Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  Pelts were piled against a wall, looking like clothes somebody had discarded in a Dumpster. Julian, she thought, but didn’t dare. She buried her face in them, ran her hands and her tongue over them. She spread the pelts out on the dirt and stone, lowered herself, and rolled. They were soft, pliant, and vaguely sticky. They smelled of sex and blood, and so, now, did she.

  A low tunnel led out of the back of the anteroom deeper into the mountain. She crawled into it. The roof of the tunnel scraped her shoulders, which were wider than she was used to and more heavily muscled. Hair snagged on her head and on her back and sides. But she knew where she was going: there were no turnoffs, no choices, and the tunnel was so tight around her that it seemed to have a peristaltic action that was pulling her through itself, swallowing her, transforming her as she went into something totally alien that she had always known herself to be.

  Into another, smaller cave full of bodies. Women, wolves, an old, old man with his chest and the top of his head opened. Deborah gagged and would have reeled if the walls and the pressing bodies themselves hadn’t kept her upright. She pushed through. Fur stuck to her, and flesh.

  Into a den like a womb or a grave, not much bigger than her body. In it, flush against her face and heart the instant she got inside, were her grandmother and great-grandmother. Waiting for her. Calling her. Dying. Waiting for her. Waiting for what she had become, but it wasn’t yet enough.

  She could tell that her grandmother Ruth didn’t really know who she was. Ruth whined and growled meaninglessly. She stretched out a paw toward Deborah with black claws extended, but supplication and threat were the same thing for her now, and both meant nothing.

  The fur had been stripped from her chest and belly, exposing gray shriveled skin. The top of her skull and her temples had been gouged. She couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t raise her head. Her yellow-brown eyes guttered while Deborah watched, then suddenly fiercely relit, and Ruth thrust herself at Deborah.

  Deborah roared. The noise ricocheted through the tunnels and the caves, through the canyons and the rocks in which there had been no canyons, had been no strata, through Deborah’s own bones. With little effort and no thought, Deborah shoved the decimated creature into the rough rock. The head struck and split. Viscous liquid from inside the skull splattered and spread, and Deborah had no room either to avoid it or to take it in.

  Ruth was dead. Her grandmother was dead.

  Deborah pushed frantically at the corpse with the side of her face. Somebody said, “Deborah,” as if it were inside her own head.

  She struggled under the dead wolf’s body. Her grandmother’s fur and blood and brain matter adhered to her, but none of it was any use to her now. For a few seconds she was too exhausted to go on. Then, forcing herself to think Suzanne, she heaved the carcass on over her shoulders, where it slid the length of her body and off the truncated bone of her tail.

  Nana lay in layers of blood and shit and crumbled collapsed rock. Gaping wounds striped her body, some of them dry and cracked as deep into the flesh as Deborah could see, others still oozing and glistening. Her breath rattled and her limbs jerked involuntarily, not taking her anywhere.

  “Deborah,” the ancient beast said clearly, without words, and bared her throat. Deborah hardly had to move at all to press her mouth there.

  She kissed. It wasn’t enough.

  She sank her fangs into the flesh, fur, tendons. It wasn’t enough.

  Heart breaking, brain expanding, Deborah brought down her huge forepaws with their glinting black claws on either side of Mary’s esophagus, slicing through strata of flesh, fur, flesh again, fur again, and the striated tunnel of the throat, where she could still feel breath, still taste fresh kill, still hear the sounds of her grandmother saying her name. Blood instead of breath. Rage instead of love. Love.

  Thinking Suzanne and Nana over and over in the same long, savage breath, she ripped through the vertebrae at the back of the neck and severed the old wolf’s head.

  In the teeth and arms of her great-granddaughter, in her brain and heart, Mary died at last.

  Chapter 21

  Sixty-five to seventy million years ago, convection currents sent restless continental plates slamming into each other, and with that the Rocky Mountains began to rise north to south across the North American continent. In time they were high enough to disturb the weather patterns that had maintained a subtropical forest for millions of years. The ratio of precipitation to evaporation declined, and moisture stress began to be apparent. The vast midcontinental grasslands developed, with short and tall grasses, blue gamma and needle, with animals that grazed and animals that preyed on those that grazed.

