Wolver's Rescue (41 page)

Eli took care of those who didn’t. The big
black wolf never did find his way home, but he never really left it
either. On moonlit nights, Molly would grab a coat from the rack
and say she was going for a walk. No one ever volunteered to go
with her, and no one worried about her safety. She’d walk across
the pastures and ford the creek and then she’d find herself a spot
to sit and wait. She was never alone for long.

The great black wolf would come padding from
the shadows to sit beside her. She would tell him about her days
with the pack and about Sammy, who was growing to look more like
his father every day, or about Macey and the young wolver who
became her mate. They were expecting a pup in the spring, though
they’d told no one about it yet. Then always, not sometimes, but
always, she would end by telling him how much she loved him.

These were the things you knew when you were
the Mate, and Tommie became a good one. She gave her love freely
and never gave up hope on anyone who came through her door. Having
lived so long in the human world, she would never become fully
wolver, but she didn’t regret those years. Through them, she’d
developed a strong inner core that helped her withstand the pain of
separation when her true mate was away.

She made few demands of her pack, and was
flexible in all rules but one. When Bull returned from a hunt, his
first day home was hers.

If it was a full moon, they ran as wolves
together, over the paths Bull ran as a cub. At other times, they
walked hand in hand with no particular goal in mind. Sometimes they
bickered good naturedly and sometimes they made love under the
cover of the trees and sometimes they walked in silence, each
thanking God and Nature for what they’d been given.

It was during one such walk, that Tommie
tugged on Bull’s hand and forced him to stop to look down the steep
slope at the side of the road.

“
What is that?” She pointed
to something buried in a covering of vines.

~*~

Time and nature had done their best to
disguise the crumpled station wagon below, though there were still
spots of bright red paint to prove its original color. It rested
almost upright on its nose, the front half disappearing in the
underbrush. A tree had forced its way up into the engine
compartment and torn its way through the buckled hood that couldn’t
be seen, but Bull knew was there. Above the tangle of surrounding
greenery, the tailgate, window shattered, was otherwise intact. The
car had been there for almost thirty years.

He is alone and has been alone for a long
time. He has no sense of days or months, only long time and short.
His human mind, Billy’s mind, tries to hang on to those memories of
long ago, but it’s becoming harder and harder to remember what it
was like to walk on two legs, sit in a chair, eat from a plate, or
drink from a cup. He loses a little more of his humanity with every
sunrise he awakens as a wolf. The moon calls to him in a different
way than it did in that long ago.

His wolf is dominant now, has been for some
time. His wolf likes living wild, likes the feeling of being
uncontained. He has tried to join the local wolf pack, but they
have no use for him. He is at that in-between time, too small to be
called adult, too large to be a cub. He doesn’t have the strength
to fight for his place as a newcomer to the pack. They drive him
off. His wolf feels a desperate need to join the pack, but Billy
prefers to run alone. He wants no part of the closeness of the
pack, though he can’t always recall why.

He is hungry and on the hunt. It’s cold and
his belly hurts with the hunger. Hunting as a lone wolf is hard and
small game never quite satisfies the needs of his growing body. His
life is a constant cycle of hunt, eat, drink, and sleep. He has
been tracking a deer, injured and dragging one leg as it runs. He
sees it cross the road below and is about to run after it when he
sees the headlights coming and then a second set of headlights.
Strange to see two cars on this road so close together when it’s
rarely travelled at all.

Under the cover of the trees, he waits and
watches as the second car deliberately runs the first off the road.
Billy can hear the screams of the occupants and the crunching of
metal as it tumbles over and over down the mountain. Two men emerge
from the second car, run to the shoulder of the road and look over
the side. They begin to argue, gesticulating wildly with their
arms.

The view from his vantage point is distant
enough to make the figures look like characters on a television
screen. This is obviously a human matter and Billy has no use for
humans, fears them in fact, but his wolf is strangely curious and
wants to see how this plays out. The boy inside the wolf
shrugs.

