The Wild

by Whitley Strieber

  "I don't think I—" He stopped. The moment his attention had gone into the effort of speaking, the wolf had leaped up inside, ready to surge out.

  "You guys stay at home. We don't want any funny business out on these piers."

  "I—I—"

  "Get in the goddamn car. We're runnin' youse in. Two creatures start a naked trip out here, pretty soon all the creatures are doing it, am I right?" The officer made a move toward Bob. A strong hand connected with his arm. Bob jumped away: where the cop had touched grew a tuft of fur. "Oh, come on," the cop said in a bored tone. "We'll beat you up if you make this a pain in the ass." He grabbed again.

  Bob still felt loose and unreal, like a jelly. He skittered away, dragging a paw on his left arm, then with a dry hiss a whole left foreleg. When he tried to bring back his arm, it would not come.

  "Halt, you're under arrest," one of the cops shouted. The other came at Bob, his arms outstretched. Bob backed up, warding off those awful hands with his one human fist.

  He saw the misty sky and heard a rush of air around him. Then he hit the water with a whooshing splash. Cold, stinking river water poured down his throat, making him choke. Choking, he sank deeper and deeper, until there was no sound but the pulsing of distant marine engines. Something big and clingy wrapped around his midriff. He struggled to release himself from it, arching his back, clawing, trying to paddle.

  His attention was shattered, and he knew that the wolf would win if he didn't regain it. The wolf leaped, struggled, twisted. There was nausea and the seething of skin. He fought: foot not paw, flesh not fur, and then he felt the eerie swinging of the tail. The pressure of the water was slaughtering his ears. He concentrated his whole attention into a single dot of consciousness. And he knew he had won: down in the depths of the river, he was human again. There came the pounding of blood, shock after shock, the hammer of suffocation. He had to breathe. The agony was amazing, total, all-involving, far worse than what he had imagined.

  He felt his flesh popping like sausage skin, felt the emergence of the reborn thing as it climbed out of him and became him. Each quake of his heart brought a flash to his eyes. In a moment he was going to take in a heave of water, cough, and commence the unmanaged panic of his dying.

  Cold water rushed past his face. He drew back his lips, felt his mouth opening, felt his every muscle straining, his legs churning, his lungs expanding to whistling, airless balloons, then a gust of water blasted down his throat. He gagged, his body contorting to a knot, then he coughed it out, expelling it through his nose, helplessly breathing again—but this time it was cold, dank air.

  His head had broken water. Again he breathed, choked, coughed, gagged, breathed, fought the waves, raised his nose high, and swam along, sweeping the water aside with his four powerful legs.

  He was an amazing distance away from the pier, and his nose took in the myriad scents of the watery world, the fish, the creosote from all the rotting timbers, the sewage and trash, the skim of oil on the water's surface.

  He cocked his ears toward the pier. The two cops were standing there calling, playing their flashlight on the near waters. They were looking for a blubbering human swimmer, though, not the sleek creature who watched them.

  He was a wolf again, thoroughly and completely. His concentration had been shattered at just the wrong moment. He screamed out his rage, but this time even that vestige of his humanity was gone. It seemed that his return to the wolf form had worked more perfectly than the first transformation. He was now smoothly wolf: an animal howl echoed across the Hudson waters.

  Dog-paddling steadily, he turned himself around and around, seeking the closest shore. But there was no close shore. He was being taken by the tidal current, and taken fast. Manhattan was already farther away than Jersey. He could see the lights of cars emerging from the Holland Tunnel. Far upriver the George Washington Bridge glimmered. A tug sounded its mournful drone. The mist sometimes obscured the riverbanks, making it even harder for him to orient himself.

  He had lost sight of the police on the shore. Manhattan was now an anonymous grandeur of lights, coldly self-centered, indifferent to the mere animal that was going to drown before its glow. Dog-paddling was an exhausting way to swim, but if he stopped he sank. He kept his muzzle just above the water, held his ears back to keep the cold out, and dug at the water with his tiring legs. The cold made him ache, the pain distracted him, the spinning lights on the shores made him fear that he was swimming in circles.

