PART III

In all of us is the hidden soul of a wild animal.  It is part of a collected memory from before we stopped being covered in fur and learned we could survive on fruits and vegetables as well as the flesh of other animals.  Murderer or priest, it lingers in the back of our minds, always seeking a crack in the wall of civilization to slither through and wreak unparalleled havoc.  These are the “dogs of war” Shakespeare would have Caesar unleash.  In our own age, we saw Nazi Germany practice genocide and murder millions upon millions of innocents… and in response, Allied forces murdered millions more as they sought to destroy Germany.  In truth, their inner werewolves took control and poured out into the world as both sides boasted of their prowess as hunters and killers.  Korea, China, South America, the Middle East…all drunk on the blood that their inner wolves grew more powerful on.  And so in everyday life the actual werewolf, for the first time in nearly three hundred years, was feeling quite at home in the modern world, Mohawks not withstanding.

I stared at the knife Wolf held out to me.  I could not visualize having the courage I’d seen displayed in Central Park.  Could I sever my own head?  I knew if I had been infected, there would be no other end—and if I couldn’t do it, there was a Mohawk that could.  As my final conclusion was conceded I slowly moved my hand towards the knife Wolf offered.

And I would have done it, too (or at least tried) had not Billy Big Feet, finally showing up after the excitement was all over, grabbed my wrist.  “Are you in a hurry to die, Paleface?  And you, Wolf!  Does a Mohawk council condemn a man with no evidence?”

Wolf looked surprised.  “Billy!  He’s covered in blood!  Now that the werewolf is dead…”

But the Apache detective shook his head.  “Is it dead?  I saw it hit the ground and drag itself away.  Even with two broken legs, it was remarkably fast—and it was heading north.”  The eyes of the hunters grew wide.  “I see blood on the boy, but no teeth marks.  Let’s be sure.  We need a big weapon if we’re gonna stop this thing.  Like it or not, the Paleface is it!”

The cop grabbed me by my collar and started dragging me back into the dorm.  Down the dark stairwell we went, with the tribe on my heels.  By the empty shower he pinned me against a wall and roughly removed… actually, it was more like tore off my clothes.  Naked, he threw me into the hot shower to melt all the drying blood off me.  I groaned as the water hit the open wounds.

“Eh, he could use a stitch or two, but no bite marks.”  All the red men examined me.  Satisfied I wasn’t going to sprout fangs and a tail, Wolf put the knife away.  They all escorted me back to my room (I never learned how they knew which room was mine).  I crawled into clean underwear and pants.  It was then I realized that my arms and chest were torn to shreds.  But I was still alive—and more importantly, still fully human.

My formal education was ended.  No resignation, no explanation to the registrar; just a note to Doctor Boreese that I was going “native” for the betterment of the human race.  I say going native not as a figure of speech or in a joking manner—I literally became a 14^th century Mohawk warrior.  In the world I now lived in, it was no longer 1962.  My head was shaved except for a strip down the middle of my head.  I lived in a lean-to-like headquarters that was easy to abandon or relocate; mainly it was somewhere southeast of Lake Ontario, but we roamed into central New York and back up and, if our bloody trail took us that way, halfway up into central Canada.  I was surprised that we did not enter many cities, but went deeper and deeper into remote areas.

The beast seemed to stay clear of the cities and, over the next four years, it picked us off one by one trying, I was to learn, to get at me.  I was to see the clan of the ghost wolf slowly killed off by the very prey we sought to kill.  When we were well into Canada, Rowtag was taken in the light of high noon as he was cleaning a large rabbit for the spit.  The werewolf came up behind him and, before we even saw it in the camp, Rowtag’s head rolled into the fire.

Red 5—Bear—went out whooping and hollering like a wild Indian (no pun intended).  The rest of us were hunting for tracks over a stone outcropping, but intuition had Bear looking out and staying behind us.  The wolf knew it had a fight on its paws.  Bear did as much damage as a human could do to it, hacking, slashing, and wrestling with the beast.  Despite that, before we could reach it, it had ripped out Bear’s innards and dragged itself back into the bush at a fantastic rate.

I looked at Wolf.  “But its high noon!” I mumbled.

Wolf let his jaw go lax.  My friend looked old and tired to me.  His time on the path, being away so long from his kin, and seeing his friends killed off one by one had taken its toll on him.  “It means your wolf has made a decision,” he replied.  “It has taken its wolf body forever.  It can never return to human form.”

“Our wolf can do that?”

Red 3 ran his fingers over the strip of hair that remained on his shaved head.  “It has more power this way.  I suspected it might do this.  I knew there must be a reason it was staying away from the cities.”