“
Know your enemy,” he
agrees.

He watches closely, head cocked as the two
shout at each other. His hearing is excellent, but at this
distance, he can’t hear the words, only the sound of their voices.
One is furious. Billy slinks down the hill in the same manner in
which he stalks prey, belly low to the ground, tail straight out
behind him. He only hears a few words before things fall apart.

They grapple and one pulls a gun. The gun’s
report echoes through the night. Billy is not surprised by this.
The human predators use guns instead of teeth, though he has never
seen them turn the weapon on one of their kind.

The shooter returns to the car and emerges
with something in his hand. Billy thinks it must be a radio like
the one his father used, though later recognizes it as a satellite
phone. He has no idea what the large device is back then, only that
it was big and by the way the human holds it, heavy.

The guy is shouting into it, angry and
frantic.

The next thing he sees does shock him. A
bright light flashes from somewhere below the talking man, from
down where the car has crashed. Billy knows that light and when the
shadow, darker than the night, leaps up and over the shoulder of
the road, he knows what it is.

The phone flies out of the man’s hand. The
gun he holds in the other comes up. Billy sees the short burst of
fire followed instantaneously by the boom of sound. It is a direct
hit to the wolf’s chest, but the shot doesn’t take the wolf down.
The wolf lands on the shooter. Bull sees a flash of teeth almost as
bright as the flash of light that took the male over the moon and
into wolf form. They fall behind the car, blocking his view, but
the man’s scream ending in a choked gurgle of sound tells him all
he needs to know. He waits for the wolf’s victorious howl, but
nothing follows the short battle but silence.

Billy is no fool. He waits as his father
taught him. Long time. He watches. He listens. He moves stealthily
closer, painfully aware of the gun and what guns can do. When he
reaches the road, he peers beneath the car and sees both the man
and the beast. The smell of death is on the wolf and the stink of
fear on the man.

The man is barely alive and trapped beneath
the heavy body of the big red wolf. Billy sniffs at him, pokes the
man with his snout and jumps back, startled, when the man’s eyes
open. There’s a slight shift beneath the dead wolf’s body and Billy
shifts with it, stepping back and searching for the cause.

He sees the hand with the gun and though he
knows the hand has no strength left to fire it, Billy does not like
guns. He snarls and lunges for the wrist of the hand holding the
gun. The satisfying crunch of bone between his jaws tells him that
in spite of the constant hunger, he is growing stronger every
day.

Lids close over terror filled eyes and the
man takes a last bubbling breath. Billy wastes no time feeling
sorry for the man or the dead animal. His wolf has taken over
enough of his being that such things no longer bother him. Dead is
dead. He has mourned for the loss of his pack. He will not mourn
again.

Death doesn’t bother him, but something else
does. The dead wolf is a wolver, just as Billy is. Sooner or later,
the car and two dead men will draw another human’s attention. They
must not find the wolver. He must move the carcass to a place where
it will never be found. Gripping the dead wolf’s ruff, Billy begins
to drag the wolf down the steep incline that ends in the sheer
drop-off of a narrow ravine.

Halfway down, he hears it, the cry of a pup.
Billy doesn’t want to leave the dead wolf until the job is done. It
wasn’t humans who destroyed his pack. They only did what all
predators do; prey on those beneath them. It was the wolver who
foolishly let his wolf rule his human and drew attention to their
small pack that had lived in this territory for years. He can’t
leave this wolver behind to draw attention to their kind. Nothing
matters more than this.

Billy the wolf has other ideas. He likes
pups, as all wolves do, and since he has control of the four legs,
Billy the human has no choice but to go with his wolf half and
follow the sound which has become an earsplitting wail.

The female pup is on her side, strapped to a
plastic car seat. A few yards away, a female is slumped forward in
the passenger seat of the car. The blood on her forehead is still
wet, but her heart is no longer pumping. Seeing the mother and
child, Billy now understands the actions of the dead male.

