Big Bad Wolf

A Werewolf Tale

She had not been his first choice. He had a curvy little blonde all picked out and was just unbending from his crouch behind the laurels when a man, equally blonde and like enough to the girl to be her brother, sauntered up the trail toward her. The two of them had laughed together and gone bouncing off toward the ranger’s station, leaving him in the cold woods to fume. Broken plans irritated him.

He had made an effort to get his mind right again, pushing his anger to the dark area of his brain where it prowled like a caged cat, and sank back into watchfulness. The sky was full of unreleased snow; he could smell it. His skin brushed up against the dry winter air with an electric crackle that goaded his need. The next one, he promised himself, and it didn’t matter what she looked like …

And there she came, swinging down the trail alone with the hood of her fleecy coat pulled up, a long, striped scarf wrapped almost up to her nose. She was small and slim as a young girl, and he liked her walk. It was smooth and springy, the stride confident - an experienced hiker with a destination in mind. He waited until she chose the most difficult of the three trails, the one that ran deep into the miles of forest and wound up into the lonely boulder-strewn wilds where the rangers seldom patrolled, and then he followed.

*****

The park was vast and had its dangers. There were bears and bobcats. He had heard rumors of wolves, which made him smirk. There was only one hungry wolf in these woods, and he wore it; he flexed his muscles inside the khaki parka, imagining he could feel the tattoo stretch into a lope across the broad plain of his shoulders. If he were forced to be honest, he was nervous about meeting a bear. He hated anything bigger or stronger than he, hated the almost-alien touch of fear.

The woods had an evil reputation. Every year, there were hikers who vanished without leaving behind so much as a boot print. Last Christmas, two women had been found mangled in the brush, igniting the old Sasquatch stories and Indian legends that sold rounds of beer at the Lakeshore Inn and guns at the Owl’s Eye Trading Post. The deaths had occurred several months apart, in different areas of the park. The rangers had labeled them bear attacks, and he agreed that the first killing might have been done by a bear.

The memory of his last hunt made him grin, a leering exposure of teeth that held no warmth. Almost a full year had limped past since then, and his blood was up. He could be cautious when he had to be. His job in the kayak rental shack provided ample opportunity to target prey, and the fantasy of hunting had been enough for a while, but the work was seasonal. He’d been sitting alone in his two-room cabin for weeks, growing restless. The imminent snow had finally decided him. He wanted to get in one good hunt before the white came down, while the ground was bare and iron hard.

*****

The girl in the striped scarf covered ground in a fast, loose stride that surprised him. He had to work to keep up while maintaining enough distance and cover to prevent her from noticing him. His breath chuffed out with delight. He’d picked a good one; she’d be challenging to trail, though in the end it would be too easy. He watched her skinny little ass in the faded jeans. Chase me, chase me. Her narrow shoulders moved in an easy, arrogant swing that he found maddening and ridiculous. What did she have to be so cocky about? He would tower a foot over her, outweigh her by more than a hundred pounds. He’d take the sass out of her one-handed. That was a promise.

They moved through air as cold and grey as any ghost, up the rough trail called Medicine Wheel that ended in a natural clearing ringed with lichen-furred slabs of native limestone. The stone pushed up out of the shaley earth like the great, grinding molars of giants. That was the medicine wheel the trail sign referred to; not a tribal artifact at all, but the chthonic jut of the land itself in its eerily purposeful pattern.

It was not a place he visited often. His prey invariably chose the gentler trails, heading outward from the hub of the main ranger station toward the sunny deer-peopled meadows, or through the hardwood with binoculars and birders’ field guides. He had never dogged anyone up into the hard bones of the mountain where the spruces birthed a land of shadows; where the stones were said to be able to rise and walk, and where winter was a sentient force.

The girl glided upward, slipping like a shadow herself between the conifer bough that encroached on the trail. She did not pause for breath. She did not look about. She did not hesitate or flinch when his foot struck a stone, kicking it onto the trail with a careless clatter that caused him to bite off a curse. Her lack of nervousness, or even simple curiosity, intrigued and angered him. Didn’t she know there were monsters out here?

He made the horrible grinning face that was little more than a baring of his teeth. Emboldened, he stepped out of the thick cover of the trees and followed along behind the girl, his boots all but silent on the trail. They approached the medicine wheel and his hands twitched once, then flexed powerfully. The first snowflakes whirled with lazy grace from the low sky.

The girl stepped into the bare circle and unwound her scarf, letting it fall to the ground. She pushed back her hood and long, dark hair lifted into the breeze. He was surprised to see that it was streaked with white. He entered the clearing, thinking of himself as inevitable, a juggernaut of death hurtling toward the spark of her life like a great black wind. The chase was over. He felt almost tender toward her as he stood blocking the trail and removed his gloves.

When she turned toward him, he saw that she was older than he had thought. Her serious urchin’s face was unlined, but her eyes were old, impassive as cave-darkness. An electric snap of something almost-alien shot through his veins, but he was already moving toward her before he recognized it as fear. Too late, he saw her change.

*****

The snow fell thick and fast through still air, bringing with it a profound hush. It settled on his face, kissed his open eyes, melted into crimson slush around him where his blood pumped, slower now, onto the stony ground. His thoughts collided and dissipated before he could grasp them. He had a memory of being in the woods tacked to the crumbling wall of his mind like an old and tattered movie poster. The trees leaned into the dark halo of his vision like funeral attendees poring over a coffin.

He thought he heard the first rising note of a song, perhaps a Christmas carol. But there were no carolers in the woods. As he dwindled further, shutting down to a single point of light, the song suddenly made sense, and his cold lips spasmed into his characteristic grin. More than one, after all. More than one hungry wolf in these woods.