Wilderness: A short story. Dean Koontz

them and wrongly supposed they were a threat to human beings, but they were returning now, as shy as they were magnificent.

      Wolves rarely will make eye contact, for they are highly social animals who understand that a direct stare can be a challenge. Their tendency to study other creatures indirectly has been misinterpreted as sly cunning. This one, a large male, emerged from the gracefully arcing fronds of a mass of ferns, almost as if materializing from a spray of green scarves cast down by a magician. He stood before the stone on which I sat and stared up at me, making eye contact for a moment before lowering his gaze submissively.

      We didn’t fear each other. And as I would learn in the years to come, I would be in far greater danger in the presence of people than I would be alone in the woods with a wolf.

      I rose to my feet and peered down at him. He looked directly at me again, and then away. Because I had no one else to talk with, I spoke to him. And why not? The least strange thing about me might be that I talked to animals in the absence of human company. “What do you want?”

      He circled the stone formation, sniffing the air, staring off into the woods, ears pricked forward. Abruptly, as he faced east, the fur bristled along the back of his neck. He whined with distress and tucked his tail and looked at me and whined again and sprinted due west, into the brush and gone. If he had possessed a voice, he could not have expressed more clearly that a threat approached from the east. He seemed to have sought me out merely to warn me.

      Nothing quite like this had happened before. Aside from what Nature had done to me in the womb, aside from making me an outcast and an object of fear and loathing, she had otherwise not harmed me in any way. I had never been bitten by any of her creatures, had not been stung by a bee, had never developed poison ivy or an allergic rash or even simple hay fever. Having done her worst to me, perhaps Nature was so satisfied with the freak she’d made that she felt any further affliction, even so much as a mosquito bite, would be one decorative detail too many, would in some way diminish me. Proud of what, in a dark mood, she’d wrought in me, she resisted the urge to improve upon the perfection of my imperfection.

      Certain that the wolf meant to alert me to danger, I was about to climb down from my perch when through the trees I saw a figure, a man wearing a bright red jacket and carrying a rifle. I knew at once that he must be a hunter, though deer season had not yet begun, which meant that he was a man who didn’t play by the rules and, for that reason, might be even more dangerous than other men if he were to get a glimpse of me.

      And then at a distance of fifty or sixty feet, he saw me. He called out in an affable fashion, which meant that he hadn’t gotten a good look. Before he might see what stood before him, I slid down from the amorphous mass of rock. In panic, I began to flee toward the house, but then he shouted something, and I thought that he must be plunging through the undergrowth in pursuit. The house lay more than a mile away. Instead of bolting, I stooped and scuttled around the limestone formation, putting it between me and him, and when I came to an opening, I entered it on my hands and knees.

       2

      This weather-sculpted stone was also a familiar warren, because I had explored its limited interior architecture as far as it would accommodate me. The tunnel was low and tight and curved to the right, and I crawled through the blinding dark, frightened not just of the hunter but of what might currently be in residence in the chamber at the end of that passageway. In the past, when I’d gone exploring there, I had done so with a flashlight, but I didn’t have one this time.

      The warren offered a home for various species if they wanted it, including rattlesnakes. In the cool of early October, snakes would be lethargic, perhaps not too dangerous, but although Nature’s creatures had spared me all these years, a weasel or a badger or some other formidable animal would be frightened and would feel cornered when I came rushing in upon it. Leading with my face, I was vulnerable, and I shut my eyes tight to protect them from a sudden swipe of claws.

      The passageway brought me around a corner and into the cave, roughly six feet in diameter and between four and five feet high. Nothing attacked, and I opened my eyes. A silver dollar of sunlight lay in one corner of the room, having fallen through one of the flutes, and a larger and more irregular pattern of light, about the size of my hand, formed under another flute. The day lacked wind, and quiet pooled in that subterranean lair—and there proved to be no tenant other than me.

      I intended to remain there until I felt certain that the hunter had hiked far away. The air smelled vaguely of lime and moldering leaves that had blown in through the larger hole in the ceiling. If I had suffered from claustrophobia, I could not have tolerated such confinement.