"Of course not, he got away. But look at the media. 'Killer Wolf Invades Silk Stocking Suburb.' We know Bob's in the area. Who else would they have been chasing out in the woods? The poor guy is heading directly away from civilization. He's trying to escape, he must be so scared!"
Joe Running Fox stared at the map. "My guess is he'll go back into the Poconos, up through the Shawangunks to the Catskills, then on into the Appalachians and Canada." Monica stared at Cindy, a slight smile flickering across her face. "I'll bet he's going to the hunt club!"
"To meet me," Cindy said. She even thought it might be true. Even Bob had the occasional flash of practical insight.
Joe Running Fox put his hand on Kevin's shoulder. "What about you, Kevin?" Her son was comfortable with this man. Joe Running Fox had told Kevin about the Way of Silence and won his heart. The two of them had spent hours together sitting face-to-face, totally silent, their eyes locked. Last night Kevin had told Cindy that it was the most intimate experience he had ever had. "We can all see each other's souls any time we want. We just have to look at each other. Not for a minute or two, but the way the Fox does it, for a couple of hours. Then you see the soul."
She had managed to share her eyes with Kevin for about three minutes. Her love for her vulnerable, inquisitive little boy had burned high, but there had come a point when what she saw, and what of her she felt was being seen, was simply too much to bear. You see the whole of a person's time in their eyes, from the first shattering infant moment to the darkening swells of age.
Over the past few days Kevin had undergone almost a complete change. Although children shine very bright, it doesn't take much to dull their fragile spark. More even than the loss of his father, Cindy thought, her son was suffering from a loss of his own faith in reality. His Kafka shelf was now abandoned. Instead he read the Bible. She found him absorbed in Ecclesiastes and Job, and the Book of Revelation. He had also bought a book about multiple personalities, and another about the Spanish Inquisition. He sat sometimes for hours staring at this last book, looking at a facsimile of a poster announcing an auto-da-fe in which thirty people were to be burned at the stake.
His identification with the persecuted had always been deep, arising, she liked to feel, from the powerful ideals that animated her own and Bob's thinking. Yesterday she had discovered him staring into the eyes of a picture of a wolf. "Can you share anything with a photograph?" she had asked.
"No, but I think I know how the wolves captured Dad. They did it at the zoo. Remember that old wolf staring at him? That was when they captured him."
"It's that dangerous to look into another's eyes?"
"'A child goes forth each morning, and whatever that child first sees, that thing he becomes.'"
How many times Bob had read Whitman's poem to Kevin. "Whitman was referring to a change of spirit, not a physical change."
"How do we know that? Maybe he was talking about a real change. I think Kafka was talking about a real change in the Metamorphosis."
"Whitman was writing about a child. Dad isn't a child."
"You never accepted that a child is exactly what he was. In some ways I'm more mature than Dad."
Fox came over. He folded his arms, looked down at Kevin, who had tossed aside the wolf photo and was examining a woodcut of a man having his feet burned off in an Inquisitional dungeon. "Few people are more mature than your father," Fox said. "Maybe now, nobody."
"You never knew him," Kevin replied in an intensely charged voice. "He could get excited about the same flower every time he saw it, day after day, until it died. Then he forgot it so completely it might as well never have existed. Dad had no mature emotions."
Cindy could not agree. "He loved us."
"We frightened him, I think. Life was too much for him. And we drove him. We created the conditions that enabled this to happen."
It was grief that was behind these hard words. His brilliance was working against him now. Cindy sensed that what he really wanted was to cuddle up in her lap and cry.
Fox might have known it, too. He touched the boy's cheek. One thing the man knew was when not to talk.
In the silence Monica drew a line on the map, connecting the red pins. Beyond the last pin she continued the line to the hunt club deep in the Catskills. "Maybe we ought to just go up there and wait for him."
"Unwise," Fox said. "We're better off tracking him. If he doesn't go to the club, we won't miss him that way."
"You can do this?"
Fox nodded. "I can track a wolf, if I can find the trail."
