Free Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht

growled at Basil when he started to move in again. In their frenzy, they were at the very limit of their capacity to obey, but they stood back as Ray knelt to the deer. They were ceding the kill to the pack leader.
    The young buck had been badly wounded. Its chest heaved and its breath raged in its throat. Its heart thrummed a muffled drum roll in its chest. Freed of the dogs, it tried to right itself in a convulsion of flailing legs, raised its head, dropped it, tried again. Each time, a flash of moon from one wild eye. Ray felt the spray from its nostrils on his bare skin. Calm, he willed it. Accept. Show me it can be done with grace. He put a hand on the straining neck and felt the heat, the wet, the quiver and throb. Musty wet fur and the copper smell of blood.
    The dogs' hunger for the kill was a dark blade of yearning. The deer's terror and its will for life was another, keen and pure.
    Ray was both. And Ray was the eye of knowing.
    Camera on Ray as he sits and lifts the quaking head to his lap: In the dark, he strokes the slimed fur, feels the hot spraying breath. He wills the deer to calm, but it twitches away from his touch. For a moment he can find no serious injury, and he wonders if maybe the buck has burst its very heart, its will to live that strong. The thought makes him weep. But as his hand moves along the muscle of the neck he feels a tear in the pelt and a hot pulsing flow. He tries to look into the deer's eye, to stare into its transformation, to meet the animal self in that instant. But the deer no longer sees anything. The eye is a black glistening orb, without mind, angled up at the sky. The thick pulse ebbs and soon stops. Ray waits for something to pass out of the deer. He wants to see it. He tries to feel what is in himself that is the same.
    A final exhalation and then all that's left are random quivers. The tension goes out of the night and the aftermath washes in, sadness and wonder. Ray knows the dogs' hunger to kill is what makes them dogs. The deer's desire to run and to live is what makes it a deer. Ray's ability to feel both, his yearning to understand both, is what makes him human.
    What are you really? This. The truth is rapturous and so hard.
    "I'm sorry," Ray whispers. "My beauty," he says. "Thank you," he says.
    For a while he strokes the deer's body and weeps for it and then he gives it up to the dogs.

8
     
    D R. SKOBOLD HAD kindly agreed to meet with her during his one o'clock lunch hour, with the understanding that his time was very limited. Figuring in drive times, that meant Cree had three hours for a visit to the New Main Library; if the San Francisco History Room there didn't have what she needed, it could refer her to other libraries, private collections, or museum archives. She parked in a pay lot and walked across the plaza between the ornate Edwardian dome of City Hall and the white art deco facade of the library
    The fog was gone and San Francisco's pastels and whites were crisp against a blue sky. Despite only six hours of sleep, she felt energized by the morning sunshine, and dealing with Bert didn't seem such an imposing problem. The guy was closed off, but she'd work on him, spend some off-duty time with him. Encourage him to call Mom, too, get reconnected there; maybe help him think more positively about life after retirement. She'd figure out who his wolfman was and clear up that one little piece for him.
    Today, the first step would be the house itself. Somebody had built it, owned it, lived in it; somebody had knowingly or unknowingly hosted the wolfman, knowingly or unknowingly repaired the floor above his crypt.
    The History Room was on the sixth floor, a huge square space filled with rows of counters, tables, and computers, with a few microfilm cartels set up along the left side. The archivist gave Cree an overview of resources and steered her toward a likely starting point, the indexes to the Sanborn Insurance Company maps. The hand-inked neighborhood maps showed