Free Wilderness by Dean Koontz Page A

except what mattered most—companionship.
    By my eighth birthday, I had spent so much time roaming the forest that it was as much a home to me as the house. Nothing in nature’s greenwood feared me or was repelled merely by the sight of me. Because I had no memory of the midwife, I had never seen a human being other than my mother, and she had impressed upon me that such an encounter would almost surely result in my death. But what traveled on wings or four feet did not judge me. Furthermore, I possessed considerable strength for my age, and quickness, and at all times an intuitive sense of where I was in the woods and of how best to navigate there. I wore hiking boots and blue jeans and a flannel shirt, and in one pocket I carried a Swiss Army knife with numerous tools. I was eight but older than eight in many ways, a boy but not a boy like any other.
    The most beautiful works of humanity, which I had seen in books of photography, were not as bewitching as any mixed hardwood forest. Oaks and maples and birches and cherry. And there were alders, the humble tree that even experienced woodsmen often fail to notice, so hardy that half the city of Venice, Italy, is still supported by alder piles that have withstood the ceaseless action of the sea for centuries. Wild acacia blooming red in summer. Wake-robin with its enormous white flowers. And all the graceful ferns, holly fern and licorice fern and daintily cut pulcherrimum and ostrich ferns with their fronds arranged like shuttlecocks. Because my mother loved nature and had a library of reference books, I knew the names of things. I loved the forest, and on that early October day, banished from the house, I took refuge in the wilderness, which at that time of year stood ablaze with autumn color.
    More than a mile from the house, I came to a favorite place, a formation of limestone sculpted by millennia of weather into soft flowing forms that made it appear to be melting. Perhaps forty feet in diameter, the mass was cored through here and there with natural flute holes leading to hollows within,some of which could be accessed through openings around the base. When the wind was strong enough and blew from the north, it made a worthy instrument of the limestone and piped from it the most haunting sounds.
    I sat on the highest point, seven feet above the forest floor, and offered myself to the sun, which slanted through the overhanging trees in warm golden shafts. The resplendent woods were filled with nearly as much birdsong as color, mostly juncos and orioles, but the hairstreak butterflies that had dazzled with their blue wings were gone with the summer. I mourned the summer that autumn had recently dispatched, for soon the forest would be less welcoming, and many creatures would grow less active or migrate farther south—or die.
    When the wolf appeared, I was not surprised, for I had seen a few before, whidding through the trees, so silent that they might have been ghosts of wolves long gone. For years, these mountains had been purged of wolves by people who misunderstood them and wrongly supposed they were a threat to human beings, but they were returning now, as shy as they were magnificent.
    Wolves rarely will make eye contact, for they are highly social animals who understand that a direct stare can be a challenge. Their tendency to study other creatures indirectly has been misinterpreted as sly cunning. This one, a large male, emerged from the gracefully arcing fronds of a mass of ferns, almost as if materializing from a spray of green scarves cast down by a magician. He stood before the stone on which I sat and stared up at me, making eye contact for a moment before lowering his gaze submissively.
    We didn’t fear each other. And as I would learn in the years to come, I would be in far greater danger in the presence of people than I would be alone in the woods with a wolf.
    I rose to my feet and peered down at him. He looked directly at me again, and then away. Because