Saint Peter’s Wolf (33 page)

In our shock we lunged toward the cabin, our ears down. Just as my vision began to return, a second spear of fire gave me a sharp, surging shadow, and the rocket landed ahead of us, ripping the cabin.

There was a sizzle, the hiss of something electric spitting sparks, a short circuit somewhere in the walls.

It was day everywhere, and a blast flattened me. There was no air, and the heat lifted the hair of my body, and I was certain both of us were about to explode into flame.

In the brilliant light of the ascending ball of fire the snow began to burst, several abrupt geysers. In my deafness, and with the snow under my feet still trembling, I could only guess what was happening.

Deliberate, careful rifle fire stabbed the snow, and Johanna rolled to escape a spout of ice. She was on her feet, lunging in a ragged circle. She zigzagged, scrambling to escape the aim that followed her.

Each shot was closer to where she ran, twisting, trying to escape. There was another burst of snow, and yet another, and at last a shot that showered her with fire-gilded ice.

I bounded, barking into the sky, praying that I could draw the fire, but this hunter chose his targets with great care and would not be distracted. First one, this hunter seemed to think, and then the other.

One moment she ran, more quickly than any other mammal could skim across the snow, and the next she spun, rolling over, kicking, her teeth bared in agony.

I was nearly beside her before I glanced up. A new explosion from the cabin cast enough light for me to see who crouched in the helicopter, his rifle ejecting a glittering shell.

Karl Gneiss smiled as he aimed at me. It was a calm smile, and a smile of great pleasure. A man could not be happier than he was, easily squeezing the trigger to send the bullet that would end my life.

Thirty-Six

He had, essentially, already taken my life. Johanna was all I cared for, and with her body flung into the snow, I was afraid of nothing.

I wanted to kill.

We live in anticipation, imagining what we are about to do, what we are about to finish already escaping us, slipping away. What keeps us alive is always the next moment, the next heartbeat, the breath to come.

There was one thing in the world for me. It was this hunter's smile, far above me in the flickering light from the ruins of my family sanctuary.

I gathered my power, crouching to spring. I took my time, knowing that there would be one chance, only one, and that I could make no mistake.

His finger squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped. I was already a blur. The propeller lashing the air around me, I bounded three times.

The third bound was a leap, a jump that sent me high into the air, a parabola like none I had accomplished so far, high enough to lose the heat from the blaze. But not high enough to reach the smiling man.

The thought was a silent scream: not high enough.

I strained one foreleg far ahead of my body, reaching painfully upward. My leap reached its apex, slowed, and I began to fall back again, short of the craft above me.

Failed failed I can't catch him I have failed.

But with a twist of my body I hooked one claw/finger around a helicopter skid. And surprised, scarcely able to breathe, I hung there, a spill of fire below me where snow reflected the source of light.

I struggled for a grasp, my weight rocking the craft, and the pilot jerked the helicopter, trying to throw me off. He was smart, and he knew his machine well, and I felt myself slipping. An involuntary growl burst from my throat. I could not hang on any longer. I was about to fall.

The helicopter bucked, and my body swung wide. But the maneuvering of the craft forced it to dip down again, and I hooked an entire foreleg over the skid. I felt, as I rarely did while on the ground, the foreignness of my shape. My hind legs kicked at the air, and my spine lashed from side to side, my fur rippling.

I clung to the skid, my weight hauling the craft to one side, and the machine performed a pirouette, spinning around and around, my weight holding the ballet to a single point in the darkness. The helicopter had already been fully loaded, I sensed, and my weight made it difficult to ascend, although that is exactly what the aircraft attempted to do, clattering its way over the black lake. The engine shrieked, and we rounded higher over the cold.

I could not see the hand, or the weapon it held, but there was a flash and the almost ludicrously petite snap of a pistol in my direction. There was the dim silhouette of a man's head hanging upside down, and the distant fire glistened off the man's face, disclosing a grimace of great effort. This was not Gneiss, I registered with disappointment, but one of his shadows.

