Songs of Love & Death

“It was just after I’d gotten back from”—he hesitated—“well, that doesn’t matter. I’d been away, and then I came back. About two years ago. I grew up in these parts, and when I was a kid, I used to go hunting and fishing and camping in the Thicket, but not after I grew up. I hadn’t set foot in the woods for ten years, at least, until that day I suddenly got this urge. I just wanted to get away from everybody and everything, away from civilization, so I drove east, into the woods, and turned off the highway onto one of the old timber routes, and drove until it was too rough and grown over to drive any farther, and then I left the car.

“I kept to the trail, of course. Everybody who grows up in these parts knows how easy it is to get lost if you don’t. There are stories about people getting lost for days within a couple miles of the road, that’s how thick and tangled it is. You can be in the middle of a swamp before you know it, with that kind of mud that sucks you down.

“I knew how it was. I’m not stupid. But after I’d been walking for about an hour, I started feeling that this old road wasn’t going to take me where I had to go. Had to go. I didn’t know why, or where it was, but I felt more and more that there was some point to this trip, and if I kept to the trail, I was never going to find out what it was.

“So I left the trail. I used my knife to mark my path, so I could find my way back. I’d done it before, only back then, I’d had a reason—a deer I’d shot but hadn’t killed, a duck or a quail I’d brought down into the brush—and this time the only thing I was following was some kind of instinct or intuition.”

He shook his head, gazing out at the road ahead but seeing, I was sure, the forests in his mind. “I’m not somebody who gets ‘feelings,’ you know? I never believed in that woo-woo psychic spirit stuff. I still don’t, except…” He scowled, gripping the wheel harder, and behind us, Lobo gave a deep sigh.

“I can’t explain why I left the trail and slashed my way deeper into the woods, why I went that way and no other. But I did, and I reckon I walked at least a mile, to a place so far off the map you’d swear nobody else had been there in about a century, except that there was this wolf, chained by the neck to a tree, and he damn sure hadn’t done that to himself.

“I thought he was dead, at first. I thought I’d come too late. But then as I crouched next to him, I felt his heart still beating. It was a near thing, though. God knows how long he’d been stuck there, with no chance of freeing himself, with nothing to eat or drink.”

Angry tears started to my eyes. “Who’d do such a thing?”

“A person.” He almost spat the word. “In the old days, people told their kids stories about the big, bad wolf, and men who were especially cruel and horrible were said to be like animals, maybe werewolves. But the things ordinary men do every day are a million times worse than anything a wolf would do. A wolf would never torture another animal to death, or lock it up. They kill out of instinct, in order to survive, because they have to—not because they just feel like it, not because they’re evil. Not like us. Man is the scariest animal on the planet, but from the beginning of time, the wolf has gotten the bad rap. We’ve tried to pretend that evil is out there, lurking inside animals beyond the campfire, and not where it really is, in here.” He tapped his chest.

“You saved his life.”

“Yeah. And he changed mine.” He shrugged. “Don’t they say, if you save a life, you take responsibility for it? I guess I could have taken him to one of those animal-rescue places, but that would have been like leaving him to die in prison, or risk him falling into the hands of some other sadistic bastard. It was up to me to make sure that the life I’d saved was worth living. It’s not that hard, you know. Enough food, plenty of exercise outdoors, companionship. Lucky we like the same things.”

As he spoke, he took a sudden turn off the road, hardly slowing as we moved onto a heavily rutted, unpaved track. I held on for dear life as we rocked and bounced deeper into the forest.

“I thought this was a state park?” The way the trees loomed over us, old and heavy with moss, so thick they blocked the sun, made me uncomfortable.

“Some of the Thicket’s a national preserve, but we tend to steer clear of their trails,” he said. “No pets allowed, and if too many people start seeing a wolf, they might come looking for the wolf-man. This old road here, it was used for logging. I think it winds up in some old ghost town. There’s all sorts of old forgotten stuff in here.”