t clever enough to survive the new age without adapting.

After she met Mark, she began to think more about the temporal fossa, the deep indentations in the skull that housed the jaw muscles. The skull was narrow because the muscles were large.

When the dire wolf bit down, it held on. That’s what it was made to do.

She sits awake for an hour, imagining she can hear him breathing, before she gets up the courage to go to sleep. It’s her imagination; the sudden shock of nearness had brought back old caution. That was all.

(It was easier to be lonely. His companionship was dangerous.)

If in the middle of the night he walks back and forth outside her door like a sentinel, scuffing the carpet just loudly enough to cut through her dreams—well, maybe she imagines that, too.

If in the dark she bolts awake, listening to an animal breathing warm and strong in the snow outside—that, she’s not imagining.

“Does it frighten you?” he asked.

She said, “Always.”

She’s been awake for an hour, watching out the window, when he knocks on her door. It’s not quite dawn, but she’s not surprised; she knows he’s been awake, too.

“There’s another wolf,” he says.

In the small room, in the welcome dark, he seems impossibly far away.

She stands up. “I know.”

He flushes, goes white. “You haven’t—have you been outside? You can’t go out there, Velia. It will kill you.”

There is a stab in her side, just for a moment, as if he’s cut her. She fights to stay calm. There is no safety with him any more.

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

He takes two steps. They’re close enough to kiss. “Velia,” he says, his voice rumbling in his chest, “that wolf snapped another’s jaw clean off. What is it going to do with you?”

“Talk,” she says.

To a dire wolf, the human form is like a paved street; the wolf lives in the tree roots that silently push until the stone swells and cracks and falls apart.

Velia has done better at keeping human than most wolves, but it’s hard to ignore another of your kind when it comes calling.

She parks her car close to the trees. (It’s a useless human habit; the wolf can run faster than any speeding car can save you.)

When she’s far into the forest and can smell she’s alone, she folds her shirt and pants and boots under the branches of a fir tree, where the snow has not reached.

(Any dire wolf who lives in human form has had to explain their nakedness. The smart ones learn to leave their clothes where they can be retrieved before people find them naked and start asking questions.)

She proceeds barefoot, wrapped in her coat—waxed cotton, the closest texture she can find to human skin. It’s nice to have a human skin that doesn’t hurt.

She stops short when she smells the other wolf.

The change surges into her throat like vomit; she swallows and tries to breathe. She won’t give in to the wolf unless she has to.

(The pain is worse than the fight.)

She reaches the clearing where the wolf has been—the smell of blood is still strong—and hangs back, waiting.

It’s rare for dire wolves of the same form to fight one another. As humans they attract each other, as wolves they form packs. But those who stay in human form often go mad, or fall in love with humans, and the true wolf has no patience for either one. The human wolf must be careful.

It won’t be the first time Velia’s had to fight for this body.

Her father died of some human cancer. He wouldn’t let anyone treat him for it (“What if they find out somehow?”), and as he took his last breaths, a ripple of the wolf’s face slid over his features, a last toothsome grin before he was gone. It was how Velia would have wanted to remember him.

Her mother died later that year during a new moon, while her body was trying to make the shift back from the wolf. Velia gathered her mother in her arms and sobbed into the soft gray fur until the form in her arms was human, and Velia could pick her up and carry her home.

(The dire wolf takes human form when it dies; that lets them pass through the world without leaving proof behind.)

It was her mother’s broken heart that did it, Velia knew. Her mother could have lived another fifty years, another hundred—their kind was hardy, if they could strike some balance between human and wolf that didn’t drive them to the brink. It was a weak heart that had taken her mother.

Velia learned early that it was safer to be alone.

She never told Mark how rare it was for a dire wolf to care for a real human. Even after he knew what she was, how could she explain what even the dire wolves struggled to come to terms with?

She told him, early, “I can’t.”

Later she told him, “We can’t.”

Just that word frightened her, the idea that there was danger to more than just herself, that she had to worry for them both.

He fought her on it. They parted badly.

But she was right. Two years after she left him, she had to identify the teeth marks on a human man who had been torn to pieces by a wild beast. A pack of coyotes, she said. The bites looked big because there had been so many of them overlapping, she said.

She never found out if the wolf had killed its own lover, or if it had been punishing another wolf for keeping human company.

Velia spent every new moon that year looking forward to the change. On four legs, at least, she could hunt without thinking.