The Wild (22 page)

Until now Bob had not understood quite what it was that distanced him, from the church. A few days in the bright shock of a new form had made it all clear, though: on a planet that so obviously needed the love and protection of its most clever species, a heaven-directed church seemed anachronistic, its indifference to the welfare of the earth fundamentally invalidating.

When the Indian began shaking a carved stick over a fire, a fine pin of unease entered Bob's mind. Religion may or may not be invalid, but rituals aren't hollow. In the hands of the believer, the ritual is a powerful force indeed.

On its deepest level Bob's change had been a matter of the wall against this kind of belief breaking down in him. His first transformation, in the hotel in Atlanta, may indeed have been imaginary. Because it was so realistic, though, he had believed in it. After that, everything else had become inevitable.

He stared transfixed at the Indian's preparations. Western culture had destroyed the Indians because it had destroyed their ability to believe in their own magic.

All the Indian had to do was to transform Bob back into a man and all of his magic would work for him again, because his success would strengthen his belief. The tribes, broken in spirit, would spring back to life.

At the end of the stick that danced in the Indian's hand was a tiny dancing man. He stared at the naked thing. Was it wax or real? It had no face, or perhaps the face was simply too small for wolf eyes to see.

He thought of the ritual deaths of kings. To give the Indian back his birthright, the wolf would have to die. The man at the end of the stick danced, a slow and regular dance, as graceful as the drifting of a finger in the sea. He was a weed of a little man, down at the murky bottom.

His arms rose and fell, his legs flashed in the spreading light. Kevin cried aloud, clutching down into the folds of his mother. A crow landed nearby. Bob smelled rabbits on the wind, and wondered how far away they might be.

He didn't wonder long though. The Indian kept chanting, shaking his stick, and Bob knew that there was another smell in the air, a human smell, small and intense. There was a suffering, real man at the end of the stick. He wept as he danced, the same awful, universal mourning that made Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle such a figure of childhood dread. The weeping without reason and therefore without consolation, reflected in the tears of the Indian.

Bob felt the movement within and knew that the man was striving to escape as the wolf had escaped. He sensed the crow alight from its food gathering, sensed the rabbits across the mountain grow still, sensed the failure of the wind and the stopping of the leaves. He had known a body that saw by eyes and one that saw by nose. It was difficult to imagine how the planet saw and felt and knew: the whole of life was its mind, its nerves, its vision. The earth was a great cyclopean eye rolling through space, looking out into the void. What awful consciousness had urged the spawning of man, or more, had ordered him to become what he had become?

He felt anger rushing through the stillness. No wonder the tiny man cried, no wonder the Indian cried, no wonder his son hid in his mother and the crow became silent. Within him the man rose and clambered, stuffed himself into the shape of the wolf, and he felt his muscles longing to stretch, his skin longing to shed its stuffy fur and spread to the caressing air. His stomach did a grotesque turn. Green-flecked vomit burst out of his mouth and he stood tottering, a tall, naked man who could not help but dance to the command of an Indian with a stick.

The Indian threw the stick down and screamed. Cindy cried out, Kevin shrieked, and Bob saw a chance of madness in the poor child's eyes.

His scream, his father's anguish, spread through the silence as quickly as an atomic expansion. Then, as quickly as a trap taking a rat, the wolf snapped back around Bob and he fell down, his jaw working, growls scumbling in the thick mucus that was the waste matter of these furious changes.

"Bob, Bob!" Letting her boy fall aside, Cindy rose up. Her face was distorted to a Hydra grimace, her hands were working in his fur like snakes, her body bursting with thick panicky stench.

"Bob, please come back to us." Her voice was not steady. She was thinking fast. "I never expected you wouldn't want to. You don't though, you
don't!
Oh, Bob, you got a rejection from the
Poetry Review,
but it was a personal letter. Bob, they asked if you were aware of the Imagists. I sent a reply, I said yes, but you didn't care for Amy Clampitt. Was I right, Bob? Oh, come back to your life. Come back to us." Then her voice broke and she sank down, miserable on the stones.

The world seemed not to have noticed. The falls still spattered, the crow still worried a berry bush. But Bob knew the lie in that, he had sensed the tension in its watching.

"Dad—"

It was agony to hear their pleading. Even to glance into his son's eyes was torment.

"Dad, please. Please. I need you, Dad, I miss you. I can't even read anymore, not without you at home. I can't draw. All I draw is black."