Notice I had said “our wolf.”  My tale is essentially about one Grand Wolf Master that was tied to me, but we encountered many such lesser creatures.  I learned quickly that Hollywood had really, really gotten it wrong.  The weir animal has been with us since the very dawn of humanity—Doctor Boreese had been right.  There were paintings thousands of years old in sacred caves known only to the Ghost Wolf Clan that.  Perhaps these creatures were a mistake, or an experiment by a God unable to admit an error, but they were real, they were here, and nothing like anyone thought.  They’ve never taken the Lon Chaney anthropomorphic shape.  Rather, they assumed the form of an ordinary wolf, but much larger, often two or three times the weight and size of a natural wolf.  They roamed freely with few natural enemies—until man got tired of being fed upon.

They don’t care if you’re not dead when they start eating.  I still have screams ringing in my ears from people—children, mostly—which were past saving.  In the years we chased my beast, we encountered and destroyed a big gray, two northern browns, and one magnificent black.  But no matter what we did, we never seemed to be able to get our prey in front of us.  It seemed to pick both the battlefields and the battles.  And it still hadn’t revealed its relationship to me.  If it had been my friend, relative, or jealous lover, it stayed unknown to me—and remained an unholy terror.

You see, the terror of the wolf-man is not the wolf.  The terror lies in being stalked by an animal with the mind of man, the instincts of a wild beast and the strength of an abnormally big being with burning eyes and teeth so strong, so sharp that a body might be ripped in half. Until you’ve looked into those open jaws you don’t understand what terror is! And you never become immune to the terror.

Night time in the northern forests can be a frightening thing in itself.  Moonlight and starlight gets filtered by the canopy, firelight casts terrifying shadows against stone canyon walls, and every sound—snapping twigs, crunching snow, growls real or imagined—can steal sleep from you.  The sleeplessness compounds until days go by in a twenty-four hour watch cycle.  I was used to functioning in a state of punchiness.  It was just Wolf and I now.

Every spring a Mohawk brave would find us with news of the Wolf Clan.  While the tribe was growing in strength to combat the sudden growth of the wolfman population, the great council had determined this beast was my mission.  No help could be spared or would be offered beyond the guides who had already been given.  So we dragged on, tracking, chasing, and hoping soon our journey would end.

It became my obsession.  I had forgotten my past, no longer considered my future; I had no friends except Wolf.  I was an island surrounded by man-eating sharks covered with fur and howling at the moon.  I had become a Mohawk warrior, and by necessity had learned to hunt, track, fish—survive—as wild as any Mohawk of the 14^th century.  I was one step above awild beast myself, a hunter with no tribe.  When needs arose, I could fashion clothes from hides, start fires when the world was wet from rain or snow, cook the food I had hunted or trapped myself, and sleep on the ground with snow or rain if needed.  I no longer needed civilization; it was as much in the way to me as it was to the werewolf I hunted.  The infinite stage was set.

It was winter, 1966.  Our prey had turned west along the US/Canadian border, and we had followed it past the Great Lakes into Canada.  Past the city of Winnipeg it had turned north again.  We worked our way along the trail of enormous wolf tracks we knew to be our quarry.  I had long since gotten used to the cold of Canada… but this winter was different.  The whole of the Winnipeg region was caught in the worst snowstorm Wolf or I had ever seen.  On a cold winter’s evening, another worst either of us could remember, we dug a shelter hole in the snow that was backed by three tall trees sitting side by side.  They offered us a roof of sorts.  We were sheltered from the snow and most of the wind, but it was only with greatest difficulty that Wolf was able to build a pathetic excuse for a fire as the temperature dropped so fast a man could feel it through his coat.  He’d ripped low hanging branches off and, with his great knife, peeled the bark as a housewife would peel a carrot.  To the peelings he placed a piece of rag smeared with moose grease.  He ignited it with his Ronson lighter, and it caught the pile of branches that rested above it.  It wasn’t much of a fire, but it was enough to keep us alive.

It was a hard night, full of no sleep and a growing apprehension of death, an unusual thing for either of us in those days.  The howling began around 10:00 PM by the clock.  It was psychological warfare by an inhuman creature with a human mind.  It seemed to surround.  It came from the south, then east, then north, as if there were many wolves encircling us.  It was a long whining howl which sounded more of loneliness than anger.  It made the hair on the back of our necks stand up and a chill run down our backs.  The message it was sending was clear: It had grown tired of the chase, of being interfered with, of missing its target.  As the night wore on and the loneliness seemed to turn to anger, both Wolf and I sensed all accounts would be settled soon.  By 3:00 AM, my world had changed forever, and I at last learned what my connection to the beast was.

Our pathetic little fire had burned down to a glow which was ready to fade into history.  There was a stack of wood not five feet away from our shelter, but neither Wolf nor I were willing to cross the darkness for fear off being mauled.  We had seen many maulings over the years—faces ripped off while the victim screamed, the gnashing teeth moving down across the neck until the jugular was torn and red covered all, and still the victim screamed.  The final gasps of pain came with the tearing open of the torso, spilling the entrails out.  If the she-wolf had cubs, they would consume this softer tissue. It was a sight I took to bed with me many nights.