Wolf must not fight man, nor man, wolf. Kill
not for murder or revenge. These were Primal Laws every wolver pup
knew and yet this adult male had broken both in an instant.
Unarmed, he’d broken those Laws to follow another; to protect his
mate and cub.

Without fingers to unbuckle the belt of the
seat, there is little Billy can do for the cub but paw the
contraption into an upright position. He licks her face clean of
dirt and tears and something dark and sweet.

“
Chocolate.” The human Billy
reminds his wolf. He remembers the treats his mother bought for
them on the rare occasions when she went to the store.

When the pup’s face is clean, he nuzzles her
with his snout as he’d seen his own mother do to his sister and
brother. Her screams settle into heartbreaking sobs. She can’t be
more than two or three and her cries for her Mama and Papa bring
back memories he can’t bear. He has to get away from this rerun of
the past.

Billy’s wolf fights him when he leaves the
child, but this time, Billy fights back as he hasn’t in months.
There is a job to do. He has to dispose of the red male. He has to
cover their tracks. The night is cold. Trapped as she is, unable to
move, the pup will die. There is nothing he can do about that. He’d
learned that lesson the hard way.

His wolf snarls a reminder of Primal Law.
“Protect the cub.”

“
I can’t protect her,” Billy
argues with his wolf. “You can’t protect her. Or have you forgotten
that, too? Let the cold take her. That’s the way it will end no
matter what we do. The quicker, the better.”

His time will be better spent preparing a
place to bury her. Digging a hole in the frozen ground with paws
and claws is hard work and takes time. He knows this. He’s done it
before. Twice.

The pup screeches when he leaves her and
screams while he drags her sire’s body to the ravine. She bellows
with anger while he does what he can to cover all signs of his
presence. The tone of her voice changes and she shouts
unintelligible infant swear words while he digs her shallow grave.
She won’t stop and the noise hurts his sensitive ears.

And then the crying stops and so does his
heart. It won’t start again until he finds her, diapered rear end
bulging in her blue denim overalls, backing out of the car with a
scrap of green blanket clutched in her hand. He yips with relief.
The blanket isn’t big or heavy enough to keep her warm, but she
isn’t looking for warmth. She is looking for comfort. She rubs the
baby blanket against her cheek.

“
Bankie,” she says before
she runs to him and buries her face in his ruff. “Mama seepin’. You
take care me. Bankie.” She rubs the green cloth against his muzzle
as if it will comfort him, too.

Billy’s heart melts just enough to make room
for a little dark haired girl with big brown eyes. His wolf
sighs.

He finds her tiny jacket in the car, but
there is nothing else to keep her warm. She struggles into the
jacket and stamps her foot in frustration when her little fingers
can’t work the zipper. In spite of their circumstances, Billy
chuffs a laugh when she slaps the zipper pull and mutters something
that sounds like “Shit”. His nose is the next thing she slaps.

“
No,” she says, indignant
that he laughed at her failed efforts. He chuffs again and shakes
his head.

They spend the night and some of the next
day in the shallow grave, his body curled around hers. She sleeps
and chatters, sleeps and chatters until he hears a car stop on the
highway above and hears the voices of men.

He has to use force to pull away from the
tiny arms around his neck. As he slinks away to disappear into the
forest that is his home, he hears her cry.

“
My woof. My woof. Come
back.”

Bull shook off the memory and looked down at
the little wolver beside him. He gave her shoulder an affectionate
squeeze and kissed her on the nose. “A car wreck. It happened a
long time ago. A man and a woman died, but the little girl
survived.”

And so had he. For the next twelve moons, he
worked to find a way to shift his body back to human. His wolf
fought him every step of the way, but the human Billy won the
battle. Billy became Bill and Bill became Bull, who went on to
rescue a wolver named Tommie, who rescued him in return.

He’d checked on the car frequently over the
years and after all this time, still wondered at how one family’s
tragedy had become his salvation. The memory of that night and its
aftermath was always with him.