  Then came ice. Four great waves of it, ultimately reaching as far south as what is now Kansas. Animals migrated, singly and by species. Vegetation migrated, too, in its way: individual plants, rooted in place, froze and died under the marauding ice, or adapted so dramatically that they turned into another life form; others put down roots in alien places and learned to live there—there are fossils in Texas and Louisiana of white spruce that today range no farther south than Canada, and isolated anomalous microclimates—such as the stands of paper birch around Boulder, Colorado—that would not be expected to flourish where they are.

  Life is almost infinitely adaptable. North America now supports four quite distinct ecosystems, each with a single element that dominates and informs it.

  In the deserts between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas—the colder Great Basin, the warmer Mojave—everything responds to water, to the dearth of it. Plants have shallow root systems so they can capture moisture before it sinks much below the surface or, more likely, evaporates into the dry air, and they are deciduous to drought, meaning that they lose their leaves when they have to in order to triage scarce moisture to stems and roots where it is vital to the survival of the plant. Animals are nocturnal, senses and sleep patterns adapted to make use of the cooler nighttime when water is, if not more plentiful, more accessible and needed less.

  The organizing element in the grasslands is fire. Without the periodic raging fires, litter would build up on the surface of the ground, temperatures and nutrient levels would decline, and the grasses would smother themselves. Here there are plant species whose seeds can be released to germinate only by extremely hot temperatures, and animals that can eat only those seeds and those plants. Fire destroys and flourishes and heals. Fire transforms by burning, by clearing away, and by igniting new life.

  Fully a third of the present-day United States is covered by deciduous forest. Here the divine element is light. Precipitation is relatively high, so the skies are overcast much of the time. Of the diminished available sunlight, less than half can penetrate when the trees are leafed out, so there is a raucous early flowering on the forest understory. Light dapples rather than streams; light seeps and skims. Light draws the multilayered supplicant life forms toward it but remains elusive and aloof, keeps its true self and its source obscured.

  It is windy in the mountains; here the restless and creative deity is air. Mat plants lie low to ameliorate the effect of the wind. Evergreens drop their needles like hardwood trees, in order to leave their branches smooth and bare for wind to pass harmlessly over. Fungi coat the roots of conifers in a symbiotic relationship that stabilizes the trees’ root systems when the wind blows and increases the ability of the fungi to bring in nutrients.

  The first alpine tundra probably formed five to ten million years ago, when the mountains had made their way high enough into the colder air. Ridges are barren there because snow is blown away. In hollows where snow remains awhile, conditions are slightly warmer and wetter. Where snow stays long enough to melt, there are cold marshes. Timberline cuts across the tundra.

  Above timberline, the growing season is too cold and too short—sometimes hardly a month—to produce both leaves and tree trunks, so there are only shrubs and bushes and, a little higher, not even those. At the timberline the wind bends and sculpts the growing things,
deforms, transforms.

  Alpine fauna must range widely. When winters are most severe, they hibernate or migrate downslope, sometimes even into cities. They find shelter among ridges and canyons created by the very wind they are trying to escape, where other species might find no shelter at all and be utterly exposed. They adapt, almost infinitely. They transform.

  A hundred years ago, when the four sisters came to Colorado across the midcontinental grasslands from forested Pennsylvania, timber wolves were plentiful in the conifer forests and alpine tundra of the central Rockies. These predators ranged across the timberline, up and down the slopes on both sides of the Divide, and for a long time, the sisters ranged with them.

  Timber wolves ran in packs, often large and with complex social structures. In the long, narrow canyon that would be known as Wolf Canyon long after all timber wolves had gone, there were at one time well over a hundred animals, adults and young. The four sisters stayed together, hunted sometimes with the others and sometimes in a small pack of their own.