With the last flicker of flame from our fire—I would guess about 1:00 AM by the clock—the roof nature had provided for our shelter suddenly seem to fall in on us.  From the darker shadows above, a shadow dropped upon us in a tangle of flesh and fur.  The Mohawk brave and I both slashed wildly with ancient stone knives, and there is no doubt in my mind that my friend Wolf, in the darkness, fear, and confusion, had stabbed me more than once as we fought for our lives.  I found myself suddenly covered in human entrails.  My friend, while in death’s grip, had put this extraordinary wolf in a head lock.

As life and death swirled about us with snapping jaws and tearing claws, I finally learned my connection to the creature.  I found myself looking into the eyes of my old flame, my lost friend… Stacey.  The world seemed to freeze into a motionless collage of myth, legend, and reality.  In my mind, all the pieces began to fall together.  With all my might I planted my stone knife right between her eyes and the crest of her eye ridges, with so much anger and fierceness the blade stabbed through her skull and deep into the creature’s brain.

I have never seen such spasming.  The she-wolf reared and the fur on her back rose straight up.  My guide, mentor, and friend was dashed against a tree with such force I was certain his body would shatter like a bottle against a new ship.  He lay there against the tree, spine shattered, moaning and bleeding.  The creature was dead, but jangling nerves kept it moving.  It took a strange hop and fell forward on top of me, jaws still snapping, claws driving right through my heavy winter clothes and into my flesh as though I was naked.  My face was buried into the monster’s underbelly, but I could feel it breathe its last.  It went motionless atop me.

In the windblown snow, exhausted, I laid there for a long time.  With all the excitement, all the adrenaline surging through my body, and now all the energy expelled, the cold of the Canadian blizzard seemed to lessen, or at least it bothered me less.  The weather broke and the clouds parted revealing a bright, silvery moon overhead.  Winter moons always seemed brighter to me, but this moon seemed weirdly brighter than ever I could ever recall.  Lying in snow turned red by the blood of my dying friend and the slain wolf, that moon fascinated me more than ever.  I could see it over the treetops and measured its motion.  It moved imperceptibly slowly, but I was certain I could see it move.  The smell of the blood surrounding me was filling my nostrils and there was a hunger gnawing at my insides, growing deeper and deeper until at last I pushed the wolf’s corpse off of me.  I tried to push myself up on my elbows to stand, but couldn’t.  I rolled over and could feel myself moving on all fours.  What happened next I find humorous now, but back then, it was quite horrifying.

I tried to move to my friend, who was holding onto life by the most meager thread, to offer aide.  I found myself instead becoming almost sexually excited by the smell of his blood.  It was intoxicating to me.  Wolf was still alive enough to keep his blood warm and he moaned loudly—a last gasp, I suppose—as I tore his clothing and began to devour his entrails.

I had never known the sweetness of human flesh, and I devoured with a great relish, consuming all the soft tissues first, then the muscles right to the bone.  When I was done, I howled at the silvery moon overhead, howling for my victory over death.  It was the first of many such celebrations.  When I had eaten my fill, I ran… and ran and ran.  Where was not important, I just ran.  In the darkness of a failing night, I scented and stalked a small herd of deer.  I watched them, seeing quite well with my new eyes in the blackness and swirling snow.  At last, when I had grown bored with watching, I killed the buck with one swing of my paw, taking out its throat and snapping its neck.  As the does scattered into the woods I stood, front paws on the buck’s dead body.  I had killed it not to eat, nor in defense, but killed it for the pure joy of killing!  I howled at Luna with a joy, a satisfaction I had never known.

With the waning of the moon, I made my way back to what was left of our camp and, by the dying camp fire and on the warm ground, fell into the deepest, most satisfying sleep of my life.  Now you would think that upon awaking and looking around me, I would be disgusted or fearful or confused by my nocturnal actions and pursuits.  But my human form felt rested and content.  Between Wolf’s possessions and my own, I wrapped my naked body as men do, and began my march back to the world of men, taking great pains in the future to greet the rising of the moon with a naked body so as not to destroy the garments as my form contorted.

I moved back into my parents’ home, living off the insurance money their deaths had left me, and by the light of the silvery moon I give thanks to the spirit of Stacey who gave me this great gift without me even seeing the bite.  I roam the great woods now for miles.  Friends and neighbors believe I left college in grief after the disappearance of my two friends… and I let them think that.  When the need in me grows too great to control, I make pilgrimage to New York City or Philadelphia or the like.  I let the Mohawks chase me and, when it grows boring, I harvest a wino or an addict to quell the needs that grows inside me, and I am content.

Such now is my life by the light of the silvery moon.

THE END

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