  It would have been easy to just stop paddling, but there could be no question of that now. His experience of drowning had cured him of any desire to do so; the closeness of death had ignited in him a hunger for more life. He worked furiously in body and mind, trying to find some way to survive.

  He had entered that state beyond exhaustion, where the flesh is supported only by will. It is a condition of rapture that seems while it lasts that it might go on forever. It doesn't. The end is always complete and total collapse. Bob swam on. There were lights ahead, but he could not tell if they were a ship at anchor or the Jersey shore.

  Then he heard a bell ring loudly and he understood that one of the lights must be a buoy, and perhaps quite near. He cocked his ears—water ran down inside, roaring and causing these fine wolf ears excruciating pain.

  There was a flash of white noise in his head. His chest constricted, he gagged. Dimly he realized that he was now completely submerged, still paddling but no longer powerfully enough to keep himself afloat. He remembered a morning long ago, fishing for perch at the John 0. Fishing Camp with his father, looking down into the green water, wondering that there were creatures who needed it as we need air. He remembered the flopping struggle of the caught fish, the astonishment in their golden flat eyes.

  Then he surfaced, heard the bell, and knew he was soon going to stop swimming. No matter how hard he tried, his legs were slowing down. For relief he let his back legs stop and churned with his forelegs, just keeping his nose in the air.

  The bell rang again, a clear, sharp peal. Before and above him he saw a flashing green light, and he heard the river sloshing against the buoy. He flailed with his paws, touched the bouncing thing. Its sides were smooth, but there was a superstructure that housed the bell. Conceivably he could lodge his front paws up in there and hang on.

  He tried to grasp the side of the buoy but his claws scratched helplessly. For hands this would be simple. He tried to concentrate, to picture a hand where his paw now scrabbled, a hand with its flexible fingers, its reach, its power.

  No change occurred. It was as if his earlier efforts had drained a battery. Change now seemed completely impossible. He was as much a wolf as he had been a man. He snorted, yapped, tried to hug the buoy with both paws. The buoy was rusty above the waterline, and he dragged slowly down until he reached the algae that clung to the base, whereupon he slipped and splashed off into the water.

  Excited, snapping, frantic, he came to the surface and tried again. This time his forepaws held. He scrambled with his rear paws, trying for at least a little purchase in the goop that adhered to the buoy's underwater surfaces. Again he kicked, and again failed, and came slowly down the side. Then one claw caught what was probably the rough edge of a weld. For an instant he was poised, unmoving. He could feel his forepaws beginning to slip. Another inch and he would topple backward into the water. Slowly, carefully, he began to straighten the rear leg that was holding. First a bare quarter of an inch, then another quarter, he slid up the buoy. It was working, definitely. Higher and higher he slid, stretching at last to his full length. He felt the edge of the cage that enclosed the bell. Then he was falling, twisting, splashing, turning beneath the waves. He came up fast, slamming his head against the bottom of the buoy so hard he saw a pink flare behind his eyes and was for a moment stunned.

  •Then he made his way out from under and surfaced again. His swimming was slow. He might as well have been wearing saddlebags filled with lead. If only he could shed this soggy fur, if only he coul
d rest just for five minutes. He could actually hear cars on the shore, horns honking at the tunnel entrance, the sigh of the roads, even a radio playing on the bank, entertainment for some lonely fisherman.

  He wanted life, his blood hungered for it, his breath sped through his lungs for it, he yearned toward the shore. He did not think he could make it. There were now just two choices, either he could try the buoy a last time, or he could attempt another fifteen minutes in the water. If he failed at either, he was dead.

  The buoy rang again, its sound deafening and yet also peaceful, reminding him of a church at dawn, of the flat seascapes of the world. He smelled coffee and hot dogs. The fisherman had opened a snack.

  Desperate now, Bob struck for the shore. The buoy was useless to him. Every few moments he would find himself underwater. It would take a burst of energy to get him to the surface, and every time he did that he was a bit less able. Soon he was spending more time below the surface than above it. His ears were roaring, his muscles were frantic, he wasn't getting enough air.

