Final Report

The full moon was its biggest, brightest self, and seemed to be enjoying its freedom in the massive Montana sky. Wolves howled mournfully in the distance. One of the four men seated round the fire turned and looked toward the cries in the dark.

“That’s last call for me, fellas,” he said, turning back toward the fire. “I’m headed off to my quarters. You boys make sure you get some rest. That Hartford deer is a wily fellow who’ll outsmart ever last one of ya if you’re not bringing your A-game. Night.”

“Night,” they answered in unison, not moving their collective gaze from the hunter’s television as it crackled and shot sparks that drifted skyward, scattered, turned from orange-red fireflies to black ash on their way up.

He woke not long before dawn with a piss hard warning him to go now or become a swimmer in his one-man pup tent. The black western sky was just beginning to hint at horizon definition as he emerged wearing nothing but boxers and the abs he was overly proud of, had worked hard to earn over the years.

He’d started to walk toward a spot several yards away from the tent, near where he’d peed the night before, when a voice came from some distance behind him hollering, “Don’t move!”

He never heard the cry until he’d already hit the ground, knocked over by two high-velocity balls of fur with long, sharp teeth and eyes that glowed, full of the western-setting moon's yellow-gold reflection.

There was a great guttural growl, maybe two, and a whimper as well, and the dreadful taste of gray and black fur on his teeth and in his mouth before the words of the cry registered in his brain.

A bit too late, methinks…

Lying now on his back, he finally could see the sky again, and also could see the wolf - it’s a she? - could feel her weight atop him even more definitively.

There was in this moment an interesting dichotomy. The man, on the one hand, was panic-stricken, trying desperately not to move. He was trying hard, even, not to breathe.

She, the wolf, on the other hand, was calm, collected, lying there with her tail occasionally swishing in his face. Her front paws hung off his right hip until her claws were touching the ground. Her back paws rested solidly and completely on his chest.

The man marveled at how the paws were much cooler—the five little foot pads, the claws—they were all much cooler than the rest of her body, which was very, very warm, and not wholly unpleasant, given his near-nakedness and the crisp morning air.

The wolf then laid her head down and appeared to begin snoozing. When she did, the much larger Alpha walked slowly nearby, came into the hunter’s view, breathed hot breath into his ear, near his eyes, on his face, sniffed him up and down, then turned and walked away, was gone.

There followed shortly a nearby grunt, some scratching, steps on the ground that sounded like paws moving very quietly, but also very quickly and very close by. The man came to understand in those brief moments how his careless, crunching barefoot steps would have covered up such delicate paw steps when the animals had been coming at him in the dark.

The 35 mm in his mind continued, too, and the details that he’d missed in real time slowed down in that mental video:

He, the Alpha, was the one who knocked me down…there’s no doubt about it. He attacked me, started to nip and bite at me, until…until she saved me! She came up, laid herself down on top of me and saved me…but why?

There were more wolves around him now. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them moving, whining, growling nearby. Still, the man began to breathe comfortably again. Mostly out of necessity, of course, but also because he was somehow inexplicably and infinitely more relaxed as the female wolf slept atop him. His breath normalized and the man, too, finally relaxed enough to doze off into a short micro nap.

Just as suddenly, though, the man woke again with a very uncomfortable erection, his body reminding him that he still really needed to pee, and quite urgently at that.

He held out for as long as he could—maybe 10 or 20 more seconds, really—and tried to ponder options. There really was only one he could come up with.

When his hard subsided, he immediately executed Plan A, Plan Only: he just did it, just let it go. When he did, he was immediately soaked and immediately filled with glorious relief.

Relief and the cold damp were soon followed, though, with another sensation: remorse. So he tilted his head upward and forward slightly, whispered to the wolf’s backside:

“Sorry about that.”

As if in response, the wolf lifted her head, turned and looked the man in the eyes.

There was some amount of dawning day’s light by now, and when the wolf turned to him, the man could see her face, her expression, her eyes, all very clearly.

And the moment was breathtaking. It was spectacular. It was life-changing to the point that, though he didn’t know it then, it was something he would wake up to in the middle of the night nearly every night for the rest of his living years.

Those eyes! Oh my gawd! They’re as blue as the Philippine Sea off the coast of Guam. They’re as deep as the Mariana Trench! So live, so emotive, so utterly and incomprehensibly wild, so…what is it? Caring? Yes, almost caring, even.

The wolf then showed her teeth and gums, what looked like it might be a prelude to a vicious growl. No growl came, though, and when the wolf relaxed her mouth, the man convinced himself it had just been a friendly smile. They both laid their heads back down and closed their eyes.

Not long after, the Alpha returned, and the female wolf stood, slid her back feet off the man’s chest and to the ground. Her front feet remained atop the abdomen and waist of the once-again un-breathing man.

She remained in that awkward position, standing there as the Alpha came up to her, bumped her nose with his own, sniffed behind her right ear.

She nipped back, lightly tugging at the tufts of hair atop the male’s ears, and as she did, her front claws lightly scratched at the man’s abdomen as her mass rose and fell upon him.

She reached to nip at the back of the Alpha’s neck, slipped from the man’s chest and the two wolves began to yip and yap playfully, turning a face-to-face half circle one way, then reversing and repeating.

When they finished their little game, the big male bent his front legs, pushed his rear end and tail high up into the air above his hind quarters, gave a toothy bark, stood to his full height on all fours. Then they started to move closer together, snout closing in on snout.

Before their noses touched, the lady wolf fell suddenly and violently to her side and in a heap on top of the man’s legs. The Alpha then jerked sideways and back in a staccato motion as his body seemed to just rip wide in the middle. Then he, too, fell in a sideways, bloody heap on the ground so that the two of them were simultaneously nose-to-nose with each other and also in contact with the man.

Only then did the reports arrive, announcing cruelly and belatedly that which was already known to the man: the presence and discharge of multiple high-powered rifles somewhere in the dim dawn distance.

The wolf never heard the man scream. She never saw his hand reach out grasping for her helplessly and hopelessly, never saw the tears streaming down his face, never knew she had howled her very last call.

When the other three hunters arrived, the two wolves were lying on the ground, their noses but no other body parts touching. Her eyes were closed, but the Alpha’s were open wide and his tongue had fallen out of his mouth and off to the side.

The man was sitting on the grass next to them, face down, rocking back and forth, wailing into his crossed forearms, hands each resting atop opposite and drawn up knees.

“She saved me, goddammit! She saved me! I don’t wanna hunt anymore. I just wanna go home. I’m going home. Somebody please just help me go home. Please. Somebody help me. Please.”