Feast

 

By Ashley Everett

 

 

The soft morning light glinted off snowflakes as they drifted from the sky. The wolf blinked twice to clear his eyes of the cold wet flakes. Maybe…just maybe he had finally escaped. When he heard a twig snap some distance behind him, he began running again. His breath came heavily as he accelerated, running from the man with the gun. As he ran, the wolf made sure to step lightly. This avoided breaking the surface of the ice-encrusted snow and leaving a noticeable trail. The trees flickered by as he maneuvered through the forest. The wolf should have known better than to try to steal the man’s food, but it was bitterly cold outside and he needed food to keep his body temperature up. He hadn’t eaten in over a week. What little food he had managed to scrape up—mostly a few nuts that had fallen out of squirrels’ nests—he had fed to his family. They were weaker and needed it more than he.

His name was Fierce-Bite, and he was a young wolf who had recently started a family. When Fierce-Bite became old enough, he left his pack in order to find a mate. If he had stayed in the pack, he would have become a non-breeding adult. Only the pack leaders were allowed to have pups. The less pups they had, the less hindrance it was on the pack.

Fierce-Bite left the pack in winter. He traveled out of his pack’s territory and into another’s. That’s where he found his mate Gentle-Paw. She had also left her pack to form a family, and he met her in the forest as she was eating a freshly killed rabbit. He had approached her, and her scent told him that she was in heat. They mated and traveled together until they could find territory of their own. The game was still sufficient when Gentle-Paw became heavy with pups. Their four pups were born healthy, but the season didn’t turn as it should have. Most of the game was gone by now, having died off or been killed by hungry men when the land didn’t become green on time.

Fierce-Bite snapped back from his memories and to his present dilemma. He ran a few more minutes, then quickly ducked into a small cave he had slept in before when he was out looking for food. The cave’s ceiling shortened, and he had to crawl along his belly, the cold hard rock scraping against his skin. He slowed his breathing, trying to be as quiet as possible, and concentrated on the sound outside the cave. Then, as he strained his ears he heard soft footsteps. The subtle crunching of the snow-covered ground’s icy crust made the man’s presence obvious. As he waited in the cave, the footsteps became louder. Fierce-bite crouched farther back in the cave, trying to conceal himself in the cave’s shadows. The footsteps stopped. The shadow of the man’s frame projected on the sparkling white snow through the mouth of the cave. Fierce-Bite could see the long thin shadow of the gun the man held at his side. The wolf’s breathing stopped as he watched the shadow turn and face in the direction of the cave. The shadow turned again, this time away from the cave. Then the footsteps resumed.

Fierce Bite let out the breath he had been holding and listened as the footsteps began to fade away. His muscles relaxed and he waited a few moments before making his way out of the cave. As Fierce-Bite crawled out of the cave’s murky darkness, he squinted as the sunlight assailed his eyes. He took a few steps away from the cave and paused warily, looking and listening for any sign of his assailant. The footprints the man’s large boots had left in the snow headed back toward the settlement men lived in. Fierce-Bite walked in the opposite direction.

Fierce-Bite needed to find some food for his family before the day was over. He lifted his nose to the wind, and thought he smelled a storm coming. If he didn’t hurry and get back home with food before the storm hit, he could be stranded in the forest for the night. His family might not survive another cold night without food.

He ran to the trails where he knew rabbits were often killed by traps men laid. However, when he got there, all the traps were empty. Next he checked the nearby stream to see if there were places he could break through the ice and catch fish. The stream was coated with a slick sheet of ice as thick as a man’s hand is wide. Fierce-Bite walked out onto the ice, and looked through its milky glaze at the shadows of fish. The fish seemed to be taunting him, lying just out of reach. This made Fierce-Bite so angry that he scraped and dug at the ice, but all he did was scratch its surface.

The sun was at its peak in the sky by the time he gave up on catching fish. He could already see the thick white clouds, heavy with snow forming along the horizon. Those clouds would be on top of him shortly before the sun left the sky. He wanted to avoid men’s homes, but he was running out of places to look for food it didn’t seem like he had any options left.

Fierce-Bite headed toward the area where he knew there were warm homes full of food. Eventually, he ended up on top of a ridge that rimmed a bowl-shaped clearing. Circling the clearing helped him familiarize himself with the lay of the land. There were around twenty homes here, and four trails that connected to the clearing. He looked down each trail, making sure they were clear, and remembered that one of those trails came dangerously close to where his family lived. Fierce-Bite had explored the trail one day when looking for food, and had found empty traps along its length. He had followed it, hoping to find a trap that had food in it. The trail meandered haphazardly through the trees until it joined an old riverbed running alongside a cliff. When Fierce-Bite had seen the riverbed, he panicked. It was the same riverbed where he had made his home. His curiosity had compelled him to walk along the bed, wanting to know how close the trail was to his family. A ways down the bed he had seen the piece of the cliff that bent and formed a natural bridge over where the river used to run. High up on the bank of the riverbed, underneath the left side of the bridge, was a hidden crevice behind a large slab of jagged black rock. He knew that crevice well. At night, the rock blended in to the bridge and the crevice was nearly invisible. This was where his family stayed while he went out looking for food. The realization that his family wasn’t as far from men as he thought made him uneasy.

