THE WHITE WOLF

by Franklin Gregory

  “Is he all right? Is he all right?” she kept asking.

  Slowly, incoherently, she told what happened. And she kept saying:

  “Its eyes. I never saw an animal’s eyes like that! Everything about it was vicious—except those eyes. They seemed almost human. They seemed to plead.”

  And still later when she had gained some measure of composure—”I know a wolf when I see one. They can say what they want about dogs, but I wasn't born and brought up in Alberta for nothing.”

  That night, about the village of Melton Crossing, the hunt was intensified under a full moon.

  There is a point on the boundary between the de Camp-d’Avesnes and Trent estates, in the north sections, where the Neshaminy crosses from the tatter ground to Pierre's. And there is a path along the south bank. And there, that night, David Trent walked alone.

  The moon’s white light filtered through the bare branches of the trees and spread a crazy lace upon the earth. David absorbed the beauty and walked in solemn loneliness. What an insane thing life was, he thought. And his thoughts returned insistently to Sara. It seemed ages since he had seen her—but, at most, it must have been only three weeks. He tried to count the days.

  Lord! he’d been so happy before. He wondered if the wreckage might, in much part, be blamed upon himself. Certainly, as a lover, he had been unromantic enough; had spent too much time with the farm; had fought shy when Sara wanted him to join in some youthful deviltry. Had he been afraid of life, afraid of her, or afraid of his own emotions? He remembered telling her:

  “Life’s well enough—to watch. The trouble is a fellow feels once in a while like sticking his fingers into the machinery. But he can’t do that. He’s liable to pinch ’em.”

  Sara had said, “But if everybody felt that way, there would be nothing in life to watch.”

  “I suppose so,” he answered glumly.

  Now he wondered: Was it that shyness that made him lose her? Was that why she became so cold? Or was it his suspicions in a mad moment? His maniacal outbreak that night on the lawn? But how could David possibly know what went on in her mind?

  He tramped moodily along the path. He thought of his Ayrshires. Something wrong with them, that was definite. They hadn’t been producing as they should, even for the winter months. The vet had been over, had found nothing wrong—physically. They ate well enough, but they didn't give. Suddenly David knew that they made no difference.

  The path forked and one branch went through the wood onto higher ground and one ran down close to the creek, and David paused in indecision. And pausing, he thought he heard a quiet splash in the waters. And then he saw Sara striding easily up the bank.

  IF, CONSCIOUSLY, David did not know why he was walking through the woods, he knew now from the tumbling of his heart.

  Sara saw him and was not startled. She said, simply, “Hello, David.” As if she had expected him.

  He stepped toward her, stopped.

  “But you can say something, David?”

  He looked down at her face.

  “What can I say?” he asked.

  She said, softly, “You can say why you haven’t been around lately.”

  He stared at her then. He stammered helplessly, “I—I didn't think you wanted me. You were—so cold.”

  Wistfulness crept into her voice.

  “I do not feel cold, David.”

  Almost imperceptibly, she leaned toward him. And David felt a vague discomfort—as if some blurred signal were warning him of some equally indefinite danger. It was but momentary. And then he had her in his arms.

  “Darling.”

  Over and over, again and again he kissed her smooth full lips. Over and over he stroked the velvet of her hair; and gently his fingers caressed her soft cheeks. But finally, when he held her out at arm's length to gaze at her, and to delight in that gaze, he was surprised at the look of her. There was impassioned yearning, hunger so vividly portrayed that he became afraid.

  Arm in arm, they turned and walked back along the path. They walked without words. And David trembled. He could not analyze this thing that had happened. But he knew, with definiteness, that here was a relationship he had never felt when they were together before. Then he had adored Sara—but within the bounds of reason. Now, reason had fled; control had gone. Instead, a merciless compulsion attended him, grew more intense with each passing moment. The touch of her hand inflamed him.

  They stopped once in a patch of moonlight. The discomfort seemed to return to David. He felt that, when she turned her face up toward his, the yearning in her eyes was but a mask; that behind the mask was calculation. It was as if she were watching, with the scientific coldness of a biologist, the hot growth within him unfold.

  And so he stood, dimly fearful.

  They kissed. And she smiled mistily. And then they walked on. And after a little they stopped again and David lit a match for cigarettes. Her hand held the cigarette to her lips. And in the flare of the match David saw her fingers.

  “Dearest! Why, what’s happened?”

  He felt the pain his own. But she only glanced at her swollen fingers and shrugged gently.

  “Not much. Still throbs a bit. I slipped and fell back there and cracked my hand against a tree.”

  Anxiously he lit another match to examine her injury.

  “More like you’d crushed it,” he said. He was aware that she was looking at him curiously. Then she dropped her cigarette and with both palms reached up and stroked his face. And he dropped his cigarette. And again they were in each other’s arms. They clung to each other.

