Wild Things: Four Tales Read online

  Wild Things:

  Four Tales

  by

  Douglas Clegg

  Author of Isis and Neverland

  Wild Things: Four Tales Copyright © 2006 Douglas Clegg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Alkemara Press.

  This edition published by Alkemara Press, by arrangement with Douglas Clegg

  This collection and the stories it contains are works of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art copyright Caniglia. Used here with permission.

  Contents

  Foreword

  "The Wolf"

  "A Madness of Starlings"

  "The American"

  "The Dark Game" -- a novellette

  About the Author

  Other Ebooks

  For Caniglia, Jacqui, Caravaggio and Vivi

  To the Reader:

  Drop by DouglasClegg.com to get instant access to treats and bonus content -- including updates, screensavers, desktop wallpaper, ebooks and more.

  Foreword

  1

  Grandma, what great eyes you have!

  The better to see you with, my dear.

  Grandma, what great ears you have!

  The better to hear you with, my dear.

  Grandma, what sharp teeth you have!

  When Red Riding Hood goes into the cottage, the wolf's deception is near-perfect. The wolf is her grandmother,as far as Red's concerned. Although Red notices the physical changes -- the eyes and ears and teeth -- she believes this is granny. In fact, if the wolf did not reveal itself -- by saying, "The better to eat you with, my dear!" -- Red might've sat down and brought out some cookies and milk and checked to see if granny wanted a paw rub.

  What this led me to believe as a child was that, sometimes, the wolves are closer to you than you think.

  More recently, I've come to understand that the problem of wolves is that they tell us who they are, and they bite us, and still...we invite them in.

  The wolves come down from the mountains when they see the sheep in the pen. If the shepherd does not guard the flock, and if the sheep-dog does not stare down the wolf, then the pen is destroyed, the flock is slaughtered. How often do we leave the gate open to the wolves?

  I have come to know the wolves; and the sheep whose eyes are half-closed; and the shepherds and sheep-dogs among us who must be vigilant against the wolves of life.

  2

  This is a mini-collection -- a chapbook, as it were -- of four stories, two of which are previously unpublished. The other two are not easily found in print. Each of these four tales, in some way, explores the wild things of life -- the predators and prey, and those who come between them as well as those who are caught in the predator's traps.

  The most obvious example is my story, "The Wolf," which launches this collection. It is a fable disguised as a suspense story, wrapped up into a tale of horror. It is not about a shepherd, but about a man and a boy who go up a mountain to hunt a wolf.

  In the story, "A Madness of Starlings," there are no obvious wolves, but there is the instinct of the narrator to guard against the predators of life -- to be a shepherd.

  "The American" is a story about a human wolf. I set it in a cafe in Rome, recalling times in my early twenties when I spent long nights with old friends and new friends wandering the streets of Washington, D.C., Paris, New York, West Berlin or London when we were all young and callow and feckless.

  On any given night, I'd be at a table with an Italian man, a French woman, a British couple, a young woman from Mexico, a South African guy, and two Canadians from opposite coasts. Often, their names got lost in a haze and swirl of conversation, cigarettes, wine, and espresso -- poisons of youth. We would go to clubs, or just sit at outdoor cafes. The night would turn to dawn before we'd go home, sleep it off and then hear about clubs or gatherings the following evening in other parts of whatever city we occupied. I miss those days because there was no future to them. There was only the "now." I did not have to be anything other than the American sitting at the table saying the things Americans say.

  And then one night at a cafe in Paris, I met someone who was a wolf. How did I know this was a wolf?

  We know wolves by what they say, because it's hard for a wolf to keep silent about its wolfish nature.

  Finally, the novelette, "The Dark Game" is included here. This is a prequel of sorts to my novel, The Hour Before Dark, but is barely connected to the novel.

  Of the four stories here, it is the least restrained, and the most pulpish and overtly violent of the lot. The narrator, Gordon, is disordered in his thinking, so the narrative itself becomes disordered; he's telling the story of his life to someone, although we do not know who it will be until the very end of the story.

  I had some misgivings about including it here, but there's something about its narrator's complete acceptance of a savage predatory nature that I find intriguing -- at least, in fiction. The cover art by Caniglia originally went toward illustrating this story, for it is the painting that Gordon mentions at the beginning of "The Dark Game." Given the binding of the wrists, I think this painting could apply -- at least, metaphorically if not actually -- to any one of these tales.

  Thank you for reading,

  Douglas Clegg

  The Wolf

  The wolf had come down from the mountains in March and killed sheep on the ranches. After several weeks of the attacks, parties of hunters went out to kill the wolf. None returned with the prize. More sheep would be taken before summer began. None of the ranchers believed the wolf would leave in the warm weather. A rancher who had lost many sheep hired a man of some reputation with wolves to come in from another county. This rancher also hired a local boy who had sometimes worked the ranch to go with the man up into the mountains. The boy would be eighteen by summer and wanted to make something right with the rancher. The boy had won trophies for shooting and hunting. He knew how to use a rifle and how to track game, although he had never hunted wolves before.

