The Talisman

outside a root cellar where Wolf was safely jailed.
    The odd, disturbing thought came to him again that Wolf was safely jailed.
    Wolf’s feet slid back under the door, and Jack thought he had a glimpse of them becoming more concentrated, slimmer, narrower.
    Wolf grunted, panted, grunted again. He had moved well back from the door. He uttered a noise very like ‘Aaah’.
    ‘Wolf?’ Jack said.
    An earsplitting howl lifted up from above Jack: Wolf had moved to the top of the gully.
    ‘Be careful,’ Jack said, knowing that Wolf would not hear him, and fearing that he would not understand him even if he were close enough to hear.
    A series of howls followed soon after – the sound of a creature set free, or the despairing sound of one who wakes to find himself still confined, Jack could not tell which. Mournful and feral and oddly beautiful, the cries of poor Wolf flew up into the moonlit air like scarves flung into the night. Jack did not know he was trembling until he wrapped his arms around himself and felt his arms vibrating against his chest, which seemed to vibrate, too.
    The howls diminished, retreating. Wolf was running with the moon.
    10
    For three days and three nights, Wolf was engaged in a nearly ceaseless search for food. He slept from each dawn until just past noon, in a hollow he had discovered beneath the fallen trunk of an oak. Certainly Wolf did not feel himself imprisoned, despite Jack’s forebodings. The woods on the other side of the field were extensive, and full of a wolf’s natural diet. Mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, squirrels – all these he found easily. He could have contained himself in the woods and eaten more than enough to carry him through to his next Change.
    But Wolf was riding with the moon, and he could no more confine himself to the woods than he could have halted his transformation in the first place. He roamed, led by the moon, through barnyards and pastures, past isolated suburban houses and down unfinished roads where bulldozers and giant asymmetrical rollers sat like sleeping dinosaurs on the banks. Half of his intelligence was in his sense of smell, and it is not exaggerating to suggest that Wolf’s nose, always acute, had now attained a condition of genius. He could not only smell a coop full of chickens five miles away and distinguish their odors from those of the cows and pigs and horses on the same farm – that was elementary – he could smell when the chickens moved. He could smell that one of the sleeping pigs had an injured foot, and one of the cows in the barn an ulcerated udder.
    And this world – for was it not this world’s moon which led him? – no longer stank of chemicals and death. An older, more primitive order of being met him on his travels. He inhaled whatever remained of the earth’s original sweetness and power, whatever was left of qualities we might once have shared with the Territories. Even when he approached some human dwelling, even while he snapped the backbone of the family mutt and tore the dog into gristly rags he swallowed whole, Wolf was aware of pure cool streams moving far beneath the ground, of bright snow on a mountain somewhere a long way west. This seemed a perfect place for a transmogrified Wolf, and if he had killed any human being he would have been damned.
    He killed no people.
    He saw none, and perhaps that is why. During the three days of his Change, Wolf did kill and devour representatives of most other forms of life to be found in eastern Indiana, including one skunk and an entire family of bobcats living in limestone caves on a hillside two valleys away. On his first night in the woods he caught a low-flying bat in his jaws, bit off its head, and swallowed the rest while it was still jerking. Whole squadrons of domestic cats went down his throat, platoons of dogs. With a wild, concentrated glee he one night slaughtered every pig in a pen the size of a city block.
    But twice Wolf found that he was mysteriously forbidden from killing his prey, and this too made him feel at home in the world through which he prowled. It was a question of place, not of any abstract moral concern – and on the surface, the places were merely ordinary. One was a clearing in the woods into which he had chased a rabbit, the other the scruffy back yard of a farmhouse where a whimpering dog lay chained to a stake. The instant he set a paw down in these places, his hackles rose and an electric tingling traversed the entire distance of his spine.