The Wolf Gift (21 page)

Down the slope he bounded, covering the yards and yards between him and his victims, leaping from one tree after another, passing one small sleeping hillside house after another, until he landed in the clearing just as the young men were entering the house.

The place glowed like a wedding cake beyond them against the night.

A roar came out of Reuben before he willed it, ripping from his chest and his throat. That anything but a beast could roar like that was impossible.

All three of the young men turned in the vestibule of the house, and saw him plainly rush towards them. They were nineteen, maybe twenty years old. Their screams were lost in the sounds of his own growls. One man fell down but the other two—the crafty ones, the exultant ones—turned to run.

He caught the first man easily and ripped his neck open, watching the blood spurt. With all his soul, he wanted to devour the man, to close his jaws on his flesh, but there was no time. He lifted the broken body, squeezing it greedily in his paws, and then relinquished it, heaving it far away from him, out towards the distant road.

Oh, too little, too quick!

With a flying leap, he caught the other two struggling to get out of the back door which was apparently locked. One of them was clawing hysterically at the glass.

The other had a gun. Reuben caught it, clearly breaking the man’s wrist as he wrenched it from the man and cast it aside.

He was going to close his jaws on this one; he couldn’t stop himself, he had to do it. He was so hungry for it! And why not, because he would never never allow this man to live.

He couldn’t stop his ravening growls as his teeth sank into the man’s skull and throat. He clamped down as hard as he could, and felt the bones crack. He heard them crack. A whine came out of the dying man.

It thrilled Reuben to run his tongue over the blood pouring down the man’s face.
Killer, filthy killer
.

He bit deep into the man’s shoulder, and tore loose both cloth and flesh. The taste of the flesh was rich and overpowering, mixed with the stench of evil, the stench of viciousness, the stench of utter corruption. He wanted to unwrap the man and gorge himself on his naked flesh. This was always what he’d wanted to do; and why didn’t he give in to it?

But where was the other culprit? He could not let that last of the trio escape.

No chance of that. The third man was helpless. He had slipped down into the corner and was shaking violently. He held out his two hands. Water was gushing out of his mouth or was it vomit? He had urinated on himself, and the urine was puddling around him on the tiled floor.

The hideous spectacle of him maddened Reuben.
Murdered the children, murdered them. The room is rank with the stench of it. And rank with the stench of cowardice too
. He lunged for the man and caught his chest in both paws, crushing it, hearing the bones snap, and staring at the man’s white and shuttering face until the eyes went dim.
Oh, you died too soon, you craven animal
.

He slammed the jangled body against the floor. Still unsatisfied, his growls as loud as before, he picked up the corpse and threw it against the side window of the room and the glass shattered as the body vanished in the falling rain.

A sudden terrible disappointment gripped him. They were all dead. He moaned aloud. A rough sob came out of his chest. It had been way too fast, and he threw back his head and roared again as he had before.
His jaws ached. He clenched and opened and roared again. It was the worst craving he’d ever felt. He could have torn at the frames of the doors with his teeth; he wanted to lock his teeth again on anything that he could find.

The saliva was dripping from his mouth. He wiped at it angrily. His paws were streaked with gouts of blood.
But the children, have you forgotten the children? Have you forgotten why you are here?

He staggered through the house back towards the front door. He slammed at the mirrors and the framed pictures that covered the walls. He wanted to smash the furniture. But he had to get to the children.

An alarm keypad caught his eye, like the one in Mendocino. He hit the blue medical alert button and the red button for fire.

At once a whooping shrieking wail erupted in the stillness.

He covered his ears as he cried out. The pain was unbearable; his head throbbed. There was no time to find the source of this deafening sound and stop it.

He had to hurry. The sound was driving him mad.

He reached the doors of the barn in a split second, and ripped off the locks, fracturing and splintering the doors as they fell in.

There in the bright light from the house, he saw the bus, draped in chains and tied around and around with duct tape—a torture chamber.

The children were squealing in a frenzy, their cries thin, and shrill, the whooping clarion of the alarm almost swallowing the sound. He could smell their terror, their desperate excitement. They thought they were about to die. In a matter of seconds they would know they had been saved. They would know that they were free.

His claws tore the tape as if it were tissue paper. With one paw he smashed the glass of the door and then ripped the door off the bus.

A revolting smell assailed his nostrils—feces, vomit, urine, sweat. Oh, the cruelty of it. He wanted to howl.

He backed up. The blaring alarm was disorienting him, crippling him. But the job was nearly done.

He made his way out of the barn, back into the rain, the ground mushy beneath his feet, wanting desperately to recover the dead child from the Land Rover, and put its body where it would surely be found, but he could not endure the noise anymore. They would have to find it, and surely they would. Yet it felt wrong to leave it. Wrong, not to somehow prepare for them the entire scene.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the figures, large and small, scrambling from the bus.

They were moving towards him. And surely they saw him, saw what he was, saw in the lights from the windows behind him the blood drenching his paws, his fur.

They were going to be more afraid! He had to get away.

He made for the wet shining trees at the back of the property, and headed for the great silent forest that lay directly west—Muir Woods.

M
UIR
W
OODS STRETCHED
for some five hundred and fifty acres, including some of the oldest redwoods yet standing in California, trees that soared over two hundred feet, and had been alive for over a thousand years. At least two creeks ran through the deep canyon of the park. And Reuben had traveled its hiking trails many a time.

He plunged into the enveloping stillness now, hungry for the solitude that had driven him to Mendocino, and glorying in his strength as he climbed the immense trees, leaping from the branches of one to another as if he had wings. Everywhere the scent of other animals tantalized him.

