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By Noah Copley
This is the loneliest time for me, the winter solstice. The uttering silence
echoes across the bleak, flurried country and twilight bears an unequal
balance against the day's brief grasp. A vague sunrise late in the snow
puffed mornings promises only a brief, friendless embrace and the
tableland's ravenous crust gobbles the weak slices of the afternoon's dim
light all too early. The temperature stiffly drops as the edges of earth and
sky become indistinct and the steady, constant gales push back the lean,
scudding clouds in the oblivion above.
A close, pre-Christmas Eve moon skirts the plateau's crowded forest, its
obtuse face half-hidden beneath the highlands - one world seemingly,
partially conjoined with the other, like lovers. I am also absorbed in my own
form of physical intercourse as both halves of my persona simultaneously
merge and briefly find excruciatingly tormented succor on the same
conscious plane. The ravenous embrace from the caged spirit newly freed
fills me with both longing and dread. I draw in a strangled, steely breath and
fall to my knees. Like a ship dropping its anchor in a reeling storm, I reach
through the pillow of snow and grasp the frozen land - my land, my expansive
prison - as I lose
myself.. .and find myself.
He descends the plateau in a rush. Black recesses of prickled wood rise and
pass between streams of the near moon's glimmer-trail. Shoots of stunted
grass reach through the wildernesses' shallow snow only to be eagerly
trampled with his paws' dense pads in the descending flight toward flatter
land and the promise of abundant game. I am here, but just barely, and I am
not in control of him. My other half sniffs the wind as he runs, but only frigid,
clean air gushes through flared nostrils in his lustful search for prey.
The wildlife that existed on this part of my territory has long since been
decimated by the creature, but that does not dissuade his blood-quest. He
blindly dives over the edge of a rock abutment and freefalls into a massive
gorge, lands lightly, and passes across a slim, ice-covered stream in a
bound, and he suddenly senses that I am there with him. There was a time
when he disregarded me, because I was inconsequential to his grand plan,
but that time is long past. I can feel intelligent and impotent hate emanate
from the beast's contemplations, and although his thoughts are animalistic,
they are still a primordial, dawn of time version of mine.
The werewolf skids to a stop, reflects on the ache developing in his belly and
weighs that against the one pervading his mind - decides - and backtracks to
the stream. His gold rimmed, intent eyes peer raptly into the ice, but the
layers are too thick and no reflection is cast. He raises his elongated right
paw to his tufted ear and slides his curved index nail inside until it reaches
the painful point. He yelps and then tilts his pointed snout upwards and roars
his pent-up fury to the limb-filtered moon. This is not the first time he has
tried to discover me - to wrest me from his thoughts. The panging within my..
.his famished stomach forces him to slip from the stream and scurry forward
again. The wolf picks up his fatiguing pace as we break into the rocky
clearing and the accusatory moon is full and glaring across the desolate
snow-scape lying before us.
We are given this power by the great light from above and you try to stop us
from fulfilling its wishes. Food, the other half silently grunts to me. I am not
surprised because it is not the first time that I have been sent that or a
variation of the same, frighteningly lucid thought.
My body, my decision, trespasser, I respond.
Kill you. I will feed on your hear, he growls with the utmost sincerity.
To kill me would kill you. I reply.
To kill you would free me. And I will be free of you.
I don't reply. I have heard his threats before and arguing doesn't accomplish
anything with him. He has a one-track mind. He thinks of slaughter and
nothing else.
We cross onto the tundra and gallop forward, sure-footed and agile across
the permafrost. The blowing snow from fierce, open land winds does not
impede our progress, but we have traveled hundreds of leagues since my
alter-ego emerged and moonset inevitably arrives. He breathes deeply in
mid-stride and sniffs the altering air.
Life! Close! Too Late! He frantically snorts as he concedes the onset of
morning. You. you. . .it is your fault!
I don't answer. I am the cause of much of the werewolfs angst, yes, but not
all of it. I left the human race and came to this uninhabited territory long ago.
The herds and the carnivores paid the price for my arrival at first, but then
as the years passed something amazing happened: the territorial migration
of the foragers changed with the lunar cycle. With my own eyes from my
distant plateau I watched the caribou pass through my region when the moon
grew three quarters full not to return until the new moon's phase. At first, the
large mammals and the meat eaters did not move far enough from my
perimeter to escape his ferocious appetites. After enough bloodletting, they
did.
Since that time, the beast has taxed his supernatural abilities to reach new
prey. But from my mistakes I learned that even a werewolf has limits and as
the winter solstice's long night wanes and day's balance shifts, my werewolf
has reached his.
Hate, hate you, he wretches from my own curled, morphing lips as the late
dawn is born.