  Then the water was suddenly very cold and the lights were whirling again. He was in a powerful current. He relaxed, realizing that this was the end. The lights, which had been no more than a few hundred feet away, began to get smaller. He sloshed with listless paws, waiting for his body to give up its struggle. The water caressed him. He closed his eyes.

  As soon as he sank he found himself rolling against rocks. Rocks! They couldn't be more than five feet below the surface. He paddled again, reached the surface, flopped and splashed, looking for a place shallow enough to stand. But he was rushing along so fast he couldn't even begin to get purchase. The rocks tantalized him, sweeping by just below the tips of his paws.

  Then he came to something quite solid. The current literally shoved him against it. He found himself clambering over cutting stones, clambering and swaying. He stood, astonished, his head hanging, too weak even to look up. Then he toppled to his side, his legs still weakly paddling, but they paddled air, for he had come up on a rocky promontory of the shore.

  "Oh Lord, who—" Bob heard the voice of the fisherman, smelled his food, his coffee. His impulse was to run, but he was beyond anything so draining. All he could do was lie on his side just where he was, and stare with one open eye up into the dank gray-red sky of fog and mist.

  "You is a dog. Lord, you done swum out of the Hudson, ain't you? Lord, Lord."

  He took off his own coat, the fisherman, and rough-dried Bob's freezing, soaking fur. Then he stroked his head. "All I got is the end of a wiener," he said. "Ain't much food for a big dog like you, but it ain't air either."

  Then there was meat at his lips, meat and bread and tangy hot mustard. Even a little kraut. Bob gulped down the food. His eyes closed. The fisherman threw an old, dank tarp over him.

  Soon there was a slight warming of his body, which was an infinite comfort. At once he slept, and he dreamed that he had come to the reefs of heaven, and found there an old black man with a hot-dog end and a rotting square of canvas, who was an angel of God.

  Part Three

  Country Life

  The country has been amputated, its soul

  is bigger than its place.

  The country has perfect mist, morning light

  that reconstructs what is true.

  The country is where you go to find what you lost,

  and find what lost you.

  —Robert Duke, "Country Life" (1989)

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE MORNING SUN HEATED THE CANVAS TARP. WHEN Bob awoke, it was from a nightmare of the gas chamber at the pound. His fur was steaming, his body sanded with pain. It was as if every muscle had been wound with barbed wire. His stomach was tight and sour. He was ravenous. In his mouth there lingered a maddening temptation of hot dog.

  He got up, shaking the canvas off his back. All around him were dank, twisted rocks. Beyond rose a cliff of the lower palisades, tall and complicated. He moved forward, sniffing the crisp air. Everywhere there was the sour sweetness he was coming to recognize as the ground odor of human bodies. Above it was the stink of the river, the nostalgic rot of autumn leaves, warm asphalt, faint car exhausts, and a musty odor of animals, no doubt the rats that lived along the riverbanks. His stomach knocked and a film of drool covered his tongue.

  He was damned if he was going to eat a raw rat. And yet he found himself imagining a lovely steak tartare, the way they would serve it at the Palm, one of his favorite restaurants. It had been a long time since he could afford lunch at the Palm.

  Would he get rabies from eating a rat? Well, that was nothing to worry about. He would never eat anything alive. He was going to be the first noncarnivorous wolf.

  His real desires were for a cup of coffee ground at home from Jamaica Blue Mountain beans, some flaky croissants from Patisserie Lanciani, and a nice stupefying Sunday morning with the Times and WBAI's Music of a Sunday Morning in the background. Add to that some fresh-squeezed orange juice from the Korean market on Bleecker, and perhaps—just to be bad—a couple of slices of bacon.

  Even so, the rats smelled kind of good. He couldn't see them, of course, but he knew they were there, and he sensed that every rat eye was on the monster that had intruded on their domain.

  Maybe there were delis with salad bars here in Jersey. He could burst in and start gobbling down the kappa maki, the endive, and the olivata. He'd be shooed away, of course, but what the hell. Hit three or four delis and he'd be full.