The pistol was too heavy to aim in my direction for more than a few moments, and the gun hand swung itself down toward the lake, and then up again into firing position.

With my forepaw I seized the wrist, and clutched it as I had gripped the cougar's leg, a grip that would stop circulation and numb the nerves, a grip that had the pistol slipping from half-dead fingers. The two bones of the wrist wrenched toward each other with an ugly snap.

There was the sound of a man's cry, and a man's curses. I could not make out the words over the rattle of the chopper's blades, but I worked myself toward the hand, and licked it, as though playfully, and then licked the man's jerking, howling head, laving him with my spit.

Then I gave a great tug, and the thump of the propellers was joined by the reedy, descending scream of a falling man. The cry ceased at the lake's perfect black surface, and I could not keep myself from a moment of compassion.

My body jackknifed. I powered my way into the cabin. Instrument lights glowed where a figure struggled to wrench the craft to greater altitude. Someone ripped a shot, and the wall of the chopper was punched with an irregular star through which the night sky streamed cold.

Another shot exploded and the pilot jolted upright. I snapped my jaws and found an arm, the hot savor of blood in my mouth. Working quickly, I closed my teeth around his throat. I snapped his spine, and hurled the body aside. In the small compartment the dead man fell over me and I wasted a moment, flinging him aside again.

The craft was spinning now, wheeling through the sky, out of control. Gneiss wormed his way behind his sole remaining shadow and the muzzle flash seared me. There was an explosion of metal and wires, and a stink of blistered plastic. The helicopter flung itself through the black.

Far below us the burning cabin cast a scarlet sheen on the lake. The tangle of flames and the glitter of the lake whipped past us time and again, as I slammed the remaining shadow into unconsciousness.

All the while my eyes were on his master, the large, pale face, the glittering gray eyes. He was a big man, bulky in the way that endows strength. His eyes were golden in the swinging light, and while he had to brace himself with an outflung arm, he seemed to enjoy my own struggle to climb toward him. The centrifugal force staggered me, threw me against the shattered plastic window, and then back against the pilot's crumpled form. My great weight was a disadvantage to me as I found myself ripping a seat out of the floor to disentangle myself.

The big man was smiling, tranquilly raising a pistol, and I gathered myself for a last spring, my hindquarters against the sizzling instrument panel. He said something, and I could not make out the words.

He said it again, calling it out, merrily, as though this were all a wonderful sport, a rare moment he had sought for years.

I realized what he was saying.

“Loving arms!” he cried, laughing, delighted, aiming the black pistol into my eyes.

And then a force flattened me, crushed me, a blank numb slam that brought silence.

Loving arms.

Utter, granite silence.

In this blankness, this slow settling downward, Gneiss's words repeated themselves. “Loving.” But surely, I struggled to think. Surely he's silent; surely he's not still talking.

Love. His words, and the silence. Silence, and a gentle downdrift, slowly spinning. And cold, too, great cold. But even as I experienced it as cold, I felt it as warmth. Pleasing warmth, like warm blood rising around my body.

Which body? I found myself wondering without much care. Which of my two bodies was it that felt such pleasant warmth? It didn't matter, did it? Both bodies, both lives, all of me, was descending forever.

My father smiled at me. “Look at me,” he said. “My hands shaking so much I can't get my tie to knot.”

I woke when the chopper settled to the bottom of the lake. The pressure of the water crushed me against the shattered window. The weight of the lake was so great I could not move. This was not water, this was a black stone mountain that pressed me even farther into the earth.

I would be alive just long enough to feel the weight of the world burst my lungs.

Thirty-Seven

Things floated, vague debris, things I did not want touching me. The arm of one of the floating corpses trailed across my eyes, and I wrestled the dead man out of the way, only to rock into the snaking wires of the instrument panel.

Calm yourself. Be calm. Find out which way is up.