  Male timber wolves often weighed as much as two hundred fifty pounds, stood five feet tall at the shoulder, stretched six feet or more from tip of nose to tip of plumed tail. Bitches were somewhat smaller. The four sisters were considerably larger than that. Hannah, especially, grew to be enormous: as a wolf, her shoulder was as high as that of any man, and as a woman, she outweighed every lover and every enemy she ever had, of which there were many. Of the four sisters, Mary, the youngest, was also always the smallest, but nonetheless she was, by lupine or human standards, huge.

  A timber wolf’s coat was gray or gray-brown, and it thickened during winter. The fur of the sisters bristled on the underside of their flesh and hung long and shaggy on the outside, its feathers nearly brushing the ground when they moved on all fours and fanning out around them when they rested on rocks and mats of plants. In some lights Theodora’s fur looked variegated, striated like the rock. Emma’s had a distinct reddish cast under the high alpine sun.

  The intelligent lupine eyes of timber wolves were slanted, and could glow yellow or red or silver-white in sunlight or moonlight reflecting off snow or off bare canyon walls. The sisters’ eyes were human, and always yellow. From the first, their slanted, yellow, human eyes made the timber wolves uneasy.

  Most often, timber wolves mated for life. Every spring, a pair would produce a litter of four to twelve pups, blind and ravenous little things with splayed paws and needle teeth. In sheltered underground dens the pups grew, and by the end of the short summer were ready to take their places in the pack or, sometimes, to set off on their own and join other distant packs or start new ones.

  The four sisters mated with the wolves. They stalked every male of age, flattened their chests against the ground, raised their rumps and lifted their tails to display pink secreting genitals. Unlike timber wolf bitches, the sisters had no seasons, and so could mate anytime.

  Hannah became pregnant. The sisters had not thought it possible. Her shaggy belly hung low to the ground when she moved on all fours. When she walked upright, her smoother, itching belly protruded to the front and sides. Her teats, her breasts, swelled painfully. She slowed. She took greater care.

  Hannah’s mate was a midsize gray timber wolf, with darker gray ear tips and tail and a black muzzle. He was neither the leader here nor likely to break away to start a new pack elsewhere in the mountains. As an early thaw loosened the surface and edges of the tundra, he hunted to feed Hannah, brought her from downslope chipmunks and rabbits already cold and stiffening although their blood was fresh and they were not long dead.

  Hannah and her mate fashioned a den. His claws were, of course, no match for hers, and the muscles of his shoulders and forepaws were much weaker, but together they dug a large and relatively secure shelter on the lee side of a south-facing overhang. Her sisters Emma and Theodora sat on their haunches on a wind-bared ridge and watched. Her sister Mary raged.

  Incredibly, a man appeared. His scent filled the windy fissure that would one day be known as Bitter Canyon. A young man, barely grown, thin and unsteady on his feet, carrying more than he could carry, weeping sometimes. At the lower end of Bitter Canyon where it opened into the squarer and shallower Wolf Canyon (where the thin fierce stream flattened a little and widened its bed, where the red and gray granite and sandstone walls angled outward enough and the altitude was enough lower and the temperature enough higher that a stand of black spruce had been able to establish itself on the south-facing side), the young man tried to set up camp. The wolves watched. The sisters watched. He did not seem to know any of them were there.

  There was a late spring storm that year among many—not much snow, but violent wind and bitter cold. The wind bounded through the high passes and down the canyon walls, shaping them as it went, shearing off infinitesimal veneers of rocks to expose new surfaces. Trees at timberline changed their shapes and textures in response to the cold power of the wind. Some alpine plants were uprooted and whisked away; the root systems of others went deeper, found or created new purchase in the cracking new surface of the rock, and their low-lying branches sent out reinforced webs of clinging tendrils. Animals hid, scurried downslope, or died.

  Wind destroyed the lean-to of the solitary young man. He stood in the storm and shouted, wept, raged. He tried to construct another shelter for himself, but the wind took his materials (branches, leaves) before he could put them to any use.

  He saw the wolves then. In a half circle on the ridges above him. He saw Mary.