  There was movement before him, back near where the old road passed under the cliff's face. He cocked his ears and was rewarded with a richly detailed scuttle of noises: the chugging of rat breath, the silver rustle of rat paws on stone, the swallowed whines of rat fear.

  They knew what he could not yet admit, that in the end he would hunt them, that among them there was one who soon would die. He drew deep, exploratory breaths, hoping that the fisherman had left some bits behind. Even one of the greasy, tumor-ridden Hudson fish would be preferable to a rat. For God's sake, rats were nothing more than reprocessed garbage.

  His body's motives were not those of his mind. His body simply wanted to eat. It was also efficient And it was working on the problem. While he worried, it had targeted a hole that was full of rats. His ears said that they were seething there, uneasy, noses pointing toward him. When he moved forward, there was a tensing. He stopped;

  Soon the tension died down. He found that his tail had lifted, and he felt some sparkle in himself, a glee as sharp as glass. He pranced forth on the hunt—and saw not just one hole but a dozen explode with fast gray shapes. They skittered about, their tails swirling behind them, their little voices shrilling. It was a dance of dread, and he suddenly knew the source of all dance.

  His body twisted, skidded, turned, and leaped. Then there appeared in his sight a long rat crusted with offal, its teeth yellow, one eye filmed gray. His nose smelled the saline freshness of its blood, sensed the heat of its body, and he tasted in his muzzle the minute hurricane of its breath, which reeked of wet cigarette ends, pigeon droppings, and bugs.

  His muzzle was a quick weapon. Once he had the rat in his vision he was able to follow it with the dexterity of a radar guidance system. A flush of wet filled his mouth. His belly churned, becoming blazing hot. This was a stomach far more powerful than its human counterpart. As he matched the rat's staccato march he noted fierce acid fumes rising from his own throat. Probably his stomach could digest damn near anything.

  There came a moment when the rat's neck would be just where he needed it. He reached down, snapped, and drew the scrabbling, screaming creature into the air. It had heft, it was no small rat. When it tried to turn around and bite him, he cracked the whip with its body. As if turned off by the will of God, it went limp. He had killed it as easily as that. It fell from his jaws with a wet thud. Now all the other rats, who had become indifferent as soon as they realized they had not been singled out, took a new interest. There would soon be carrion to scavenge.

  Bob sniffed
at the thing. Up close he could smell so many different varieties of unpleasantness that he was unable to count them all. The worst, perhaps, was a distinct odor of benzine. The rat also had a scaly growth on the side of its head, that looked almost like the plates of a lizard's brow. A bizarre cancer.

  His humanity told him not to touch this diseased thing. His wolfhood wanted to gobble it up and have done with it. He pushed it with his nose. The surviving rats gathered eagerly around, waiting for him to finish.

  He wanted to get out of here. But the dead rat kept him lingering. Without hands, how would he skin it? How could he bear the crunch of the bones? His stomach was molten iron. Without any conscious decision at all, he gave the rat's soft underfur a smart nip.

  His jaw seemed to go off like a cocked pistol. Entirely without his conscious participation, he had ripped the rat down the middle. Its blood flowed out, steamy and quick, causing eager scurrying to break out among the others. They followed their brother's blood down the cracks and commenced drinking at once, their little lapping filling the still, expectant air.

  He recoiled at the sight of the slick, purple guts spilling over the stones. How could he be doing this? A thrill of fascination went through him— this curiously automatic and quite skilled behavior must come from instinct. Becoming a good wolf was like learning a musical instrument.

  In this case, though, success would mean actually eating the ghastly mess on the rocks in front of him, something he did not at all want to do. The smell of it, so intense and bloody and alive, made him step back. Then, quite suddenly, one of the rats dashed in and grabbed some offal. That made him growl and lunge forward, and before he could stop himself, the warm meat was going down his throat. He felt it on his tongue, fur and skin and muscle, little rat bones, he tasted it and the taste was absolute meat. Then it was gone, the whole damn rat, even the tail.