Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

Jack looked at her for a moment, considering his answer. He wasn’t the same person from nine months ago. He was no longer a child. He’d lost his brother, his best friend. He’d learned to provide for the group. The boy from that earlier time was gone, killed on the same day as Manny had been. When he answered, Jack spoke as a young man whose life had changed in an instant; who’d survived against long odds.

“I met him when he was still a cub. His foot was caught in a trap and I freed him from it.”

He looked up at Tom and the others, whose expressions reflected the sadness in his own gaze.

“The dead cloaked one near the camp earlier…” Jonu said.

“Yes. I’m pretty sure that was him.”

Jack noticed the blood on the ground. It was pooling from the wolf’s belly. “He’s bleeding,” he said, unable to stop his tears from flowing.

“Let me take a look.” Jonu moved to the other side and lifted the wolf’s hind leg. He whimpered sharply. The cut was short, no longer than the width of a blade. “He must have been stabbed. There’s no way of telling how deep it is. Here, hold this on the wound with a bit of pressure.”

Jonu gave Jack the piece of scarf, and he pressed it against the wolf’s soft belly. He felt Carrie’s hand on his shoulder as his tears dropped onto the wolf’s head. He hadn’t cried for Manny, wouldn’t allow himself to. He knew that crying for the loss of one would open the gates to his grief for all the others, the stored-away grief of the last two years. In front of Jack, on the barren ground, lay not just a wolf, but a brother, a mother, and a father. His sorrow washed over him, drowning him, and Jack couldn’t stop himself from weeping uncontrollably. Anguish and gratitude for his family’s sacrifice, his wolf’s sacrifice, twisted in his gut as he buried his face in the wolf’s fur and sobbed. He could feel the wolf’s ragged breathing begin to slow. Shallow, short breaths now.

“It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “It’s okay. You’re among friends now. You’re among friends.”

The wolf felt the life bleed out of him, but with it also the pain. He’d killed some of the cloaked ones, wounded all, one of them only a few hundred feet from the boy’s camp. He’d ripped their sword arms or their legs, whatever he could reach, so they could neither move nor strike.

At first, he’d felt fear. But when he’d stepped into the circle of firelight, it lifted from him. Only the boy and his need to protect him remained in his thoughts. When the cloaked ones came at him, swords raised and screaming with their heat and rage, he moved like a silver shadow among them. He struck and withdrew and struck again. He was quick, and he was death to three of the eight.

When the first sword cut him, the pain struck him straight to the ground. But he’d rolled back to his feet and tore more legs and more arms to shreds before one of them stabbed up and into his belly with a short knife. The wolf ripped that one’s throat as well, but he knew by the way the blade had sunk deep into his belly that he would die.

And he’d loped, slowly but steadily, following the boy’s scent until he’d reached his camp.

As he lay on the ground, the boy’s tears falling onto him like drops of warm rain, the wolf felt at peace. For he knew he’d breathed his last breath surrounded by his pack.

Jack and the others reached the stronghold two days later. They’d buried the wolf in a grave made of river stones at the edge of a valley. Into the soil surrounding it, Carrie etched the name Jack gave to the wolf before he died. Rain washed the letters away by the time the moon was full.

But the name was never forgotten. It lived on—passed along as family history by Jack and Carrie to their children; then a half-believed story a generation later; then a myth of survival handed down through the history of an entire people. The telling of the tale, a testament to one whose bravery stands as a lesson of loyalty, captured in the simple name of a wolf who gave his own life so that many might live.

Protector.

Ever since I first read The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, I’ve had an affinity for wolves. A few years back, I had a T-shirt made with three simple words printed on the front: “We Are Pack.” I’ve gotten many positive comments for it. The shirt gave its life in a freak bleach accident during laundry. But the message stayed with me, a shining example of the bond we all share.

Please check out my other works, in particular my fable, The Three Feathers —a story of friendship between a young rooster, a war horse, and a grey wolf, and their epic quest to search for three magical feathers deep inside a mountain.

2015

Santiago opened his single eye and took in the morning on the piazza. The light had the strangest and faintest of orange hues, and Santiago stretched his stiff limbs still wrapped in a drowse. He ran a quick inventory—habit after years of street life. All four legs still in place. Eyesight growing weaker. Hunger faint but present; which was good, because surely he couldn’t be dying if he still wanted breakfast. As his senses came back online, his old heart began to accelerate. There was something wrong with the air. It grasped at his nostrils and forced him unsteadily to his feet where he ran his inventory again, this time checking for the man, who was nowhere in sight. The apartment stood empty and dark, and it occurred to Santiago that he did not even know the man’s name.

He came into the world the son of a stray, who was the daughter of a stray, who was descended from a long line of cats who eked out an existence on the street. After making a wrong turn as a young kitten on the piazza on which he was born, he was ushered into an overly hot home that smelled of cabbage, clinging to the sticky, clenching hands of a child.

He lost most of his tail in that home in an unfortunate incident with a door while attempting to come inside on a particularly rainy night, and although being a housecat was a much whispered-about and longed-for thing on the street, Santiago could not say that it was a particularly comfortable experience. He could not recall the final incident that had separated him from that home. Perhaps he had wandered too far and gotten lost. Perhaps his owners had just up and moved without collecting him. Possibly he had simply set out on his own, carried forward by a quiet joie de vivre and a sense that he was not especially wanted or safe.

He spent most of his younger years living in alleys and corners of Pompei, fighting, scrounging, and carousing. It was there he lost his left eye to another ginger tom, a mean and heavy scrapper twice Santiago’s size and who took no prisoners. It was there that he learned the economy of the street, the art of the grab and dodge, and the quick and inevitable slide into violence of the desperate to survive.

But Santiago got along with his smarts and knack with the ladies and enjoyed an acceptable life, as street lives go. Certainly he had outlived most of his contemporaries—the ginger tom who took his eye got run over by a lorry when Santiago was ten—and there were many handsome kittens wandering the streets of Pompei with brilliant orange fur, pronounced stripes, and a certain loft to their tails.

When Santiago crested the last few months of his fourteenth year, a sluggishness settled into his reflexes, and he could no longer zero in as easily on the precise location of mice with his single eye. His once solid and reliable bones had started to feel fragile and delicate. Life had started to get more dangerous; a cat who could not see or run very fast was an easy target, and Santiago’s escapes had become a bit too heart-pumping for his liking.