"And you're sure you can? I'd hate to be traipsing around Ulster County while Bob sits at the hunt club. He might not wait long. It's bird season and we got a huge stocking assessment, so the place is full of grouse and therefore hunters."
Cindy interrupted. "We'll split up. You go to the club, Monica. The three of us will do the tracking."
"I want to do it alone. With the boy."
Cindy wouldn't have that, not for a moment. She wasn't going to agonize the days away at the club. The miseries of camping and hiking would keep her preoccupied. Anything was better than the ordeal of waiting. "I'm going."
"Women have other power. Not this."
"Oh, nonsense. I won't hear that. He's my husband."
"I won't track with a woman." She almost couldn't believe what she heard. The man was worse than a chauvinist, he was an unreformed Neanderthal. "You have no conscience," she said. She'd always found personal discrimination surprising and confusing. His eyes were brown and flint hard. She pleaded on her own behalf. "He'll respond to me. If he knows I'm there, he'll be much more likely to stop running."
"His son will be there. A man will do anything for his son."
That was it. He'd have to learn here and now who was in control of things. "If you imagine for one moment that my boy is going without me, you're very much mistaken, Mr. Fox. You're not lord and master of this house, no man is, not even my poor husband, God help him. I intend to go out there into that wilderness and find him."
"A northeastern second-growth forest is hardly wilderness, ma'am. I want my medicine to work, and with a woman around it might not. It's no reflection on you. It's just the damned Indian culture. Woman has her role and man has his, and the two are different. Equal but different. I know it's another stupid Indian idea, but I can't help respecting it, dummy that I am."
"The hell it's an Indian idea. I don't hold with all this idealization of the old Indian culture. You say you've got Mohawk blood? The Mohawks considered their women slaves."
"They loved them. It was all stupidity, though—"
"Shut up, and can that false self-deprecation. It makes you seem like a bigger ass than you probably are. Now, let's quit bickering and lay our plans. The more we talk, the farther away Bob gets."
Fox didn't say much more after that. It took only a few minutes to plan their journey. Largely it was a matter of making sure that the available hiking boots passed Fox's meticulous inspection. "I thought Indians used moccasins," Kevin said. "I don't mean to be condescending, but it is what I thought."
"Boots. Indians used moccasins because they couldn't afford anything better, not to mention the fact that the dopes never invented the shoe on their own. Indian high-tech consisted of beaded wampum. Life was diseased, dirty, violent, and short."
Cindy wondered if the man was trying to be insufferable, or if he was so involved in his posturing that he really couldn't see himself at all. She needed him to track Bob, and she wasn't going to let anything stand in the way of that.
"We have no camping equipment," she said, "beyond the boots and Kevin's sleeping bag."
"I need a blanket. What do you need?"
It was a dare, she supposed. At best she found it boring. "I need everything I can get. A tent, preferably air-conditioned and equipped with a full kitchen and all necessary supplies. Why?"
"Just asking. So I'll bring two blankets."
"Waterproof."
He nodded. "Let's go."
"You're kidding. Right now, at eight o'clock at night?"
"We can stay in a motel tonight. In the morning we start. Early, four A.M."
She found herself eating a fatty breakfast in an all-nighter on Route 202 at 3:30 in the morning. Her head was pounding. Poor Kevin looked like a corpse, he was pale and very slow. Cindy made sure he drank a couple of cups of tea. Fox advised a big breakfast, and she obliged with scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, 40% Bran Flakes, coffee, and a slice of melon that tasted like dishwasher detergent. "You can eat," Fox said. "That's good. Once we're tracking, there won't be much time for food, and game's scarce these days."
"We'll hunt?"
"I make traps. You'll see. They work good."
The detailed area map showed a road ringing the dump site. It was a lozenge-shaped two hundred acres of smoldering, noxious ruins when they arrived, their headlights dispelling the faint glow that persisted from the fire. The car moved slowly along, Fox peering out into the dark as he drove.