The Indian was lying on his back, staring at the sky. His breathing was so even, Bob thought he might be in a coma.

He must not prolong this torment. With a bitter heart, hating himself for what he did, he turned away from them. There was no sound behind him. Over his shoulder he saw Cindy slumped on the ground. Kevin was watching him with a sorrow in his face that no child should know. Bob could not say why, but his deepest instincts, wolf and human, were all telling him to do this, to leave them, to run into the wild.

He did run, farther and farther, until the last edge of their scent was gone.

All day he ran, stopping only to steal a chicken from a yard in High Falls, New York. Toward afternoon it began to snow. He ran as much toward the wilderness as away from his family and his former life. Somewhere in him a brute voice shouted that it was free, shouted down the driving snow.

He heard the flakes hiss on the hemlock boughs, felt them snap cold on his nose. As he ran the world changed from the last of autumn to the first of winter, and all memories, all desires, were covered with a kindness of snow.

Chapter Nineteen

D
AYS STRETCHED ON DAYS AS
B
OB MOVED STEADILY
north. He became a cunning hunter, quick and mean, and clever at avoiding men. Winter came, wet at first and then rich with snow. Sometimes he heard Cindy's name in the wind, or saw the sorrow in Kevin's eye, but he ran on, obedient to the wolf that he was, and the wild.

He was in the deep north now, and the snow hissed in the hemlocks and pines, it roared past the naked limbs of oak and maple, it swirled in the glades and blew hard against his flanks.

His coat had grown thick and full. Only his nose was cold, and it was tormented. When he could bear the twirling knife of the wind no longer, he would curl up with his back to the blizzard and bury his muzzle in his paws. He could remain like that for hours, until he was entirely covered by a blue, icy translucence. Then it was quiet, and he experienced a deep feeling of safety.

Every morning, when thin light would penetrate the sky, the urge to move would possess him once more. He would break out of the snow and shake himself, feeling the cold air penetrate all the way to his skin. Thus refreshed, he would sniff the air, seeking the musk of an opossum or the rabbit odor.

The colder it got, the less often he smelled anything beyond the smooth aroma of the snow.

There was something in his soul that was urging him north. He did not know what it was, but it drew him, dragged him, forced him when he was tired. His nose ceaselessly tested the air for something he could not name. Cindy and Kevin had become glowing statues in his memory. The brutal labor of his journey, the snow, the clarity of his struggle had sliced away all sentiment. His blood was no longer attached to his family; it belonged to whatever goal lay at the end of this journey.

But then he would hear the wind, and her name. . . .

He loved something out here, something he could not name. Maybe it was the wild itself, the whole complex, restless personality of life, or maybe it was his new wolf nature—so urgent, so fundamentally decent—or maybe it was wolves in general, even the beautiful act of hunting.

Finding and killing game was the highest experience he had ever known, higher even than riding Cindy in the soft summer nights. There was something at once so terrible and so beautiful about biting the life out of a little creature that he quaked inside just to think of it. In his life before he had never seen sorrow like the sorrow that entered the eyes of an animal he was killing, nor had he ever felt the fire that eating a kill gave him.

It is the life of the killed thing that is eaten, as much as the blood and meat and bone.

By the time he reached the high Adirondacks the weather was so cold that the fur framing his face froze at its tips. The pads of his paws had fissures in them that revealed deep red wounds, and he left pink flecks of blood in his tracks. Game was scarce indeed, and he was becoming famished.

Despite his doubts and the conditions, his progress had taken on a kind of hypnotic quality. From the gray hours before dawn to the gray hours after sunset he would lope steadily along, stopping to hunt when he scented the opportunity. He would eat anything—rat, opossum, rabbit, raccoon. He avoided skunks and porcupines. Deer were too fast for him, and the idea of trying to attack something with sharp little hooves was unsettling.

In the past few weeks he reckoned that he had come at least five hundred miles. As he moved along he altered his course to the northwest. Sooner or later he knew that he must cross the St. Lawrence Seaway. He would not attempt to swim. He was hoping that he would reach it after the seasonal ice had closed it. If not, then he would have to wait on the American side until it did.

He had been without food for six days when he detected a powerful, greasy odor coming out of a tumble of rocks. He'd never smelled anything like it before. Strong smells delighted him, and this one was so strong that it made him shudder all over. His impulse was to rub himself with it, to wear it like a sort of talisman. It was extremely rich with meat and blood.

