Wolf gleamed at him again, and then looked up at the sky
with a blank, yearning expression. “Not long now, Jacky.
You’re the herd. I have to put you inside.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I guess you do have to.”
And this too struck Wolf as uproariously funny. As he
laughed his howling laugh, he threw an arm around Jack’s
waist and picked him up and carried him all the way across
the field. “Wolf will take care of you, Jacky,” he said when he had nearly howled himself inside-out. He set the boy gently on the ground at the top of the gully.
“Wolf,” Jack said.
Wolf widened his jaws and began rubbing his crotch.
“You can’t kill any people, Wolf,” Jack said. “Remember
that—if you remembered that story, then you can remember
not to kill any people. Because if you do, they’ll hunt you down for sure. If you kill any people, if you kill even one person, then a lot of people will come to kill you. And they’d get you, Wolf. I promise you. They’d nail your hide to a board.”
“No people, Jacky. Animals smell better than people. No
people. Wolf!”
They walked down the slope into the gully. Jack removed
the lock from his pocket and several times clipped it through the metal ring that would hold it, showing Wolf how to use the key. “Then you slide the key under the door, okay?” he asked.
“When you’ve changed back, I’ll push it back to you.” Jack
glanced down at the bottom of the door—there was a two-
inch gap between it and the ground.
“Sure, Jacky. You’ll push it back to me.”
“Well, what do we do now?” Jack said. “Should I go in the
shed right now?”
“Sit there,” Wolf said, pointing to a spot on the floor of the shed a foot from the door.
Jack looked at him curiously, then stepped inside the shed
and sat down. Wolf hunkered back down just outside the
shed’s open door, and without even looking at Jack, held out
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his hand toward the boy. Jack took Wolf ’s hand. It was like holding a hairy creature about the size of a rabbit. Wolf
squeezed so hard that Jack nearly cried out—but even if he
had, he didn’t think that Wolf would have heard him. Wolf
was staring upward again, his face dreamy and peaceful and
rapt. After a second or two Jack was able to shift his hand into a more comfortable position inside Wolf ’s grasp.
“Are we going to stay like this a long time?” he asked.
Wolf took nearly a minute to answer. “Until,” he said, and
squeezed Jack’s hand again.
9
They sat like that, on either side of the doorframe, for hours, wordlessly, and finally the light began to fade. Wolf had been almost imperceptibly trembling for the previous twenty minutes, and when the air grew darker the tremor in his hand intensified. It was, Jack thought, the way a thoroughbred horse might tremble in its stall at the beginning of a race, waiting for the sound of a gun and the gate to be thrown open.
“She’s beginning to take me with her,” Wolf said softly.
“Soon we’ll be running, Jack. I wish you could, too.”
He turned his head to look at Jack, and the boy saw that
while Wolf meant what he had just said, there was a significant part of him that was silently saying: I could run after you as well as beside you, little friend.
“We have to close the door now, I guess,” Jack said. He
tried to pull his hand from Wolf ’s grasp, but could not free himself until Wolf almost disdainfully released him.
“Lock Jacky in, lock Wolf out.” Wolf ’s eyes flared for a
moment, becoming red molten Elroy-eyes.
“Remember, you’re keeping the herd safe,” Jack said. He
stepped backward into the middle of the shed.
“The herd goes in the barn, and the lock goes on the door.
He Would Not Injure His Herd.” Wolf ’s eyes ceased to drip
fire, shaded toward orange.
“Put the lock on the door.”
“God pound it, that’s what I’m doing now,” Wolf said. “I’m
putting the God-pounding lock on the God-pounding door,
see?” He banged the door shut, immediately sealing Jack up
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in the darkness. “Hear that, Jacky? That’s the God-pounding lock.” Jack heard the lock click against the metal loop, then heard its ratchets catch as Wolf slid it home.
“Now the key,” Jack said.
“God-pounding key, right here and now,” Wolf said, and a
key rattled into a slot, rattled out. A second later the key bounced off the dusty ground beneath the door high enough
to skitter onto the shed’s floorboards.
“Thanks,” Jack breathed. He bent down and brushed his
fingers along the boards until he touched the key. For a moment he clamped it so hard into his palm that he almost drove it through his skin—the bruise, shaped like the state of
Florida, would endure nearly five days, when in the excite-
ment of being arrested he would fail to notice that it had left him. Then Jack carefully slid the key into his pocket. Outside, Wolf was panting in hot regular agitated-sounding spurts.
“Are you angry with me, Wolf?” he whispered through the
door.
A fist thumped the door, hard. “Not! Not angry! Wolf!”
“All right,” Jack said. “No people, Wolf. Remember that.
Or they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
No peopOOOWWW-OOOOOOOOHHHOOOO!” The
word turned into a long, liquid howl. Wolf ’s body bumped
against the door, and his long black-furred feet slid into the opening beneath it. Jack knew that Wolf had flattened himself out against the shed door. “Not angry, Jack,” Wolf whispered, as if his howl had embarrassed him. “Wolf isn’t angry. Wolf is wanting, Jacky. It’s so soon now, so God-pounding soon.”
“I know,” Jack said, now suddenly feeling as if he had to
cry—he wished he could have hugged Wolf. More painfully,
he wished that they had stayed the extra days at the farm-
house, and that he were now standing outside a root cellar
where Wolf was safely jailed.
The odd, disturbing thought came to him again that Wolf
was safely jailed.
Wolf ’s feet slid back under the door, and Jack thought he
had a glimpse of them becoming more concentrated, slimmer,
narrower.
Wolf grunted, panted, grunted again. He had moved well
back from the door. He uttered a noise very like “Aaah.”
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“Wolf?” Jack said.
An earsplitting howl lifted up from above Jack: Wolf had
moved to the top of the gully.
“Be careful,” Jack said, knowing that Wolf would not hear
him, and fearing that he would not understand him even if he were close enough to hear.
A series of howls followed soon after—the sound of a
creature set free, or the despairing sound of one who wakes to find himself still confined, Jack could not tell which. Mourn-ful and feral and oddly beautiful, the cries of poor Wolf flew up into the moonlit air like scarves flung into the night. Jack did not know he was trembling until he wrapped his arms
around himself and felt his arms vibrating against his chest, which seemed to vibrate, too.
The howls diminished, retreating. Wolf was running with
the moon.
10
For three days and three nights, Wolf was engaged in a nearly ceaseless search for food. He slept from each dawn until just past noon, in a hollow he had discovered beneath the fallen trunk of an oak. Certainly Wolf did not feel himself imprisoned, despite Jack’s forebodings. The woods on the other side of the field were extensive, and full of a wolf ’s natural diet.
Mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, squirrels—all these he found easily.
He could have contained himself in the woods and eaten more than enough to carry him through to his next Change.
But Wolf was riding with the moon, and he could no more
confine himself to the woods than he could have halted his
transformation in the first place. He roamed, led by the moon, through barnyards and pastures, past isolated suburban
houses and down unfinished roads where bulldozers and giant asymmetrical rollers sat like sleeping dinosaurs on the banks.
Half of his intelligence was in his sense of smell, and it is not exaggerating to suggest that Wolf ’s nose, always acute, had attained a condition of genius. He could not only smell a coop full of chickens five miles away and distinguish their odors from those of the cows and pigs and horses on the same
farm—that was elementary—he could smell when the chick-
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ens moved. He could smell that one of the sleeping pigs had an injured foot, and one of the cows in the barn an ulcerated udder.