Saint Peter’s Wolf (30 page)

He was on me at once, his teeth in the heavy fur of my throat. I picked him up and hurled him, but full strength had not returned to my shoulders, and he plunged through the air at me immediately. I danced away, his teeth snapping in the air.

We circled each other. My own snout wrinkled, my own teeth exposed and icy in the wind. My hackles bristled. My growls were a battery of guns. He must have heard nothing like them before, but he never hesitated. He was on me again, but this was not the ambush of a cat.

I caught him, although the force of his plunge rocked me. I hammered him with the side of my forepaw, trying not to claw him. He lunged again, and this time I threw him, and he landed hard, skidding, spinning across the snow.

He dived in low so I had to whip to one side to protect my belly from the flash of his incisors. I nipped at him, and found his flesh through his fur.

The blood of a wolf tastes like any other blood. Hot salt water, flesh-broth. But the taste of this blood stung me, and filled me with a sensation like a child's first taste of brandy. It tasted hot, much hotter than it really could have been, and yet there was a deep perfume to it.

It reminded of the time I put the fangs in my mouth for the first time, in my study, in another lifetime. The flavor had been like this.

This sensation was so stunning that I could barely block the wolf's continuing attacks. The strangest flavor broke over not only my tongue, but my entire body. In my numbness, I grappled with the wolf, his slaver scalding my eyes. Once again, I hurled him away.

Then, acting entirely on a memory I did not know I possessed, I did exactly the right thing. I had entertained the thought of rolling on my back, exposing my belly in the language of surrender. But I had doubts about this plan. As large as I was—and I had learned that size was nearly everything in such confrontations—he might decide that even in the act of surrender I was simply too formidable a beast to have in his pack. I had the vivid mental image of my guts torn out, all over the snow. This was not a careless opponent. I had to do exactly the right thing.

And so I ran. I scrambled over stones and ice, and then I spun to confront him. His breath was hot, but he fell short of throwing himself upon me.

Go away go away go away, his snarls commanded. Before, he had only wished me dead.

Backing away, still facing him, I retreated. I knew that I could kill him if I had to.

Leave this place leave this place don't stay another moment, he growled.

We both knew I could kill him. I was stronger, if not as quick. But I did not want to harm this animal. He was a worthy leader. He had felt my greater strength. He knew me well. It would be a long battle, but I would wear him out, unless he got in a fortunate bite. It didn't matter. He had no choice.

As I sidled, careful to show my teeth, he cantered after me, careful to swing wide so he would not actually reach me. I mounted an outcropping, and panted down at him. He planted his feet, and gazed after me with a look like a laugh.

You, his laugh said. You, Strange One.

Master some other place, his silent laugh said. You do not belong here.

I loped through the growing darkness. I did not belong. I was strange. This was not my place. These thoughts dripped in my mind, unceasingly, and the strangest current swept over me, my legs, my spine, to the scythe of my tail.

The battle I had just fought, the failure of my quest, did not trouble me now. Something even more profound had happened. Something had changed in me when I tasted the wolf's blood, something so sweeping that for the first time in days I felt lost.

I did not know what I was, and I did not know how I was going to survive. The air was laced with strange, impossible fragrances, cinnamon, clove, musk. Sounds splashed over me, chimes, chirps, like the twittering of unseen birds.

The sensations were sweet, but my stomach was cold. What was I to do? Where was I to go? Should I try to tag after the wolves, following them, a satellite of the pack? That was a barren plan, and yet I could not even determine where I was to spend this night. I had no destination, and I was exhausted. Exhausted, and profoundly troubled. Something deep within me had changed.

At that moment, as the dark was perfect, and I had to travel by smell and feel alone, I felt it again. Once again, that suspicion so strong it stopped me, and turned me south.

Something was after me.

I rocked back to my haunches, and lifted my call. I lifted it, trying to touch the stars with it, the stars which, on this night, I could not see.

I never heard whatever answer there might have been. There was a rumble and the air began to flutter around me. The air itself was shattering. Space was fragmenting, splintering around me, pattering to the ground.

