The Wild
Page 21
Bob went on, trotting close to the storefronts, slinking across streets, taking advantage of every bit of foliage he could find. He left Morristown on a long, straight road. Every so often he would see a police cruiser and crouch down. The car would glide past, and he could hear the men inside. "Man, I haven't had this much fun since deer season."
"Who gets the head, the guy that does the shooting or the mayor? That's my question."
Horrible!
As he neared Morris Plains Bob turned west and began to make his way through a more densely populated neighborhood.
Something happened that he hadn't taken into consideration, something very bad.
The houses around here were closer to the street, and the dogs inside were going mad. One, which had been asleep on a porch, came running up and went into a paroxysm of barking, leaping, and snapping. Its lips wrinkled back over its teeth as it crouched down, ready to attack. He watched its hackles, its muscles, waiting to absorb its charge. The creature went off like a shotgun, blasting into him with the full force of its body.
He let himself relax into the blow, dropped his chin to protect his throat from the fury of the jaws, then followed the dog down as it fell in a scrabbling heap at his feet. Once he would have merely wounded it, and sent it screaming away into the night, but he knew he could not afford the attention the screaming would attract. Sadly, he tore the dog's throat open. Its barking at once ceased, replaced by the sound of air whistling and bubbling in the wound. The creature bit wildly, running in the air as it did so. Bob jumped away from it, his heart beating hard, and then he heard a boy's voice call "Frito." The dog shook and gibbered. The voice repeated, "Frito?" Bob slipped into the shadows, miserable but safe.
Scared now, the voice repeated, "Frito!" Bob could see a profile in a front door, a boy of about eleven dressed in pajamas and floppy sandals. "C'mon, Frito, come home." Sadness now, the voice cracking.
An engine muttered beyond the trees at the end of the block, and a squad car wheeled around the comer, its lights searching through the thin fog of the night. Concealed in a bush, Bob stood very still.
The boy waved and the car stopped. "There was a dogfight," the child said. "My dog is hurt!"
The two policemen got out of the car, their guns drawn. The pistols smelled cold. This was not the same pair that had shot at him in Morristown. A flashlight worked the ground, coming to rest on the body of the dog.
"Frito!" The padding of small feet across grass, the sobs. There is no love like this, Bob thought bitterly, no love so noble or so true as that between a dog and a child. He hated himself. His only excuse was that life was sweet also to the wolf.
The flashlights began to poke about in the bushes. One of them swept the bush he was in, paused, came back. "Go inside, son."
"My dog—"
"It's the wolf. Go inside." The boy needed no more prompting. Bob heard the slippers pattering frantically on the dew-wet grass.
Inside the house the child's voice was raised:
"Mom, Dad, it's the wolf! It's here, it killed Frito!" Lights came on, joining other lights from houses where dogs were still barking. Bob had already understood that his end might come anywhere, down any innocent street, anytime. It could come down this street, now. He wanted to be reconciled to this but he could not accept it.
There was in him an almost overwhelmingly urgent need, one he had never felt in such a raw, terrible form. Bob the man might be tired and sad and ready to give up. But the wolf didn't feel that way at all. The wolf wanted to live, and he wanted it desperately. Bob was still his gentle old self. But the wolf had tasted blood; the wolf would kill to live.
The two cops had already radioed for help and lights were now coming on in virtually every house in the neighborhood. These wealthy families would probably be well armed. The police, with their notoriously inaccurate .38 Specials, might miss a quick target in the dark, but the hunting rifles and target pistols that were about to be brought into play would not miss.
"Work around to the other side of the hedge," one of the cops said softly. "It's just standing in there. Maybe it doesn't realize we mean it harm."
As soon as the second cop came around the bush Bob was going to be trapped. Without another thought he jumped up and took off down the street, causing a massive upsurge in barking. Doors slammed, people shouted. A shotgun roared, its pellets whining over Bob's head.
"I hit it," a man shouted, "I got the wolf!"
The tip of Bob's tail stung, but the old wound in his thigh was far more painful. His tail might have been grazed by a pellet, but as injuries went it was minor.
He dodged down a driveway and jumped a Cyclone fence into a yard inhabited by two cats, which began shooting around like fur-covered hockey pucks, their tails fat with terror, their eyes blazing. Then he was through the yard and into the alley, trotting fast, but not running. This could be a long chase and he had to preserve his strength.
As be moved along he realized that he was not nearly as scared as he had been before. The wolf and the man had come together again. He had begun to be very interested in the process of combining his reason with his instinct, which was the key to preserving this unique life.
He smelled not only woods around here but flowing water. There was a stream where he could drink, maybe even enough woods to harbor a meal.
He trotted to the end of the street, throwing himself under a car as the police and a crowd of enraged citizens came puffing around the corner. Powerful lights plunged about, seeking the tawny spot of fur among the fallen leaves and the naked bushes. A little earlier in the season and it would have been a lot easier for him to hide. They passed him and he started off again, heading for the smell of the water.
Soon he came to the stream. There was nothing behind him to suggest danger—no smell of dogs, no off-the-road vehicles. He lowered his muzzle and began to lap the sweet, iron-tasting water.