  The man preferred to hunt alone, but allowed the boy to go along with him.

  The man and the boy had been tracking the wolf since sunrise, but by the time the moon came up they made camp along the ridge. "Put your rifle over there," the man told the boy, pointing to a pile of rocks covered with fern. "Always put your rifle as far from you and the fire as possible. Accidents happen when they're too close. We don't sleep with them. The wolf won't attack us. It's sheep he's after, not you. Not me."

  The boy at first questioned this, because he liked to have his rifle close to him when he hunted. After a few minutes of consideration, the boy decided that the rancher had hired the man to lead, and he would let him. The boy also had done something he wished he hadn't that afternoon, by shooting at what he thought might be the wolf, but turned out to be a silver fox.

  By the fire, after supper, they sat across from each other. "We might have had him at the bluffs," the man said. "He's smarter than us, I think."

  "I didn't mean to shoot at it," the boy said.

  "It doesn't matter."

  "I thought I saw him."

  "Foxes can look like wolves, sometimes. Coyotes, too."

  "It was a stupid mistake."

  "I don't care. You're young."

  "I'm the best hunter for a hundred miles."

  "I can tell."

  "Mister, maybe they pay you money to hunt wolves, but when I hunt, it's for the love of the sport," the boy said. "I can take anything out fast. Once I ta
rget it, it's mine and that's the end of it."

  "I'm not here to argue with you, son."

  "I'm not your son."

  They went silent again. After he had relieved himself in the woods, the man checked their rifles, and then felt for the small gun beneath his jacket. The man returned to the fire and saw that the boy still sat there.

  "We need to get up before first light," he said.

  "How many wolves you kill?" the boy asked.

  "What?"

  The boy glared at him in the firelight. "How many?"

  "Twenty. Maybe more."

  "That's not a lot."

  "No," the man said. "It's not."

  "When I'm your age, I bet I'll have more than twenty pelts."

  "I don't keep souvenirs like scalps," the man said. "You need to sleep closer to the fire. Take your coat and anything in your pack. Cover yourself good. In a few hours, it'll be colder than you can imagine."

  "I hunt a lot," the boy said. "I know how cold it gets up here."

  The man did not sleep much. Just before dawn, he rose and rekindled the fire and drew an old rusty skillet from his pack. He made breakfast with the meager supplies he'd brought.

  The boy awoke to the smells, and after a mug of coffee began laughing.

  "You look like crap," the boy said.

  They wandered off the main trails that morning. The man saw evidence of the wolf's passing through a route between narrow rocks. There was blood of fresh kill and the rotting smell of a dead animal in the air as they moved further along through the pines. He motioned for the boy to remain still. The man went up along moss-covered rock, through underbrush, and finally came to a cliff's edge overlooking the valley. He glanced out over it to see the distant lake and the dots that were the ranches below. He saw three white-tail deer in a clearing among the trees just above the rocks where he stood.

  He sensed the wolf, yet did not see him.

  The boy followed him up the trail. When the boy drew close to him, the man whispered, "He knows we're following him. This is a problem now. Yesterday, he didn't know."

  The boy remained silent until they had made camp for the night.

  "It ain't my fault."

  "No one's blaming you."

  "You are. You think I scared him off. When I shot my rifle."

  The man continued to peel an apple as he leaned back against his pack. "You can't look for blame all the time."

  "It was one mistake," the boy said. "I won three hunting trophies before I was fifteen."

  The man glanced at him, nodding.

  "I bet they paid you a lot of money to do this," the boy said after a minute. "I bet it's a racket you got. You set wolves free down in the valley. Then, eventually, they hire you."

  The man laughed at first, but then saw that the boy meant every word. "There would be easier ways to make a living."

  "I just can't figure why they'd hire a stranger when we got a lot of hunters in the valley," the boy said. "That's all I meant."

  "What did you do makes you special to that town?" the man asked.

  The boy wouldn't tell him. He shook his head and said, "I just hunt. That's all. I can hunt and trap and shoot. I win a lot of trophies at the fairground. I can shoot just about anything. Could since I was a boy. First kill was a rabbit when I was ten."

  "Jack rabbit?"

  "Peter Cottontail," the boy said.

  The man said, "What's the last thing you killed?"

  The boy didn't answer.

  The man said, "First thing I ever killed was a wolf. I was younger than you. You kill a wolf, you start to understand it."

  After that, there wasn't much talk around the fire, and the man chuckled to himself when he rolled over to sleep. They had to sleep close beside each other for warmth. The boy's breathing kept him awake for another two hours.

  The next day, they went off toward Needle Heights, the bony points of the mountain that crossed into the mountain range leading up north.