Fierce-Bite had discovered soon enough that he couldn’t trust the men who lived in the clearing in the woods. When the animals had begun dying off, he knew food would be scarce this winter. Picking through the garbage outside the homes was his first strategy to get a meal, but he almost always got chased off with a big stick of a gun. One man had managed to hit him hard on the side of the head with a board when he was digging in the garbage. He was dizzy for a week after that incident, and had since kept his family as far away from those men as he could.

Now he only approached homes when he was there was no other option but to starve, and no longer wasted his time digging in the garbage. That took too long and made too much noise. Now he went straight for the big game, as quickly and quietly as he could. Once he had managed to wrestle a steak away from one of the men’s dogs. It was at night, and a man had thrown a steak out the back door to his dog. Fierce-Bite was hiding on the side of the house, looking for some way to get inside one of the homes. When he saw the steak drop to the ground, he rushed over to it. The dog had just begun sniffing and licking at his dinner when Fierce-Bite made his attack. He leapt at the steak and caught it up in his teeth, catching the dog by surprise. When the dog realized what was going on, he growled and ran towards Fierce-Bite. The wolf was already running back towards his den. The dog followed and had almost caught up with Fierce-Bite when his chain went taught. The ugly mongrel stopped abruptly with a yelp of pain, then sat and barked as Fierce-Bite made off with his meal. The steak was moist and savory in Fierce-Bite’s mouth, and he was rather proud of himself for successfully stealing it.

 

The clouds were approached, and the sun closed in on the horizon. He needed to act soon. He shifted his gaze from the sky to the house he had been watching. Both the outside and inside of the house were dark.

Fierce-Bite approached the house, sticking to the shadows. He walked lightly to keep from leaving visible signs of his presence. He reached the back of the house without incident, and walked to the open window he had noticed from his vantage point on top of the ridge. When he was certain all was quiet inside the house, Fierce-Bite readied himself to strike.

He tensed his legs and jumped for the window, just managing to catch the edge and scramble inside. Fierce-Bite crouched as soon as he dropped to the floor and waited for his eyes to adjust to the low light. As his vision became clearer, he studied the way the room looked so he could find it easier when he made his escape.

He rose from his crouch and walked to the doorway, peeking around the edge to make sure the hall was clear. Then he stepped into the hall and turned to the right. Fierce-Bite felt something soft under his paws, and looked down at the ground. He nearly howled in anguish when he realized he was walking on the skin of a dead wolf. Fierce-Bite stepped to the side to avoid standing on the wolf rug, and continued down the hall. He investigated the rooms in the house, trying to find one with food in it. As he looked in the last doorway in the hall, he smelled food. His stomach growled as he walked through the doorway and the scent became stronger.

Fierce-Bite looked around the room and saw the source of the mouth-watering aroma. In a shallow pan on the kitchen table was the freshly plucked carcass of a large turkey. It amazed him that the people who lived here had managed to find a turkey in this barren forest. When he snapped out of his state of surprise, he jumped onto the table and considered what would be the easiest way to carry this bird back to his family. Just then, he heard a noise and realized it came from the front door.

The door opened and a woman appeared in the doorway. He quickly sunk his teeth into the turkey. As he lifted the turkey out of the pan with his powerful jaws, the woman who had just walked through the front door paused and looked curiously at him. “WOLF!” she screamed. The woman’s shriek startled Fierce-Bite, and he lost his footing. He slipped off the table and the turkey tumbled onto the floor. The woman was still screaming as he picked the turkey back up and ran down the hall back to the room he had come in. The woman’s screaming stopped, and he heard men’s voices. One yelled, “Jim, go and get your gun. Tell your son Thomas to get his, too. Lisa saw a wolf just steal our dinner.” He heard pounding steps behind him as he catapulted himself off the bed and out the window. He sprinted for the forest, and when he entered the trees, he risked a quick look behind him. Three men were running up the ridge after him, each with a long gun in hand.