I walk shivering naked and undetected into quasi-civilization. I say quasi
because a village of fifteen sod shacks on stilts and a populace outnumbered
by a pack of mangy half husky, half-wolves does not measure up to the
civilization I remember. The mutts whimper at my nearing presence and skulk
away to safer locations. This village was lucky because I reverted less than a
mile downstream. I am no less fortunate than they. The winter solstice was
nearly long enough for the wolf to reach them. I am disappointed with this
tribe's stunted survival instinct because I have been here before from days
past, and unlike the animals of this region, they have not yet migrated away
from fear of my return. Although they are a nomadic summer people, they
tend to set up familiar stakes during the winter.
They will eventually learn to regret that decision.
I peer from the corner of the southern-most building and wait, my breath
pluming in the day's early chill. Like me, the men-folk of the tribe are
hunter/gatherers and only women and children walk to and fro across the
"town's" tundra. I slip from the comer of one hut to the next, always keeping
my eyes on the people's movement in the grayness of the day's morning. A
woman and her girl-child, loaded down with kindling and firewood, enter a hut
next to my surveillance point and I consider myself fortunate. I hurry through
the entrance undetected behind them and before the rickety door can be
shut. Their deaths are quick and merciful, although not from kindness, but
rather from design. I am a careful killer. I always have been.
My stomach protests and I know that it is the inner wolf who is attempting to
communicate. He is still strong inside although the moon's pull on him has
waned for another month. Days will pass before I stop feeling his
unanswerable questions.
He doesn't, could never understand why I keep him under control, no matter
how I say it. He thinks he is smarter than what he is, but he isn't. I am a
professional murderer who knows how to cover my tracks, he doesn't. Twice
before I came to this part of the world, the wolf side almost got me killed -
once in Massachusetts by a wily Boston detective and again in Canada by a
rag-tag family in a farming community called Francois' Fork on the fringes of
Ottawa. I realized after The Fork Incident that someone - somewhere would
eventually take me down when I was wearing wolfs clothing. The inevitability
of grandma's house going bad and a little old lady taking me down, or the
boy crying wolf and the townsfolk actually listening was only the blunt force
head trauma of a silver cane slap or a mob's torch-lit, pitchfork packing
parade away. And I wanted to continue living.
I collect two sets of the husband's clothes, both to wear and to take. His
inner Arctic fox t-shirt, heavy-hooded caribou coat and leggings are a touch
big, but his seal-skinned boots, lined with caribou hair fit me fine. I gather up
a pair of sun-goggles made from polished bone to complete my ensemble. I
pack a month's worth of bottled cooking walrus oil along with a week's helping
of frozen berries and geese meat in a satchel made from polar bear hide and
tie it with dried walrus skin into a loop around my neck and drop it under my
right armpit. I throw the slight, broken-necked girl across my left shoulder
and slink through the door to pass wraith-like from the edge of the hut to the
corner of the poor excuse for a town and into the blowing snow of the cloud
stacked morning. Within an hour, and long before the warriors return home,
all traces of my presence will vanish.
I don't know why I began to change all those years ago, black haired child,
but I have a theory. I was not bitten or licked by a werewolf, or enchanted by
a witch, warlock, demon, or Satan himself. I didn't procure a magical belt,
and I didn't drink rainwater out of a wolfs tracks. Perhaps my own unnatural
bloodlust triggered something from within that was not more evil than me, just
more natural to the killing, but I doubt it. I equally believe in both evolution
and an all-powerful God. Do you believe in God, or A God?
I believe we came from animals - pure spirits, devoid of guilt - eventually
separated from them by a spark of good intention from God's eyes. But the
difference between people and animals is that when we do something evil, we
know it. The wolf within is a reflection of me and the man I could have been
millions of years ago, but don't misunderstand, I am much more deadly than
the werewolf. When a man does something evil, he knows it, and enioys it.
Our soul is forever forfeit and we understand it and accept it, and that moral
dilemma doesn't stop a man like me from killing.
Do you have any answers, frail girl, as I carry you from your home and leave
behind a grieving father who will always wonder to where you vanished? Will
he pray to God or to A God today to bring you back to him?
Could it be that I am cursed by Heaven itself? Do you think your singular
death might be a fair, equitable trade when weighed against the numerous I
would have killed if God had not imbued me with this daunting responsibility
for self-preservation? I would say, yes, that makes sense to me. Being our
Creator, and since we were made in His image, God must have a hint of
murderer in Him as well. He empathizes with me I am sure because although
He is ashamed of me, He knows I can't help my nature because I am Him in
miniature. He is God and He is the werewolf. What do you think of my
theory? Am I a heretic as well as a killer?
We will travel in each other's company for many sunsets before you will be
made a guest in my lair and help ease the solitude of my decided exile, at
least for a brief while. In the torturing cold and nights as absolute as the
abyss we will discuss evolution and theology and make the quiet jealous.
End
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