Deeper into the park he went, only dropping down to the soft leafy floor when all the human voices of the night had died, and only the rain sang to him, and the muted sounds of a thousand little creatures, nestled in the ferns and the leaves, whose names he couldn’t know. Above, the birds rustled in the branches.

He was laughing out loud, singing nonsense syllables, roaming, staggering, and then scaling a tree again, as high as he could go, the rain falling like needles on his eyes, until the trunk was too thin for his weight and he had to seek another perch and then another and descend once more to dance in circles with his arms out.

He threw back his head and roared again, and then let the roar round itself into a deep howl. Nothing answered him in the night except the crackling flight of other living things, living things that fled from him.

Suddenly descending to all fours he ran as a wolf would run, swiftly through the dense foliage. He caught the scent of an animal—
bobcat
—fleeing before him, flushed from its lair, and after that scent he went with unstoppable hunger until he reached out, and caught the furry snarling creature in his claws, and drove his fangs into its throat.

This time nothing held him back from the feast.

He stripped succulent muscle from bone, and crunched both in his jaws as he devoured the beast with its brittle yellowish fur, slurping up its blood, its soft innards, the rich sack of its belly, all in all some forty pounds of it, leaving only its paws and its head, with yellow eyes staring at him bitterly.

He lay down on a bed of leaves panting and crying softly, licking at his teeth for a last taste of the warm flesh and blood. Bobcat. Scrumptious. And cats never beg for mercy. Cats snarl until the end. Even more succulent.

A great disgust came over him, a horror. He’d run on all fours as an animal runs. He’d feasted like an animal.

He walked after that, dreamily through the dense forest, crossing the broad stream on a thick moss-covered log, his clawed feet easily clinging to it, and he ventured even further into the canyon, beyond the places he’d known, and further up the flank of Mount Tamalpais.

At last he fell down and lay against the bark of a tree, peering through the dark, and seeing for the first time many more creatures than he’d ever dreamed were harbored in the brush. Scent of fox, squirrel, chipmunk—how did he know what each was?

An hour passed; he’d been snuffling, crawling on all fours, wandering.

The hunger was on him again. He knelt beside a creek, his eyes easily tracking the swift progress of the winter salmon, and when his paw came down, he had a large fish, helpless, squirming and flapping, which he tore open at once with his teeth.

He savored the raw flesh, and how distinctly different it was from the meat of the juicy sinewy bobcat.

This wasn’t hunger he was satisfying, was it? This was something else—a great flexing and exercising of what he was.

He climbed again, high, fumbling for birds’ nests in the shivering branches, and devoured the eggs shell and all as the screeching mother bird circled him, pecking at him vainly.

Back down beside the creek, he bathed his face and his paws in the icy water. He walked out in it and bathed all over, splashing the water over his head and shoulders. All the blood must be washed away. The water felt refreshing. He knelt and drank as if he’d never satisfied thirst in his whole life before, lapping, guzzling, gulping the water.

The rain sparkled on the rippling, tossing surface of the stream. And beneath it, the indifferent fish swam speedily past him.

He climbed up again and traveled in the trees, high above the valley floor. Never mind, little birds. I don’t want to torment you.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk
,—indeed.

As had happened before he could see the stars through the thick mist. What a glorious thing it was, the open heavens rising above the thick layer of fog and damp that shrouded this earth. It seemed the tumbling rain carried with it a silvery light in its busy descent. It sparkled and sang on the leaves around him. Then down from the upper branches it became rain again to the lower branches, and from then on down to the world below, rain and rain and rain, until it fell soft on the tiny quaking ferns and on the deep mulch of dead leaf, so rich, so fragrant.

He couldn’t really feel the rain on his body, except for his eyelids. But he could smell it, smell it as it changed with every surface it cleansed and nourished.

Slowly, he dropped down once more and walked, his back very straight, the strong desire to feast having left him, and he felt a wondrous safety in the dark forest, musing with a smile that he had encountered nothing that was not afraid of him.

The annihilation of the three evil men revolted him. He felt lightheaded and liable to weep. Could he weep? Did savage animals actually weep? A low laughter came out of him. It seemed the trees were listening to him, but that was most certainly the most preposterous of illusions that these thousand-year-old guardians knew or cared that anything else whatever was actually alive. How monstrous were the redwoods, how out of scale with all the rest of the natural earth, how divinely primitive and magnificent.

The night had never seemed sweeter to him in all his existence; it was conceivable that he could live this way forever, self-sufficient, strong, monstrous, and utterly unafraid. If that was what the Wolf Gift had in store for him, perhaps he could bear it.

Yet it terrified him that he might surrender his conscious soul to the heart of the beast pumping within. For now, poetry was still with him—and the deepest moral considerations.

A song came to him, an old song. Where he’d heard it he couldn’t recall. He sang it in his head, putting its half-forgotten words in proper order, only humming under his breath.

He came out into a grassy clearing, the light from the low gray heavens
increasing, and after the closeness of the woods, it seemed beautiful to see the shimmering grass in the thin rain.

He began to dance in large slow circles singing the song. His voice sounded deep and clear to him, not the voice of the old Reuben, the poor innocent and fearful Reuben, but the voice of the Reuben he was now.

Again, he sang it, dancing a little faster and in greater circles, his eyes closed. A light shone against his eyelids, a dim, distant light, but he took no note of it. He was dancing and singing—.

He stopped.

He’d caught a strong scent—an unexpected scent. Something sweet and mingled with an artificial perfume.

Someone was very near to him. And as he opened his eyes, he saw the light shining on the grass, and the rain sparkling gold in it.

He caught not the slightest hint of danger. This human scent was clean, innocent—fearless.