A shot split a limb a few feet to his right. Far off in the street he saw a man with a rifle and some bulky equipment: a starlight scope.
Bob hastened up the middle of the brook, trying to run in the water as much as possible. He was worried about dogs being put to his scent. As a boy he had seen the Lone Ranger ride down streams to throw them off, a trick taught to him by Tonto.
He left the stream bed for a jumble of rocks. Another shot echoed in the woods, but farther away. Starlight scopes or not, people couldn't follow Bob into this tangle. Beyond the rocks the land sloped steeply upward. He was soon on a ridge, looking down over the wood he had just crossed. His ears and nose told him that he was alone. Without trained dogs, they were helpless.
Bob loped now, following an abandoned deer path. There wasn't a fresh scent along its whole length, not even droppings. The deer had died out on this ridge. As he moved he glimpsed a dark hulk off to the right. Then, through the trees, he saw that it was a house. This one was huge, a great, Gothic monster with a dozen chimneys and hundreds of blank leaded-glass windows.
He altered his course toward thicker woods. He wasn't precisely sure where he was anymore, just that he was moving in a northwesterly direction, and his nose told him that the human population around him was growing less dense.
He trotted steadily, easily, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the human world.
As the western sky began to grow light he lengthened his stride, trying for a final burst of speed before he stopped and hid until dark. He was also hungry.
Sniffing as he moved, he sought the rotted-grass odor of a rabbit or the garbage smell of rats. The woods seemed empty, though. He would have considered bugs, but it was past their season.
Was this to be his new life, scuttling through the woods searching for food or seeking escape? He wanted to lie back on a grassy hillside and think. He wanted to have a discussion with his son, or go out with his wife and talk and sip espresso.
He was the running wolf, the wolf of desolation, lonely wolf. To man he was now the gray cloud in the morning, t
he shadow worrying the bones. Overhead he heard a helicopter popping. He ignored it. They weren't going to spot him from that thing, but its presence meant they were really hungry to catch him.
The helicopter circled back, louder this time. As a precaution he stopped in a dense copse of hemlock. As far as he knew there was no way for them to detect him. Unless—what about infared, or a starlight scope?
A bullet whizzed down through the trees, splitting a fat branch not three inches from his face.
There was no time to hesitate: he started running.
He tried to remember the terrain he had crossed. Were there any gullies that went down to the stream? No, he thought not. As a matter of fact, he didn't remember any place he might hide from starlight scopes or infared, unless it was behind the waterfall he had seen on the creek. The waterfall was miles back, though. Slow as they were, even his human pursuers would have reached there by now.
He did the only thing that he could do, the thing any ordinary animal would do: he ran blindly, hoping for the best. Maybe he would reach deeper woodland, maybe he would be shot. All he could do was hope that his nasal and aural technology would somehow outwit man's sight technology.
The helicopter kept with him, fluttering like a massive insect in the glowing sky. From time to time a bullet smacked through the trees.
When he mounted a rise, he knew exactly why he was alone here. The wind was blowing from behind him or he would have known much sooner. Before him there was a pit full of rusty steel drums, some of them leaking stinking orange goop, others intact, still others surrounded by scums of green jelly. This close he could smell them despite the direction of the wind, and the odors were awful: powerful acidic scents as if of Clorox mixed with gasoline, airplane glue, and roach spray. A rivulet trickled sadly along, scummed with silver oil, making its way through tired, brown grass. There was a smell of death: two buzzard corpses lay twisted beside the fulminating ruins of a 'coon that had apparently dropped dead while drinking the water. Then the buzzards had died while eating the 'coon. Nature is designed to work in cycles. It dies in cycles, too.
The dump seemed to have no borders. Bob had no time to get around it. He would have to cross it, out in the open, the helicopter on his back. There was no reason to wait; caution would gain him nothing. He moved into the clear space. The land was just being touched by the gray light that precedes the dawn. The eastern sky was now a faint green, Venus low on the horizon. Grackles and jays were beginning to scream in the woods; the feathers of a dove lay in a puddle that Bob carefully avoided.
Inside the dump the smell was shocking. The ground was spongy and his paw prints quickly filled with scum. The odor reached deep into his muzzle and clung there. He was sure that it was in itself poisonous, it was so strong.
Then the helicopter came in low, raising a mist from the standing pools. Bob ran hard. He was more afraid of getting exposed to that mist than he was of the bullets that now came steadily from the copter. In his mind's eye there was an image, maybe from a National Geographic special or a Sierra Club program, of a wolf seen from above clambering through a snowbank, being chased down by a helicopter. And then the wolf's head explodes and it tumbles back down the bank, its tail gyrating like a broken propeller.
Behind him there was a terrific thud. For a mad hopeful instant he thought the helicopter had crashed, then he felt heat on his back. One of the bullets had caused a drum of chemicals to explode. So much for their infared scope now. That blaze would white it out. Unfortunately, dawn was on their side. Shimmering lines of light were spreading from behind low eastern clouds. Bob could hear birds rising from the trees on the distant horizon, and could smell even above the stink of this dismal place a sterling, rich burst of autumn breeze, the beautiful dry odor of the hanging leaves, the sweetness being exhaled from the ground.