It seemed like a simple task, but in this black so perfect it was blindness there was no filtered light to tell me where the surface was, and there was no sense of anything trying to float upward. Only inward, toward me. There was a tangle of trash about me. A paper cup grazed my ear, and scraps of paper drifted over my forepaws, clinging to me. And the dead men seemed to stagger, bumbling in their confinement, floating and yet kept in place.

No air. The signal from my lungs drove every other thought from my mind. No air no air get out now.

I threw myself against what I imagined was the windscreen, and was bounced back by the force of my own attack, dislodging a rack and a metal cylinder which I recognized, in one of my last cogent seconds, as a fire extinguisher.

I crashed upward, or outward, hurling my back against a wall that buckled. I rammed it again, and had the dull sense of something giving, whether some part of my shoulder or a part of the wreck I could not tell.

Then there was a crack, a split I snaked my body into and through, twisting from side to side. I forced the rent wider, and metal groaned. The great cold was gradually kneading into my muscles, stilling my body, turning it to iron, but with a final spasm I burst from the wreck.

An ascent can be like a fall, a spiral that has its own life. We are not free creatures at all, even the most graceful human. We go where our bodies take us.

Some powerful creature held me, and dragged me from the water. Someone I knew. Someone I knew well, and loved.

Was I alive? I wanted to laugh at my own stupidity. Of course I was alive—I hurt. The sand on the shore there is, essentially, crushed granite. I opened my eyes and gazed at the beach, and then, barely able to move, I managed to pull my beast shape into a thicket of mesquite.

I shuddered, and had no feeling in any of my limbs. I barked once, a sharp note: where are you?

Sleep, came the command from my bones. Lie down and sleep.

I barked again. Are you alive? Am I alone?

Only silence, and the steamy pant of my own breath.

Sleep now. Too much weariness.

I let myself fall to the pine needles, and then someone was with me. Her shape stood guard over me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was still there. A golden wolf.

She sang a low tune: Don't worry. I am with you.

I had been mad to doubt her again. I scrambled to my feet, for the moment no longer weary, and laughed. I shook the water from my fur. I staggered at first, but soon found my stride.

I barked, telling the sugar pines that I had been a fool. She was here! Look at her, golden in the starlight. She was hurt, though. There was a tar-splash of blood along her side.

I followed Johanna, and to my surprise she was not seeking refuge in the forest. She was dragging something from the water. And then she splashed into the lake, and retrieved something else, something long and heavy with water.

And then I understood what she was doing.

Here was the man who had tried to shoot me with the pistol, the man whose wrist I had squeezed so hard. How helpless he looked, gazing upward at the stars, his clothing sodden about his arms and legs.

She seemed to be able to find bodies by their fading warmth in the water. Here were the others, all still, glistening in starlight. All except for one. One was missing.

One very important corpse was not here.

Gneiss.

A growl rose from within me as I gazed over the black lake. Gneiss was here somewhere. He was dead. He had to be. I wanted to see him, cold and still.

I wanted him here on the sand.

Was there even more to that night? Did we crawl to watch a struggle against flame, firemen in yellow hardhats and freezing gouts of water, failing to kill the fire?

There is a memory of that, and a memory of a continuing search, with Johanna, for the sole absent body, the one man we most wanted to find.

Then we escaped, running through the night, ice bearding us, weighing us down, into a cabin farther along the shore. It was one of dozens of lakeside cabins boarded up for the winter, an aluminum boat lashed to the side of its carport. This diminutive version of my family's now ruined cabin was a refuge where we shuddered, melted into our human forms, and slept.

Even in sleep I ran, until at last the slumber purified me of the flight, and I slipped into a new, fertile country, not oblivion so much as deepest peace. I knew exactly who was with me, and we held each other as we rose from time to time to the surface of sleep, only to drift downward again.

She sighed in her sleep, and said my name once. The sound woke me, and I held her, praying that I not cause her pain, and praying, too, that her great powers of recovery might continue to heal her.

“He's still out there,” said Johanna, sitting in a borrowed bathrobe, an electric blue plush that had seen better days.