  The boy asked him what he smelled in the air, and what signs of the wolf he followed, for the boy could not track as well as the man and knew it. At twilight, the man told him, "I learned from the old mountain men, when I was a boy. There are ways to track wolves. Different from tracking other animals. There was a mountain man, half-Cherokee half Scot. He was an old man, and he took me out to hunt wolves back in the days when we all hunted wolves. He told me that a wolf who got a taste for sheep would draw other wolves down to the ranches. You have to kill them before they can get back up to their pack. Usually, it's the young males. You see it with them first. Old wolves, they know not to go in the valleys, to the ranches. The young ones just see sheep and want them. We tracked this wolf for nine days, and when we finally cornered him, he didn't seem like a wolf anymore. He seemed like a man. I felt as if I knew him, just like I know you. I saw his eyes and I could almost tell what he was thinking. He wanted what you might want. Yes, you. What a lot of men want. He wanted a bite of it. A piece of it. He had wiles and instinct. He knew that if he found a pen full of sheep he might eat better than if he spent his time chasing deer or rabbit."

  "Wolves are like rabid dogs," the boy said.

  "You just never met one yet," the man said. "They're smart. When they feel threatened, they attack. When you hunt a wolf, you don't let him know he's being hunted until you absolutely have to do it. You wait. You have patience.

  You let him think you're just part of the scenery. Just another wolf, maybe. This wolf.

  He's just looking for the sheep and then a place to hide. When he finds the prize sheep, that's the one he wants. He doesn't want the sickly or the scrawny. He wants the best."

  "It's funny we kill 'em, then," the boy said. "'Cause that's the way some people are. Some people I could name. Where I live."

  "Wolves know each other," the man said. "When I had that wolf cornered, when I was younger than you, that wolf looked at me and knew I was a wolf, too. He'd met his match. Only I wasn't a wolf until that day. I didn't want to take a bite of anything until that day. You think you're a wolf, son?"

  "A wolf? No."

  "Some people are sheep. Maybe most people. And a few people in a thousand may be the vigilant dog that guards the sheep. Now and then, there's even a shepherd. But whenever a group of sheep are together, a wolf always comes 'round. You can count on it. That's why I get work. I'm an expert at wolf killing. They know it in towns in this region.

  Somebody talks to somebody, and they call me in and pay my fee," the man said. "And I track the wolf. I don't make errors. I don't let the wolf know he's being tracked. I usually work alone. I make sure the wolf I kill is the wolf that's causing distress for people. I don't just kill wolves because I can. I find the right wolf and I do my business."

  "I think all of them should just be killed. Every wolf. They all eventually will come down to the sheep. That's what I think," the boy said.

  "That would be wrong," the man said, looking the boy in the eye. "What if a man killed another man? Should all men be killed because that one man did wrong? Of course not."

  "We're talking wolves, not men."

  "Some men are wolves," the man said.

  When they had crossed into the deep forest, the man thought for sure the wolf was near. He motioned for the boy to remain silent and at the ready. The man pointed toward the ramble up ahead, overgrown with dead vines.

  He gave the signal for the boy to step ahead of him.

  The boy raised his rifle up. He stepped slowly between the rocks and trees.

  Breaking the silence, the man said, "I was wrong. It's not him."

  The boy glanced back at him. His face gleamed bright red with sweat. "How do you know?"

  "It's a bitch," the man said. "Heavy with cubs. I don't hunt like that."

  The boy moved forward. The man raised his rifle and shot it into the air above the boy's head.

  Birds flew out from the underbrush, and the boy turned around in anger.

  At camp that night, the boy said, "You did
that to scare me."

  The man nodded. "We are after one wolf only. We don't shoot any others."

  "How do you know she wasn't the wolf?"

  "I know the wolf is male. I know its size. I know the color of its coat. And I know its track. This was not the wolf."

  "I say kill them all," the boy said.

  "You're not a hunter if that's how you feel," the man said. "You may win a hundred trophies, son, but a hunter does not wish to kill them all."

  "I hate wolves," the boy said. "I'm tired. I want to go home. The food is awful. Your coffee's awful. I want to be in my bed. At home."

  "I know you do," the man said. "You shouldn't have come with me. But here you are. Make the best of it. We'll have him soon." After a moment, the man asked, "Why did you come?"

  "I owe it to him. The rancher."

  "What do you owe him?"

  "I made a mistake once, on his ranch. With him. I need to make it right."

  "Mistakes can be forgiven," the man said. "But it's not good to make them."

  The boy's lip turned up into a snarl. "That was a mistake. What you did today. Shooting like that. Warning the wolf. He was probably nearby."

  "Everyone makes mistakes."

  "I bet when they hired you..."

  "They?" the man asked.

  "The people in town. The ranchers. I bet when they hired you they thought you'd have this done fast. They sent me to learn from you, I bet. Learn. What I learned so far is you worry about wolves too much."

  "I wasn't hired by people. I was hired by a person."

  The boy thought about this for a moment, and seemed to chew on it. "The rancher was good to me once, but that changed. Maybe it was the wolf attacking his stock. Maybe it was something else."

  "You see him as a rancher. I know him as a man who lost his only daughter."

  The boy went silent for several minutes. The man watched him.

  Then, the boy said, "Not my fault, either."

  "I believe you," the man said.

  "I didn't do that to her," the boy said.

  "I believe you," the man said. "But he hired me to track this wolf. You came along because he wanted you to know what it meant to track a wolf. That's all."