"Somewhere on this side, I figure." He drove for a time in silence. "I hope your husband had a good sense of direction. He's not a fool, is he? He wouldn't go south?"
Bob was not a fool in the sense that Fox meant. She did not think he would go south. He knew the direction of the wilderness in New York. His love of it had taken him deep into the Catskills and the Adirondacks. If only he could get away from civilization, he might well have a chance to survive. "He knows the country."
"Can Dad kill things with his mouth, like rabbits? And I wonder if he can eat a raw rabbit?"
They were upsetting questions. "I have no idea how your father is coping. I can't even begin to imagine it."
"They acquire the secrets of the beast," Fox said. "That's why men try shifting in the first place. They want to learn the secrets of the animals. Such secrets used to be very valuable."
"The cave paintings at Lascaux," Kevin said. "They don't show any people because the people are the animals."
"It's an ancient way. In all my life, in all the legends I've known, I've heard of only one other case where it really happened. Where somebody really, really changed into an animal. And that was many generations ago." He stopped the car. His hands went toward Cindy, took hers. "I want to thank you. You've given me a chance to meet this man in person, the man who was seduced by the wolves."
The three of them got out of the car. Cindy could see absolutely no trace of him in the dark blotchs of undergrowth that hugged the ground this side of the woods.
"There." Fox gestured toward a place that seemed no different from the others. "He went in right there. He was moving fast, you can see that by the number of leaves that are broken." Bending low, he hurried over to the spot. "He's favoring his right rear leg, toes digging in left to right. That says he's got a thigh wound. The way the left foot is hitting, I'd say the bone's not broken. It's a flesh wound, probably infected. Hurting him, but not too dangerous. He's moving very strongly for an animal that's lost weight."
"Now, how can you possibly tell that?"
"The paper said he was weighed in at one-sixty. These tracks in this dirt—he weighs more like one-fifty." He stood staring at the ground, thinking.
"Where is he?" Kevin asked.
"Your father is well away from here. He passed this spot at least twenty-four hours ago."
"The dump fire started at five-fifteen yesterday morning. That's when he was here."
"Well, nearly twenty-four hours then. With his thigh and general weakness, he's covering about twenty miles a day. That's if he hunts on the run. If he can."
"What do you mean, if he can?"
"If he has the skill. You're hunting like he's got to hunt, running the animal down, it doesn't go in a straight line. It goes in circles, backtracks, anything to get away from you. Once he's killed and eaten something, then he has to reorient himself and cover lost ground. So we can assume he's getting maybe fifteen miles a day out of it. Moving sunup to sundown, maybe a couple of hours at night. My guess is he's about thirty-five miles from here."
She didn't want to ask the next question; she felt Bob slipping through her fingers. But she did ask, she had to ask. "What are our chances of catching up with him?"
"We can cover maybe fifteen miles a day. Twenty, if we work like mad. We don't have the four legs, that's our trouble. And we're tall. The undergrowth will slow us down."
Maybe they should all go to the hunting camp and just hope for the best. Bob would know the camp was crowded, though. There was a good chance that he would bypass it. He was hurt, she knew he was scared. If it was her, she'd be desperately unhappy and in a state of extreme panic. She would not make rational or courageous decisions. Her tendency would be to get to the most isolated place she could find, and hide there until she died.
It had occurred to her that he might commit suicide. She could only hope that the thought wouldn't cross his mind. Sometimes, though, he had fallen into deep, deep troughs. His despair was pitiful, at once bitter and full of sardonic humor. When he got an especially good poem back from one of the magazines, or endured some epic business humiliation, he could drop into one of those states.
She kicked a stone.
"There might always be another sighting," Fox said. "You never know."
Wave after wave of sorrow broke in Cindy's soul. She hunched her shoulders, fighting back the tears until her throat felt like it was being wrapped in leather thongs. Then she burst out with huge, gasping sobs. Kevin clapped his hands over his ears. Fox stood impassive. When she stopped, he merely headed into the woods. They moved along easily at first, passing between tall trees and through stands of mountain laurel.