I lapped at it with my tongue, and it was so cold it burned, but it was only snow. Only snow, I reassured myself. But it was a thick pelt that filled the air, and I could not see. All scent vanished. There was nothing but blank black.

And then the wind struck.

Thirty-Three

I rolled, and scrambled to my feet, but the blizzard was so strong it swept me off my feet again. It was an explosion of wind from dead north.

I considered digging a burrow, coiling within it, and sleeping through the storm. But what if I never woke? I was still weak from the cat, and the encounter with Dark Ears had drained me further. I could not risk being turned into so much frozen meat. I no longer trusted my wolf shape. It was not what it seemed to be.

Somewhere here, lost in the thundering dark, there was a shelter. It was a shelter built for men, and it was somewhere ahead of me, directly south. I tried to detect my trail in the snow, but that was hopeless. The blizzard clawed all trace of the surface away, and I had to guess where I was going, blundering, half-swimming through snow. If I knew where north was—and I did, because the wind poured unstinting as a cataract, directly from the Pole—then I knew my other directions as well.

But I could not find it. I was lost, and I would have to wander, or find a hole, and curl up and risk my life in sleep. My paws were lead, and ice clotted my lashes.

I stumbled, thrashed, snarling at the snow.

Die, I told it. Go away and die.

And then I smelled pine tar. Just a thread of it, from off to my right. In my blindness I had lumbered past it, and I climbed, the blizzard raking my fur. The rumble of the wind was twisted into a howl where the A-frame sliced it. I rose to my hind legs.

I fell into the cabin, heavy with the snow that spattered from me onto the floor. I closed the door, fighting the wind, and then I collapsed. I could sleep now, I told myself. I was safe.

The walls of the A-frame shuddered. The floor groaned. It was wise of the naturalists, if that is what they were, to choose their winters far from here. As the wooden structure staggered under the wind, I decided that now was the time I wanted to revisit, perhaps for the last time, my human form. I could do something I remembered from my human life, centuries ago.

I could build a fire. But I knew that my paw/hands would not have the dexterity for this basic, human endeavor. Only a human hand could make fire.

I was desperate for a new plan. My old drive, the hope, the great faith, was gone. I could not join the wolves for the blunt reason that I was not a wolf. I was something else. Still a creature of nature, still something of a miracle. But I did not belong here.

However, merely wishing a return to human form did not always make it happen. I shook my fur, sure that I simply had trouble concentrating. But I was like a man unable to remember a phone number, or a name. I simply could not trigger the transformation. I stood on four legs in the darkness of a cabin, and I was a human wolf. There was nothing I could do to force it.

Until at last it began.

It was slow. My teeth ached. My bones burned. The pain surprised me. It had been so simple, but now, once again, it was a cramp that tossed me from bunk to stove, gasping. All feeling faded, and I was unconscious for a while, because I woke only when my shivering was so violent that it jerked my arms and legs.

I was a naked human being, and I was freezing to death. I stuffed newspaper into the stove, added a pine-cone, and was too convulsed with cold to get a match out of the box. My hand shook the box back and forth, and matches pattered all over the floor in the dark.

I broke one, and then another. The third sputtered sulphur before it died. When I did have a fire going, the newspaper was so damp the flame died immediately. Gasping, I groped more matches from the floor and managed to trick a fire under the pinecone. When it blazed, white flame sparkling, sap sizzling, I added kindling, and a chunk of wood, until there was a blaze.

My eyes smarted; I had to twist the handle to the damper. Smoke was making tears stream from my eyes. And all the while my feet were numb, and feeling melting from my hands. I promised myself that this was my final experience in human form. A human body could scarcely function in such cold.

It was an efficient stove. The wind rumbled outside, and I succumbed to the small, human comforts of sweating in the heat of a fire, and reading the instructions on a packet of freeze-dried turkey casserole. I brushed a comma of mouse dung off the package of food. It was a race within my nervous system whether exhaustion or hunger would be the stronger.