Fierce-Bite knew he would have a hard time getting away this time. The turkey was heavy and slowed him down considerably. His stomach ached with hollowness, and the temptation was strong to stop and eat the turkey. He felt his mouth salivate around the juicy meat it held. The turkey left Fierce-Bite’s mind as he heard the men clumsily following behind him. Since they were so much larger than he, they had to work harder to get around the brush and trees. Two shots were fired, and one barely missed, whizzing past his right ear and into the trunk of a birch tree. His heart pounded heavily and his fear kicked in. The knowledge that the next shot might be the one that ended his life motivated him to ran faster, his panting hindered by the large bird in his mouth. He knew stealing the turkey, but he had to get this food back to his mate and their young pups.

He was running at maximum and the men weren’t too far behind. Fierce-Bite knew that if they caught him, they’d kill him and probably use him to decorate their floor, like he had seen in the home. The riverbed was coming up quickly, and the men were just out of sight. He hoped he wouldn’t collapse before he could get this food back to his family. Then Fierce-Bite noticed that he could no longer hear the men behind, and his hopes began to lift. Perhaps he had managed to lose them. A few moments later, the trail opened up into the riverbed. This was the most dangerous stretch of his journey home, since the lack of trees in the bed made him an easy target. He could have run alongside the bed in the trees, but that would have slowed him down too much, and speed was his best advantage over the lumbering men with their heavy footsteps and awkward movements.

As he entered the riverbed, heavy, wet flakes of snow fell from the sky. Within a few moments the air was white and the Fierce-Bites eyes were clouded with the flakes that fell in them. He ran straight ahead, trusting his instinct to help him find his home, rather than his eyes, which were all but useless now. The weight of the turkey made his jaws ache, but he kept going, his need to survive pushing him on. The crevice where his family waited for him wasn’t too far away when the bullet came tearing through the snow to graze the left side of his shoulder. The pain of the shot made him stumble, and had to slow down his pace. He knew he couldn’t go home now. The trail of blood would give his family’s location away, and he had no doubt that these men would kill his family without a second thought.

He ran up the edge of the riverbed and into the trees along its edge. Fierce-Bite knew he couldn’t escape injured and carrying this turkey, so he buried the turkey in a large pile of snow next to a white pine tree. When he began running again, he went past the bridge where his family was hidden. The snow was falling fast enough that it would cover his trail of blood in a short amount of time. For once, the weather was his ally and not his enemy. Fierce-Bite crossed the riverbed and clambered up the hill and into the trees on the other side of the bed.

He looked around for a good hiding place, but the best he could do was to crawl underneath a pine tree with branches that drooped until they touched the snow. Fierce-Bite crouched there, his legs tense and ears laid back against his gray fur, waiting to see if the men would find him. Shouts came from the other side of the riverbed. Then Fierce-Bite heard the rustle of tree branches, and a man’s heavy breathing. The man walked past his hiding place, then paused and came back to stand in front of it. Another man shouted at him from the other side of the bed, and the man replied, “Just a minute!” The man then left, his footsteps ranging out of earshot as he crossed the riverbed to join up with the other men.

He stayed in that crouched position under the pine tree for another hour, licking his shallow wound as the wet snow blanketed the ground. When he felt it was safe, Fierce-Bite pushed his head out of his hiding place, and walked to the edge of the trees. The snow had slowed down a little, but the storm was definitely not over. He listened and sniffed the wind to check for any sign of the men’s presence. When he found none, the tired wolf crossed the riverbed, and returned to the tree where he had buried the turkey. It was a lot more difficult digging the turkey up since the thick layer of snow made the turkey hard to find, but he finally managed to pull it out of its hiding place.

Fierce-Bite walked up the rocky hill leading to his den with the turkey in his mouth. He slid behind the slab of rock and into the crevice. When Fierce-Bite entered the den, he noticed that two of his young pups were lying alone in one corner of the den.. Their tiny eyelids were closed and no steam came from their muzzles. Gentle-Paw and the other two pups huddled up in the opposite corner trying to keep warm. Gentle-Paw raised her head as he entered and he locked eyes with her. Her tail usually showed her happiness when he came back to her after hunting, but this time, she simply stared at him, her thin body slumped in a heap.

He dropped the turkey in the middle of the den, and went to inspect his dead puppies. He pushed at them with his nose, but their bodies were already stiff with cold. Fierce-Bite gently picked one up by the scruff of its neck, and then carried it up the ridge. He returned for the second lifeless body, placed her next to her brother, and slowly returned to the den, leaving the bodies in the snow. He remembered how playful those pups were before the food became scarce. They were always wrestling and tugging at each other. Now they would never get to play with their siblings again, or learn how to hunt deer, or see the fish jumping in the stream. He would miss their bright eyes and wagging tails.

When he returned, Fierce-Bite tore off a small piece of turkey, and then fed it to his remaining offspring. His mate simply watched until he was done, then finally took a few pieces for herself. Even though he now had a full belly, it didn’t satisfy him. He had failed to provide for his family in time to keep them all alive, and that was a wound far more painful than any gun could inflict.