Soon Cindy became uneasy. They seemed to be going in an almost perfectly straight line. This was fine, but it didn't strike her as the sort of thing Bob would do. He'd get confused, double back, fall down gullies, end up at the edge of cliffs. But she had to trust Fox; he was the expert.
Even so—Bob in the woods? He'd practically gotten himself killed trying to track wolves in Minnesota back in the early seventies. And then there was that camping trip where he'd forgotten the matches and failed to pack the tent in the tent pack and brought the wrong hiker's map and missed the bus, and then laid their campsite at the edge of a pretty waterfall which had become a raging torrent during the ten-hour downpour that had taken place that night.
And the poor guy was out here with no hands, trying to keep himself alive with half the population of the northeast cheerfully hunting him down.
Lost in her thoughts, she wasn't aware that she had fallen behind until Fox was standing in front of her. "Look, Mrs. Duke, we can't keep breaking stride for you. Either you keep up or you don't keep up. The car's half an hour behind us. You can go back if you want to."
"No. I'll keep up."
He started again, twisting and turning through the trees like some sort of ghost, followed by Kevin, who was almost as swift. "I've been thinking," Kevin said as he moved, "we need to hit a town and buy a Walkman. One of us has to be listening to the news at all times in case there's another sighting reported."
Fox grunted. Twigs were scraping Cindy's head, she had leaf dust in her right eye, she'd practically shattered her knee slipping on a toadstool the size of a pancake, and now she was tumbling head over heels down a ravine she hadn't even noticed.
She did a complete somersault. When she saw the top of the forest rush past, leaves against a pale pink streak of dawn, she forced herself to relax totally. Then she hit with a thud. There was a jagged rock right under the center of her back, but she had managed to loosen up enough so that she flopped over it rather than breaking in two. "I'm good, no problem," she shouted. Then she was on her feet and up the ravine and running to catch them.
As he talked Kevin hopped from stone to mossy stone in a little brook.
"Listen," Fox said. "I think the water has a message for us. He passed this way. The brook remembers him."
Cindy could not keep her mind on the water. She was more interes
ted in her own ragged breathing and the excruciating pain at the back of her left heel, where her boot seemed to be grinding down to bone. She flopped back in a bed of leaves and mushrooms, and stared up through amazingly tall trees. It was now full dawn, and the orange and red leaves were clearly etched against a blue sky.
When she listened, the brook did indeed speak to her. She sort of understood what Fox meant, that the water had a message. It wasn't a direction, a piece of information, it was another kind of message, vibrant with obscurely useful meaning.
"I tell you one thing," Fox said, "the way this water smells, there's a town upstream."
"I don't smell anything. The water's fresh."
"You don't know the meaning of fresh water, then," Fox replied. "I've drunk perfectly fresh water. Bathed in it. The more filth you can smell, the farther along you are on the road home. That's the message of this water."
"What he's saying, Mama, is that we need to get to the town."
Nonlogical thinking was what they called it. Or was it nonsequential thinking? Cindy sighed and got up. "I hope there really is a town."
"Hell, just through those trees is a gigantic condo development. We're in New Jersey, ma'am, one of the most densely populated states in the nation. The only reason we don't see it is that Bob avoided it. This forest is a thin strip of green between armies of housing developments, believe me."
Half an hour later they were walking along a road. A mini-mart stood next to an Exxon. Rite-Aid Drugs and Wendy's had occupied the center of town, hard on to the lawn and garden center and the drive-in bank. Kevin picked out an inexpensive Walkman at Rite-Aid and Cindy was elected to listen with one earphone.
When they started back to the woods to reconnect with Bob's trail, she found herself walking to the drone of WINS, all news all the time. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was jammed from Grand Central Parkway to the Gowanus Canal, due to a disabled tractor-trailer. It was now 9:14. In sports, the Oakland A's had beaten the Orioles.
Torture, torture, torture. Slog through the woods while listening to this drivel. She was bored. She wanted a cup of tea and a good book. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to cuddle Bob up tight and make love to him.
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