I was glad I did not have a mirror. I could only imagine my wounds. My back was healing, but certain quick moves stung badly. It must look terrible, I told myself with rueful pride. There was a plastic gallon of water in one of the cupboards, and the propane stove blinked into flame.

I stirred hot water into what looked like multicolored sawdust, and had something that resembled food. The smell alone was enough to make me weak: I had been very hungry. I did not bother with a spoon. I shoveled the steaming stuff into my mouth with my fingers, and licked them when I was done. The fire was bright and hot, and after a while I did not need to wear a sleeping bag like a shawl.

A single pebble-gray mouse, whiskers a blur, darted to one of the matches I had left on the floor, and froze.

I realized that I had not spoken a word of human speech for days. This little companion made me miss conversation. What a luxury it was to talk, and to listen, to others.

I wanted so much to speak to the mouse, to tell it something, to comfort it with some sort of greeting. But, like an explorer blinking at a bank of microphones, I could only gape. I was thankful, I wanted to tell it, for its company.

The mouse streaked to the wall, and followed it to a split in the plywood, and vanished. Its sudden absence made the A-frame seem like a cavern. There were drafts, under the door and around the windows, and whenever these licks of wind touched me, I huddled. I had never been so apart from human beings before. I had not felt this when I ran as a wolf. Only now, reinstated, or reduced, to my man's body did I feel how far I was from any human, and how dangerous it could be to sit here, with a tiny amount of food, and three more chunks of firewood.

Not dangerous to my wolf self, but then I had to remind myself that I was not a wolf. Not entirely. Enough of a wolf to fool nearly everyone but myself, and the rare, shrewd beast. The wolf pinup on the wall stared back at me, a reminder of what I could not be.

So, I resolved, I would be some other sort of beast. Perhaps Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, creatures I had long considered apocryphal, would be joined by another sort of wanderer. If I could not join the wolves, perhaps I could live like a wolf nonetheless. And it was not impossible that some other wolf society might accept me. The zoo wolves had sported with me. At that moment I could not keep myself from remembering Belinda, and then the loss of Johanna shivered me again.

She had sacrificed herself. I had fed on the faith she had given me, the belief that what I was experiencing was a miracle. But for a moment I doubted. It was cold, steely doubt: it would be better to be free of this altogether, and be a human being again.

There was no question. It would be better to be a man, with a man's hopes, and a man's dreams. But I had no choice. Perhaps a dog or two would be my companion, or a stray wolf, or even a fox. I would survive, with companions or without, but I was a social creature, and found myself hoping that some beast would join me in the hunt. The storm slammed the roof of the cabin. The ceiling heaved in and out, and nails creaked.

It would be better to be a man. To speak, to lift a hand to a friend, to ask after the news of human beings, to share the lives of other people. This truth was like the flayed skin of my back. But like that other, physical pain, I tried to ignore it, and after a while I succeeded.

Perhaps I drowsed. I woke to a fire a little brighter, and a storm outside even more fierce. And to something else, something that had awakened me. Not the snap of the fire, and not the huff of the wind. Some sort of voice, a call of some kind, so lost and buffeted in the wind that I could not make it out.

There was an animal out there. I could just hear its cry over the freight-train thunder of the wind. And it was not just an animal.

It was a wolf.

There was a wolf out there, calling again and again, and at first I thought that it was one of the wolves of that day, relenting, calling for me to join it. There was, however, an unusual quality to this call. The call was a howl, but it was so plaintive, so sorrowful, that I was on my feet, wrapping the sleeping bag around my shoulders, and wrenching open the door.

The cold slammed me, and I fell back into the cabin. There was a wolf out there, and it was calling. And I knew, how I could not guess, that the wolf was calling for me.

I peered once into the blinding swirl before me, and called. I could not sing like a wolf now; there was only my puny, human voice. My cry was wordless, a long tune whipped away by the storm. There was no answer.

I shrank into the cabin. I climbed into the baggy, elephantine jumpsuit. I thrust my feet into the gaping, oversize boots. The parka covered me, and I found my hand trembling as I tugged the Coleman lantern from the wall. I shook the lantern, and there was a splashing sound from inside.