personal encounter.
13. To his surprise, the wolf turns out to be someone he used to know quite well
I f the wolf charged him, he decided not to assume the fetal position but let out a blood-curdling scream and crouch low and go for the beast’s throat. He thought he felt a knife in the pocket of the parka, and he slipped his hand in and found it among the flotsam, the lengths of string, needlenose pliers, duct tape, and empty snoose can, a Bic pen, some lead sinkers, scraps of paper. He opened the knife. The blade was dull, but it would do. He withdrew it slowly and held it in his right hand hanging loosely at his side. The wolf blinked. He had noticed. Good. A little zap of confusion in the animal’s brain. It was fifteen feet to the wolf and fifteen feet to the door of Floyd’s shack which, he reckoned, he could make in three seconds, but maybe that’d be too sudden. Better to take five seconds to stroll purposefully to the door and open it and slip inside. He guessed the shack was nothing the wolf cared to be part of. Probably it smelled horrible to him, the stench of man and his beverages and his dreadful urine.
“No, not horrible,” said the wolf in a low whispery voice. “Once I was a man myself, like you. I remember the smells. Some of them with fondness. I remember your smell very well.”
“Who are you, sir?”
“We used to camp out here overnight, you and me. There were eight or ten of us, all in one tent.” The wolf glanced toward shore. “Over there by the marsh.” The wolf spoke without moving his lips, the voice simply emerged from him.
“We were in Scouts together?”
“I am your age. Or I was when I died. ”
So it was Ralph.
They were standing on the spot where Ralph’s canoe sank that chill October day in 1992.
He went out duck-hunting in his green wooden canoe, his big rubber hip boots on, and the canoe tipped and he plunged into the chill water and the hips boots filled up with water and he sank and drowned. They dragged the lake for him and two days later his body floated to the surface and drifted toward shore. Floyd found him. Floyd lifted this horrible mass of bloated flesh into his boat and laid his slicker over it and never went hunting again.
“How are you, Ralph?”
A silly question.
“I was a happy man with a sad life and you are a sad man with a happy life,” he said. “Just for your information. You can put away the knife, James. You won’t need it. I’m here to guide you, not attack you. ”
“I don’t think I need a guide, Ralph. I’m doing okay on my own.”
The wolf sneezed and then sneezed again. Or maybe it was laughter. He spoke slowly. “You are a frightened man and you live in vast ignorance. And now you’ve come to a place you never intended to be and there is more at stake here than you know.”
James put the knife away. “Do you mind if we step inside?” he said. And the door to the shack swung open.
He put another birch log on the fire and got down a cup and poured whiskey in it.
“What happened to you that day, Ralph?”
“I was hunting, wading through the cattails, and I shot two ducks with two shots and they plunged into the water a hundred yards from shore. I could see them out there flapping and I got in my canoe to put them out of their misery. My old retriever Jackson had died in March and I grieved for him and it took me a while to get myself a pup and by the time hunting season rolled around, he wasn’t trained in so I had to retrieve the birds myself.”
“I remember, you always hunted alone.”
“I did. I liked my friends well enough but I didn’t go in for drinking in a duck blind and the bad jokes and the loud talk. They didn’t care if they got game or not. I did. That was the point of it. I loved hunting. It wasn’t about killing things, it was about the intense awareness when you sit perfectly still with eyes sharpened, nose to the wind, ears open, your whole being at attention. The hunter can sit for