  Hannah’s mate lay steadfastly just inside the entrance to the den, protecting it with his not-very-massive body. He was trembling from the cold and his fur billowed as the wind came up under it, but he stayed.

  As the wind wildly altered the form of the mountains, of the canyons, of the den, Hannah gave birth to nine pups. Blind, squealing, with needle fangs and helplessly splayed toes (the thumbs opposing) that ended in curved black claws, the pups swarmed unsteadily over their mother’s body in frantic search for her milk. There were not enough teats for all of them. Their wet little bodies, fresh from her womb, steamed in the frigid air. Their hearts, no bigger than the tip of a human finger, beat visibly inside their fragile rib cages, and their tiny bellies spasmed as the warm milk spurted in.

  Vicious instinctual hunger intensified by the wild wind, the timber wolves closed in on the man. He groped on the steep slope at his back, found a rock, and hurled it. It harmlessly glanced off the flank of a big male, who snarled. The wind snarled and whipped among them, predator and transformer.

  From a ridge high above the wolves and the man, Mary and then Emma and Theodora pounced. The three sisters positioned themselves between the man and the wolves, as though they were defending him, which of course they were not.

  The first of the timber wolves leapt at Emma. She rolled over and exposed herself to him as if in surrender, but when he moved in for the vanquishment she brought up her powerful back legs and slashed his belly. His blood and guts, pouring down over her, chilled almost at once. The other timber wolves lowered themselves warily, flattened their ears, and narrowed their eyes.

  Now it was the three sisters closing in on the man. He struck out at them with a gnarled, frozen branch of mountain mahogany, but it snapped when it connected with Theodora’s hip. He tried to scramble up the side of a massive boulder, but it was slick with ice and moss and he slid backward, into Mary’s jaws.

  Mary carried the man to the entrance of Hannah’s den. Driven to defend his mate and young, Hannah’s mate managed to struggle to his feet against the wind. Emma and Theodora pounced on him, one from each side. They sank their teeth into the soft flesh of his neck, ripped out his vibrating throat, and pulled it apart between them.

  Dangling from Mary’s jaws, the young man was bleeding and screaming, and the wind blew.

  Mary pushed her way through the tunnel that led from the cold surface into the warmer and dark interior of the mountain, into her sister’s cave. The pups (eyes open now, legs stea
dier) scattered. Hannah rose to meet her, hackles up, teats dripping milk and, where the pups’ little fangs had pierced, blood.

  Mary dropped the man onto the litter on the floor of the den and said, “Take him.”

  The man stopped screaming when he heard the werewolf speak. Understanding that he was in terrible danger, he could not possibly have understood the nature of it. He curled up to protect his face and throat, his heart and abdomen, his genitals.

  “Take him,” Mary commanded her sister again. “Mate.”

  Hannah’s yellow eyes brightened. She stepped over one of the squirming pups, pushed aside two others who were swiping playfully at the bare back of the man’s neck, and used her forepaws with their curved wolf claws and opposing human thumbs to turn the man over and lay him open to her.

  She took his penis into her wolf’s mouth. He gasped and sobbed. She licked his scrotum with her long wolf’s tongue; his penis stiffened. Wolf and woman, she squatted over him, pushed his organ into hers and chafed it up and down against the bristly walls of her vagina, tightened and loosened her strong striated muscles around him. Her pups scampered and tumbled. Her three sisters hunkered in the tunnel. Outside, above their heads, the high wind shrieked.

  He ejaculated. Hannah climaxed. She broke open his chest, tore open and devoured his heart that was still pounding with passion.

  Meanwhile, Mary, Emma, and Theodora murdered and ate all nine of Hannah’s pups, who could not yet scale the incline to get out of the den and would not have survived alone in the outside world anyway. Hannah howled but made no move to protect her young, fed instead on the heart, brain, and genitals of the man whose seed she now carried.

  The wind died.

  The timber wolves recoiled and milled, agitated by a profound instinctual horror, and then moved out. There have been no confirmed sightings in the Rockies since, except when somebody’s pet wolf, usually a hybrid, has escaped and prowled the suburbs.