  They clung to each other. And when the first dizziness of delight passed, David felt that her kisses were more cruel than sweet. They were harsh. They hurt. In the breathless pause that followed he tasted blood from his lip.

  An insulated wall rises between the classes of society, so that one class cannot really know the thoughts and reasoning of the other. Though each may hold possession .of precisely the same facts, each will interpret those facts differently in the light of its own culture.

  So Pierre and Manning Trent, materialistic men, spoke only of objective possibilities. But at the Well, men who feared God were not unequal to coating a problem with a paint of supernatural evil.

  They were too close, for one thing, to the Hexenkopf—and to all for which the Hexenkopf stood. They could see, from high hills on clear days, that forested Witch’s Head frowning starkly against the northern sky. And they remembered the dark stories of their grandfolk of how the witches from the very Dutch country in which they lived had gathered there.

  There were men at the Well who had been close to the Hexenkopf—so close that they could see the ominous lights on the lower slopes. They knew that magic herbs grew there and that trees were stunted and died young. And they knew that certain crones worshipped the devil there.

  Their forefathers had come from the north of Germany to the New World in the cramped holds of tiny wooden ships. They had brought more than themselves and their worldly possessions. They had brought their centuries-old beliefs.

  For them, evil was a terrible reality. They feared God, but they feared the devil more. Their faith in demons was as real as their bodies and their spirits. And in the strength of that faith they had moved a mountain. Their horror of that damnably infamous Blocksberg in’the Hartz was transferred, with their arrival, in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, to the gloomy Hexenkopf of the Delaware Valley.

  So, by that same metaphysical process, they had transplanted the hunger rocks from their native Rhine to the Lehigh. And they knew for a certainty that when the flat white rocks were uncovered by receding waters, the year would be a year of famine.

  Hexerei still flourished beneath the coating that the less discerning described as twentieth-century civilization. Heinrich Derhammer drove Pierre’s brand-new ninety-horsepower station wagon. But, when Freda was ill of a complaint, he was not averse to driving in that same station wagon fifteen miles over back roads to the farm shack
of old Hans Ehlers, the hex doctor. There, for a dollar, Freda would buy a salve. In itself, she knew, the salve was not potent. Its potency was conceived by the immaterial ingredients which old Hans injected into it—the ingredients of conjuration.

  And was there not the fine black stallion the Caldwells owned? Had it not come trotting down the road the day after August Haussler disappeared? The constable took it to the pound, but no owner was located. And finally, at auction, the Caldwells bought it.

  “Queer piece,” they said at the Well. “Queer piece it turned up the day after Augie went away. And along the same road he was last seen. Hear tell it’s of high spirit, too.”

  Nobody came out and said what each one secretly thought. In the code of those at the Well this was not done. A stating of ominous fact was sufficient. Not because one feared the jeers of his fellows, but because it was dangerous to name names and to place the finger too specifically on certain points that were better left alone.

  That was why the experience of Nathan Messner and Heinrich Derhammer was received with the solemnity it deserved, and without comment.

  It was four nights after the incident at Melton Crossing. Nate and Heinrich, armed with rifles, were tramping up the Neshaminy “to see what we might make out.” There had been a light snow in the afternoon and then the skies had cleared and the stars hung brightly low like the points of icicles.

  They had left Pierre’s land and followed the path through the Trent place and into the small canyon through the hills back of the Caldwells. At the north mouth of the canyon the hills opened out, and there was more wood. And there was scrubby growth about under the trees. Suddenly Messner gripped Heinrich's arm, “Hear that?” he whispered.

  They stood rigid, ears acute. To their left, away from the creek, they heard the soft crunching of a moving pressure upon the snow and the muffled crackle of leaves beneath the snow. The sound neared. Heinrich slowly raised his rifle.

  Then, into the clearing not twenty feet away, a huge white beast trotted. It was sleek of form and long of snout and it white teeth shone. Behind it, but vaguer to the eye because the shadows of the shrubbery fell across it, a second animal drew up short.

  Heinrich took aim. He fired. The white beast leaped into the air, somersaulting out of sight.

  “Him I got!” Heinrich cried.

  “Ja!” yelled Nate.

  Bedlam broke loose from behind the tangled brush. Heinrich and Messner followed. The sharp thorns of the thicket caught at their clothing. They plunged on in the wake of Messner’s flashlight.

  “Not far it can go,” Heinrich muttered. But Messner had paused and was studying the ground.

  “They's tracks,” he said, “but they ain’t no blood.”

  The animal sounds were distant now. And finally, there were no sounds at all. Moodily, Heinrich looked at the ground. They retraced their steps to the clearing. There was no blood there. Heinrich said wonderingly:

  “Never did I miss like that a shot.”

  Messner’s face was grim. He said with studied significance:

  “Ya didn’t miss. Ya had a perfect bead on him.”