Another drum of chemical exploded. Intense heat made Bob skitter forward, then gallop. The whole place started thudding and popping. The fire was furious and spreading wildly. The helicopter rose into a billowing mushroom of orange-black smoke and disappeared off toward Morris-town. Bob wondered if the citizens of that worthy community even knew that this mess was here, leaching slowly into their water supply. Well, they were certainly going to find out.
He managed to stay ahead of the flames by running himself hard, finally reaching a high Cyclone fence. He ran along beside it, thinking for an awful moment that it was going to trap him. But it hadn't been maintained; he managed to go through a hole as big as a Lincoln.
He rushed back into the scrubby woods. The area had been logged within the past ten years, and the hemlocks and white pine were still saplings, and stunted by the near presence of the toxic dump. He kept moving, always choosing the uplift of the land, seeking less populated regions.
He was tired and hungry and wanted badly to hunt. As if on command, his nose and ears promptly became hypersensitive. All he could smell, though, was birds. They seemed to be more able than ground dwellers to survive near the chemicals, probably because they spent relatively little time exposed to the poison. He'd seen one of the coydogs in Central Park catch a bat, but he didn't think his own paws were adapted to such extraordinary skills. Nature had created coydogs in the past fifty years or so, breeding the new species from the best of the dogs and the coyotes. The coydogs belonged to the future. They were smart enough and supple enough and adaptable enough to live right in the middle of the human world. People had them in their backyards and never knew it. In the small hours the Central Park packs probably hunted midtown from the Hudson to the East River, and nobody saw them, not ever.
Bob stopped long enough to lift one of his paws and examine it. It wasn't going to grasp anything. The toes were long, but not as long as those of the coydog. And he could not move them independently. He would eat no birds.
There was a flutter and a sudden pang along his spine. Snapping, he twisted around just in time to see a jay flying off with a tuft of his fur in its beak. As a child he'd disliked them because they got to his feeders and scared away the songbirds.
To rid himself of the jay Bob moved into a thicker copse. Screaming, the bird flew off.
Then Bob became aware of a pungent and absolutely magnificent aroma. As it filled his muzzle he trembled with delight. He was hungry, very hungry, and he smelled bacon.
The odor was warm, too, meaning that the bacon was being fried nearby. He followed the scent up a low rise and through a thick copse of saplings. It wasn't long before he saw a ruined cabin with smoke coming from the chimney. The roof was half-off, the walls were peeling tarpaper, there was no glass in the windows. Bob approached warily. He could hear the bacon sizzling, smell the two people clearly. Bob was a reticent man, but he could not ignore the fact that he smelled the odors of human sex. There was also an odd smell of fresh earth. He stole forward on his belly, trying to ignore what he was smelling, all except the bacon.
Then he heard a female voice, softly pleading. "Please, please ..." He pricked his ears. Something told him that this was not right. Close by the cabin wall, he could hear deep male breathing, very soft female breathing. It was almost the gasping of a child. Bob raised himself up on the window ledge and looked in. There was a man of perhaps forty frying bacon and eggs in a skillet on the hearth. Behind him there were some dirty, crumpled sheets on the dirt floor of the cabin, sheets that stank of sweat and the uses of night. Bob was horrified to see, hunched into a corner, a terrified and naked girl of perhaps thirteen. Her arms clutched her beginning breasts, her legs were twisted around one another.
Around the front of the cabin Bob saw a hole, a shovel lying beside it. On the man's hip was a .45 automatic. But for his pistol belt, he was as naked as the child.
Bob had never seen such a depraved situation. The poor girl was in awful trouble. This vicious monster had obviously raped her repeatedly. Bob was no longer one to waste time about these - things. He leaped at once through the window and knocked the man on his side.
"Aw! Holy shit!"
The girl, who had seemed almost catatonic, now rose from her corner and moved to the hearth. The man grabbed Bob's muzzle with his good hand while he forced his bad one to fumble for his pistol. It was no good; Bob was heavy and took full advantage of his weight. Again and again he hurled himself against the struggling man.
At the hearth, the girl took the skillet in her hands. Bob felt a blow from the man to the side of his head. Another one, much harder, landed on his skull. The man was built like a tank. Despite the pain of a broken wrist, he was becoming a wheezing, furious juggernaut. He crashed into Bob's side, throwing him to the ground. A spike of pure fury made Bob roar. He dug his teeth into the man's floppy belly, feeling the little pops as his incisors broke through the flesh to the fat within.
There came a clang. The man sank down. He and Bob were both covered with sizzling bacon and eggs. The girl stood over the inert form of her captor, the skillet held in both hands. Then she dropped it and, grabbing a dirty sheet, took off into the woods, looking like a ghost as she swept off among the trees.
Bob ate the bacon, which was only a little burned, and lapped up the eggs.
Chapter Seventeen
WITH A DETERMINED JAB CINDY STUCK ANOTHER RED pin in the map, at the location of the smoldering dump site northwest of Morristown. "I'm convinced," she said to the others. "It was him."
Monica still disagreed. "The police say it started during a high-speed chase. They don't mention Bob."