The Boy Who Spoke Wolf

Yellow eyes pierce the night and flash in the moonlight. Bastian feels a familiar thrill shooting up his spine. He’s been waiting here for hours, as he has every night since he discovered the miracle.

“Boy.”

The voice has a throaty quality, and although he’s heard it several times before, Bastian still can’t quite believe that it is real.

He’s listened to their voices hundreds of times, certainly—howls that make children pull the covers up to their chins (and their parents, too, even if they won’t admit it). Howls that come ever closer to the barn and occasionally turn into guttural snarls as they clash with those of Baron, one of the Great Pyrenees that guards the flocks and sometimes greets him in the morning with blood on his snout.

But those sounds make sense in his brain. They are part of the fabric of the night. This new reality—the one in which a wolf can form consonants, vowels, and syllables—this reality has caused him to pinch his arms black and blue to make sure he’s not dreaming.

“What have you for us tonight, boy?”

Bastian has been anticipating this question. Luck is with him. Most nights when the wolves come, he pulls a haunch of mutton from storage, praying his mother will not notice it gone if the pack appears and he needs to give it away.

Tonight, he drags an entire lamb through the dust of the barnyard and skitters away, his heart pounding. The lamb had died the previous night from a failure to thrive, poor creature. His father will be angry in the morning when he finds it gone; he would not have wanted the tiny creature to feed the predators he hates so much.

Bastian worries for a moment that Baron will be blamed for the lamb’s fate. Baron, who follows him into the woodshed each night with such trusting eyes, slobbering over his hand for the piece of cheese he clenches in his small fist. How such a fierce creature, capable of holding wolves off of his precious flock, can be so sweet and gullible, Bastian cannot fathom as he bolts the door and hardens his heart against the big dog’s whines.

As soon as he pulls back from the lamb and leaps the split-rail fence in a practiced vault, the wolves set upon it and feast. He winces hearing the sounds, and thinks of all the poor sheep carried off in the dead of night, terror in their hearts. At least this lamb did not die in fear.

His parents do not understand his soft heart. His mother, so used to lopping the heads off chickens and gutting fish, rolls her eyes when he winces and turns green at butchery time. She is a practical woman, kind to Bastian and his sisters, but with a stomach of iron.

His father, who must make practical decisions about the fates of all animals on the farm, fears that Bastian will not be suited to the work. Fears that his legacy is in jeopardy.

“You cannot make decisions with your heart, my son,” his father always says, as Bastian stares down at his plate or pitches hay, avoiding eye contact.

Although he wishes he could share the miracle of the wolves with his gutsy sister Regina, Bastian knows that this must remain his secret and his alone.

The pack has nearly finished.

“We will not further disturb your flocks, boy. You have been kind to us,” says the wolf with yellow eyes.

“Will you ever come back?” Bastian asks, a swooping sense of loss descending upon him.

“We will not be back,” says the wolf. “But we will meet again.”

***

Years pass, and Bastian never grows into the man his father wishes him to be. Regina can gut a fish and separate lambs from their mothers with ease, and the farm becomes her domain.

High in the mountains, Bastian lives in a small hut. The trees shelter his small cabin and a brook whispers music to him in the night. He listens to the birds in the morning, the howls of the wolves past dusk.

When he is an old, old man, he sets off with his walking stick one day and vanishes into the trees. When his cabin is found by errant hikers, they wonder about the person who chose to live up here, so close to the dangerous animals that most men fear.

Some say that in these mountains, more than a hundred years later, you can still hear the whooping of a small boy when the wolves shatter the night with their voices.