He looked toward the rocks. How odd that the odor came from there. Such a powerful smell, rolling over him in waves, had to emanate from a large animal. But what could it be? He would see a deer or a moose. Stiff-legged, he stole closer. Still there was nothing, and yet the odor was literally pouring out of the rocks. It was strange enough to be frightening. Had he not been so hungry, Bob would have left this place.

The rocks were contorted razors. They cut painfully into Bob's paws, and he slipped on the ice, skinning his spindly lower legs. But that scent: he visualized a whole mass of animals, rich game, incredibly rich. His drool froze on his chin.

It was not long before he located a den in the roots of an enormous hickory. The den opening was large enough for him to walk through.

A large black bear came swarming out at him, its eyes beads of fury and hate, its voice booming against the snow-muffled land. There was no warning, no waiting. Before Bob could do more than utter a bark of surprise, the bear had taken a hissing swipe with the claws of his right paw. Bob narrowly escaped the speeding, black nails. He skittered back, fell, tumbled backward. The bear literally leaped through the air in its mad urgency to attack. For a moment the whole huge beast hung above him, its front paws spread wide, its lips revealing yellow, vicious teeth.

The smell that cascaded down from the bear was lovely, an art of meat and wonderful, rich grease and blood. As Bob tried to tumble away the bear landed on him with a thunderous crash. Now Bob was under the creature, his breath knocked out, half-stunned by the power of the blow, feeling his bones bending to break beneath the horrendous weight of the animal.

Beneath his compressed body he could feel a tangle of frozen brush. It was a crack in the rocks. As the bear struggled to get its huge forelegs around him, he tried to dig down, grappling at the twigs with clumsy paws. Frantically, he scrambled out from under the bear. A swipe of one of its paws connected with his injured thigh, reopening the wound with a flash of pain so great that he almost lost consciousness. He spun round and round, tumbling down the rocks, stopping only when he landed upside down against a spindly rowan. The bear stood in front of him, swaying from

side to side. He could hear its claws clicking, and the moaning of the wind across the top of the ridge behind it. Looking into the bear's blank, glittering eyes, he felt very alone and very lost. In all the wild he was, after all, the only truly aberrant creature. This bear was savage, its eyes said. And its eyes also said that it had no mind. If he died here, it was going to be a lonely, hard death. But were not all deaths in the forest such? And he would die having had one of the highest of experiences: to be a raw animal, in the body of the animal, with all his human consciousness intact.

Cindy ... the wind said. He shook his head and snorted. At a moment like this, the human world must not be allowed to intrude. If he was to survive, he had to fight as a wolf.

The bear sucked him up in its deadly hug, and began dancing ponderously through the snow-choked clearing that bordered the stony hill. He smelled its breath and heard the dark thudding of its feet in the soft snow. Then sun came out, and shone golden on its coat. In the rich new light Bob struggled and snapped, trying to connect with some vital part of the monster, while it crushed out his life.

His chest was closed off and his nose began to pulse with trapped blood. He could no longer breathe, and it felt as if his head was going to explode. A torment of air hunger made him writhe. He felt his bowels give way.

His teeth kept meeting air, but the bear's claws did not meet air. Instead they twisted and dug under the skin of his shoulder, piercing toward essential gristle. In great agony, he screamed. The bear replied with a mournful, inexpressibly savage moan. It tightened his grip on him, and he saw Cindy coming up the clearing with a gun in her hand.

His heart battered against the walls of his chest, he felt his legs scrabbling through the bear's fur. Cindy raised her rifle—and then disappeared into the crystal air. At that moment he came close to complete despair. The bear was killing him, and she had been a death dream, nothing more. Had he been able to shout, he would have called her name, but in the event, all that escaped from him were high, sucking cries.

His body turned and his legs kicked frantically. The bear danced round and round, moaning as it brought its muzzle closer to his neck. He could feel its bear breath on his face, could smell an intimacy of berries and old fish. His body was -wiped in the animal's grease. The odor of bear that had drawn this ignorant wolf too close now became a loathsome smell.

He probed dismally into the wall of coarse fur, snapped with half his strength. To his surprise the bear tossed its head back, then bit at him angrily. For a moment the two of them were cheek to cheek. He could see his own reflection in the bear's savage eye.

