Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

A third spectator came out on to the porch - a boy of about eight, carrying a plastic sword. He stared at me without the slightest surprise - to him I probably looked like a picture from the television, come to life, and he’d seen more amazing things on TV.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ asked the head of the household with the droopy moustache.

He’d hit the bull’s eye there. At that moment my soul was overflowing with shame. It was no longer shame - it was disgust with myself. I felt as if I were standing at the very epicentre of global infamy and it was not only the offended chicken-owners who were looking at me - all the hierarchies of the heavens and myriads of spiritual beings were gazing at me from their fathomless worlds with furious contempt in their eyes. I began slowly backing away from the chicken coop.

The father and son exchanged glances.

‘You let go of that chicken,’ the son said and stepped down off the porch.

The boy with the sword in his hand opened his mouth in anticipation of a bit of amusement. And now I realized, not with my mind, but with every last cell in my body, that there was only one way out of this cocoon of intolerable indignity - the track leading away into the forest. And I turned and ran.

After that developments followed the classical sequence. The first steps were painful because the branches and stones stuck into my bare feet. But after a few seconds the transformation began. First I felt my fingers fusing together. It became harder to keep hold of the chicken - now I had to press it against my chest as hard as I could, and I had to avoid smothering it accidentally at the same time. Then I stopped feeling any pain in my feet. And another few seconds after that I was already rushing along on three paws without any feeling of discomfort at all.

By that stage it was impossible not to notice the changes that had taken place in me - and they had been noticed. I heard voices hallooing behind me. I glanced round and bared my teeth. Both chicken-owners, father and son, were chasing me. But they were falling a long way behind. I slowed down a bit to disentangle myself from the night-dress (it wasn’t difficult - my body had become lean and flexible), allowed them to get a bit closer and then ran on.

What makes a man run after a fox in a situation like this? Of course, it’s not a matter of trying to recover the stolen property. When the fox undergoes the supraphysical transformation, her pursuers see something that demolishes all their ideas about the world. And then what they run after is no longer the stolen chicken, but that miracle. They are pursuing the glimmer of the impossible that has illuminated their dull lives for the first time. And that is exactly what makes it so difficult to get away from them.

Fortunately, the track into the forest was empty (throughout the entire chase I didn’t meet anyone coming the opposite way). I knew Alexander was somewhere nearby - I could hear branches cracking and leaves rustling as they were parted off to one side of the path. But I couldn’t see anyone - just once or twice I thought I glimpsed a shadow through a gap between the bushes.

The older chicken-owner began falling behind. When it became clear that he would never manage to close the gap, he gave up and dropped out of the race. His son kept up a good pace for about another kilometre, and then slowed down a lot. I shifted into an easy trot, and we ran about another five hundred metres. Then my pursuer started panting for breath, and soon he had no strength to run any further - I suspect he was a smoker. He stopped, with his hands propped on his knees and his dark eyes goggling at me, and I was immediately reminded of the deceased Sikh from the National hotel. But I suppressed my personal feelings - they were inappropriate here.

If my goal had been to escape, the chase would have ended there (thus does the miraculous disappear from human life). But I had another goal - the hunt. I stopped. There was no more than twenty metres left between us.

As I have already said, if the fox releases the chicken, then a minute later, at most, all the supraphysical changes disappear. Naturally, the fox can no longer run faster than a man. And so the manoeuvre I had decided to perform was risky - but I was spurred on by the awareness that Alexander was watching what I was doing. I let go of the chicken. She took a few faltering steps across the asphalt and stopped (during the hunt they go into a special kind of trance and their reactions are inhibited). I counted to ten, grabbed her again and hugged her against my chest.

My pursuer couldn’t bear to be mocked like that - gathering all his strength, he came dashing after me again, and we ran another three hundred metres at a very good pace. I was happy - the hunt had definitely been a success.

And then something unexpected happened. As we ran past a fork in the track, where the trees were marked with blue and red arrows (probably for skiers - although I don’t know what Alexander would have thought), I heard my pursuer shout out:

‘This way! Help!’

Glancing round, I saw him waving to someone. And then two mounted militiamen rode out of the sidetrack that we had just passed.

I don’t know how to express the terror and the majesty of that moment. There’s something similar in Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’, but there was only one rider there, and here there were two of them. Like a slow-motion sequence from some terrible dream, they swung round, pointed their four faces - two belonging to the militiamen and two to the horses - at me, and came dashing in pursuit.

Why do we hate English aristocrats so much? If, for just a few seconds, you had been in my skin (and at this point I was already covered by it, but rather unevenly, in patches), you would never need to ask that question again. Cops are stupid and they do what they’re told, what can you expect from them? But how can you excuse educated people who have turned another creature’s agony into entertainment and sport? That’s why I don’t condemn my sister E - although, of course, I would never do the things that she does.

It was almost a hundred years since the last time I’d had to escape from mounted pursuers (that was near Melitopol during the Russian Civil War). But when I heard the heavy hoof-beats behind me, I immediately recalled that day. The memory was vivid and terrifying - I even thought for a moment that I had simply imagined the entire twentieth century owing the heat and the oxygen deficiency, and in reality I was still running with all my might from a group of drunk Red cavalrymen who were pursuing me along the dusty road, intent on killing me. An appalling feeling.

The fright lent me strength. And as well as that, fear made my supraphysical transformation go very far, much farther than during an ordinary hunt. At first I thought this was an advantage, since now I could run faster. But then I realized that it would be the death of me. The paw with which I was clutching the chicken to my breast changed into a normal fox’s limb, which is useless for holding anything. And I had lost control of the process. I was slipping inexorably towards the edge of the precipice: a few more seconds of agony, and I dropped the chicken. It somersaulted through the air and landed on the side of the track, clucking in outrage. I had already become an absolutely genuine fox - but now I wasn’t going to stay that way for long.

And at this point I suddenly noticed something very strange.

I suddenly realized that my tail, which wasn’t supposed to be doing anything, was working.

A fox will understand immediately what I mean, but it’s hard to explain to a human being. Alexander once told me a joke about a certain libertine whose penis was so long that he could scrape it along the windows of the nightclubs. ‘Ooh, I think I’m in love with someone . . .’ Take away the erotic connotations, and what I felt was something similar.