  “Between the eyes right in,” Heinrich agreed. He shook his head slowly, unable to comprehend.

  He added, “But where is the blood yet?” The men stared off into the wood.

  “Smart devil!” grumbled Messner.

  “No wolf’s so smart. Must have dog blood.”

  “Sein. It was the wolf. With your eyes you saw. Behind it another. A gray, a littler one.”

  “Whoever heard of a white wolf?” Messner demanded. “Snow white.”

  They fell silent then. For from a far distance across the country they heard a wolf’s bay, at first low and whimpering, and then louder and louder and more piercing until, reaching a high hysterical note, it stopped abruptly. In the sobbing catch at the very end there was a quality almost human.

  “Shall we follow the tracks?” Messner asked after a moment.

  But Heinrich, trembling, stammered, “Not any more of this I want.”

  And he turned and staggered back along the path.

  THE next day Pierre and Manning Trent lunched together in town. Trent lit a cigar over his coffee and wriggled his nose.

  “Damned difficult,” he said, “to imagine such a thing.” His eyes roamed about the dining room where smartly tailored men and women sat at small tables; where suave black-jacketed waiters bent over the tables. “I meant, dammit, right here in the middle of civilization. Off in Central Europe or up North. I’d say ‘yes.’”

  “Still. I remember during the last war. I had the Paris edition then, you remember, and spent about a year there at the start. The wolves, packs of ’em, came right down to the suburbs. Two or three reasons: it was a bad winter and the Germans didn’t leave ’em anything for forage, and I understand they were pretty much frightened by the big guns.”

  “None of that holds here,” Pierre observed. “No, and there’s only the one wolf.”

  “Heinrich said two.”

  “I wouldn’t believe Heinrich.”

  “But I asked Messner, too. He said the other just seemed to be a regular gray wolf. I walked up there this morning with Messner.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Not tracks, if you mean that. The snow had melted. But—” Pierre drew a white envelope from his inside coat pocket. He opened it and withdrew a folded paper. He unfolded the paper and spread it before Trent.

  Trent examined it, frowning at first and then dropping his jaw with surprise. It was a tuft of coarse white hair.

  “Snow white,” he breathed softly.

  Pierre nodded soberly.

  “Found it caught on a wild-rose bush.” “Why in thunder,” demanded Trent, “didn’t one of those two fools shoot?”

  “Heinrich claims he did. Point-blank, at close range. And—they couldn't find any blood.”

  Trent snorted.

  “Baht He’s either lying or was too scared to aim straight.”

  Pierre, never nervous as long as Trent had known him, tapped his fingers on the table cloth.

  “I don't know,” he said. “I don’t know. I'm beginning to wonder if I’m crazy or if the rest of the countryside is. And, by the way, where was David last night?”

  Trent glanced up, startled.

  “Eh? What’s that got to do with it?” “Nothing,” Pierre said quickly. “But I’m talking about craziness, so I wondered if you knew he and Sara were seeing each other again?”

  Trent smiled.

  “I’m glad to hear it, Pierre.”

  Pierre picked at his mole.

  “I'm not so sure. Manning. Somehow, I’m afraid for Dave. They’re back together but she's as moody as ever. Moodier, maybe. She goes grousing around the house, quiet as a ghost. I’m afraid she’ll be a—oh, I was going to say bad, but it’s a dull word— devilish influence on Dave. She’s taking him on her nightly walks.”

  Trent nodded slowly.

  “See what you mean. Come to think of it, David was out last night—pretty late. And the night before, too.”

  Keen observer of human nature, Trent could not but note the lines of worry on Pierre’s normally placid face. He leaned forward and his eyes met Pierre’s.

  “By any chance,” he asked shrewdly, “you've something else on your mind?”

  Pierre was a long time in answering, a long time in staring into Manning’s lace.

  “I don’t know,” he said at length. And he repeated it. “I don't know.”

  Justin Hardt described himself as consulting psychiatrist. Unless, as in Sara’s case, it was necessary to observe a patient with discretion, he seldom left his office. And so it was something of an occasion for him to visit Pierre during business hours.

  Pierre found him, on his return from lunch, in the main room of the Salon de Camp- d’Avesnes. He was stalking importantly about, examining the collection of objects d’art, and adjusting his glasses as he bent stiffly over each item. Pierre led him into his privat
e office at the rear.

  Dr. Hardt came directly to the point.

  “I am up against a blank wall,” he said.

  It was enough that Hardt’s egotism should permit him to make such a bald admission.

  But he went on:

  “Nowhere, sir, can I find a case history to match hers.”

  Pierre sat dumpily back in his chair and folded his hands.

  “But don’t you always find everybody, everything, a little different? Take my business.” He nodded toward a row of little vials on his desk. “Each of those is geranium oil. You can smell each one and you won’t tell any difference. But one’s Turkish and one’s Algerian and one’s French. I can identify each one blindfolded.”