Twisting his head, he drove a canine deep into that eye. There was a loose pop as of a finger jabbing through many layers of tight, wet paper and this time the bear screamed horribly, throwing its head back, the remains of its eye dangling along its cheek. A claw drew across Bob's back, the nails going deep. It would have been less painful to have his skin trenched by hot irons.

The pain was so great that he forgot himself. His head shook from side to side, his jaws snapped and snapped. All control was gone.

Then he was lying on the ground and the bear was glaring down at him, shrieking and gasping. Half of its face was torn away. Bob could see teeth and muscles, and the tongue working in the mouth. In his own mouth he tasted filthy hair and rich, rich meat.

Almost without being aware of it he leaped right at the creature, driving his furious muzzle deep into the flesh of the belly, into reefs of sticky fat, then deeper into the wall of tight muscle beneath it and the steaming organs at the final depth. With a roar the bear grabbed him in both paws and heaved him away. Bob slammed against a boulder, was covered in a cascade of snow, and came forth wild with a fury he could neither control nor understand.

Shaking, his ears back, the skin of his neck stiff and full of shivers, his tail close down, he ran at the tottering bear and grabbed a purple loop of intestine protruding from the hole in its belly. The gasping creature savaged him again, kicking him away. This time, though, he drew the bear's vitals with him, his jaws clamped hard around them.

By pushing him away, the animal had gutted itself. It stood to its full four feet of height and waved its forelegs in the air, looking very much like a man wearing a bearskin. Then it began to claw at its own belly. A torrent of dark blood poured out of its mouth. Surprised, it snapped its jaws shut. Its eyes were sad now. Slowly, it sat on its haunches, swaying from side to side, staring at the wolf that had killed it.

With a final moan of rage, it threw itself toward him. By the time its great, bloody body had covered him, it was dead. Bob lay beneath it, in the heat of its blood and offal. He struggled a time to free himself, but a tiredness so profound that it seemed itself a kind of death overcame him and he closed his eyes.

He dreamed of the kindness of a balmy goddess, who touched him mercifully where he hurt. She touched him with long, golden fingers, probing so gently into his wounds that he felt naught, filling them with the sparkling medicine of heaven.

When he awoke, it was from coldness bothering his nose. It was snowing again, and the bear was no longer covering his body.

He opened his eyes to piercing gray light. The blizzard had blown itself out, leaving a residue of flurries drifting down from high clouds. When Bob raised his head, he was astonished to see the remains of the bear scattered all around him. He snorted, stood up.

At once he yelped; every part of him ached, especially his chest and back. His old thigh wound was better, perhaps because the bear's clawing had lanced it and drained away some of the infection.

He took personal inventory: he had at least two cracked ribs, possibly a broken one. His shoulder was hard with swelling and scab. When he shuddered his skin, his back felt as solid as a board. Looking as far as he could over his shoulder, he saw a mass of scab there. He was literally encased in dried blood.

The bear was in pieces around him. The huge creature had been pulled apart by experts, and eaten. The organs were all gone, most of the meat and fat had been consumed, even the bones of the legs had been cracked and the marrow eaten.

Bob saw in the snow tracks very much like his own, dozens of them. His heart started racing: wolves! Then he smelled the finest, the sweetest, the most exciting odor he had ever known. He barked five or six times, he did a crutchy dance of excitement. Wolves, he was in wolf country! Sheer happiness burst up in his heart, making his injuries seem light, his trouble seem small. Wolves, you could feel them, all around. His heart was weighted with love and longing.

This was the nameless thing that had come to dominate his life, had separated him from his family and drawn him all of these brutal miles. They smelled wonderful. It was much more than an odor or a perfume, it was a scent connected directly to his soul. There was no way to describe it, except to say that it was to normal odor as the sight of heaven must be to hell-weary eyes. Again and again he inhaled. Wonderful. Love. His heart burst with joy.

Then he found himself throwing back his head and howling. The sound that came out was not restricted as it had been before, controlled by the uneasy human consciousness that was so quickly becoming a supercargo. Now the sound rose fine and tight as a needle piercing the sky. It shaped itself to a long sonic spire, then spread out like a flower in the light air, flowing softly across the frozen land.

It evaporated into silence. Bob was disappointed. Where were the wolves? Why wouldn't they answer?

Then they did.

Echoing across the far hills, sweeping past the naked limbs of the trees, as cool, as sharp, as delicate . . . the answer came, and his tail twirled wildly.