The Wolf: Short Story
by Radrook
The frantic cackling of hens and the fearful braying of sheep had awakened the boy and his grandfather on many a night. Yet, they had only been able to catch fleeting glances of the culprit, a large, black, male, lone wolf with a slight limp of its hind-leg. He always seemed to melt quickly into the surrounding forest as soon as the farmer, with the radiation-scarred face, appeared on his porch with his rifle!by Radrook
The aged grizzled farmer, a tall lanky man, of Anglo American descent, who was suffering from the deadly effects of post-WWIII radiation, had dealt with wolves before. But never before had he been as frustrated. You see, other wolves had succumbed to his cunningly-placed traps which he’d baited with fresh chicken meat. Still, others he'd lured into ditches fitted with upright spikes where they had been skewered. A few, he had bagged with his shotgun. But this one was too cunning to fall for any of that.
As he scoured the semi-darkness of that early morning, he concluded that it had to be a lone wolf or a desperado, as he often called them. The rest kept their distance from human habitation preferring the relative tranquility the safety of the packs and keeping deep within the semi defoliated forest while successfully surviving on whatever moribund post World War III wild game remained.
It was only the lone wolves that were the problem, the ones that had once been alpha males but had been deposed due to old age, injury, or infirmity. The desperadoes, or desperate ones, were forced to risk being killed by human sharp shooters who had come to consider any animal fair game. Such lone wolves often displayed the deep scars of their last battle against insurmountable odds. Blindness of an eye, the maiming of a leg, the festering wounds that just wouldn't heal.
These wolves couldn't kill big game by themselves, and the meager rabbit here, or squirrel there, barely managed to satiate their ravenous hunger. The grizzled farmer definitely understood. Such unfortunate wolves had no choice. But neither did he. Not if he were to survive and take care of his ten-year-old grandson Ollie.
Yet, Ollie was a sensitive kid to whom all life was precious, and his grandfather would much have preferred to shelter him from the savagery that the circumstances had forced upon them along with the rest of mankind. Regardless, he had no choice. The horrid harshness of the Third World-War aftermath demanded a systematic toughening of the human spirit, and Ollie had to be toughened if he was to survive.
On this cold, radioactive morning, as he pondered such things within the small protected domain that he had struggled to carve out for himself in the post-apocalyptic wilderness, he heard the wolf once again rummaging the barnyard, as well as the featherless chickens in their wild cacklings, and the maimed horses in their terrified neighing in response to the wolf’s prowling his property's perimeter.
Why the wolf would suddenly risk exposing himself in that way in full daylight, he didn’t know. Maybe the bum-leg had finally failed him completely, limiting his leaping ability, and trapping him inside? Whatever the reason might have been, he knew that survival required he had to be stopped regardless of the cost. The grandfather was old and his joints ached both from advanced age and from the radioactive fallout. His gums bled, and he knew that his end was drawing near.
But for perhaps the last, agonizing time, he had to force himself to grab his shotgun from the living room table and rush to the porch. This time he reached the porch just in time to see the wolf in full sprint with one of his dead chickens clamped in its vise like jaws. The farmer took careful aim and fired once, but fell short.
His shot had barely missed the wolf’s hind-quarters, but it had been near enough for the wolf to be stung by the material that the buckshot kicked up from the rocky ground. It forced it to release the dead chicken and bolt for nearest upright spear like banisters.
It would be a high jump, the farmer noticed, as he knelt to one knee to get a better perspective - a good eight feet at least, and with the limp, the farmer doubted that the wolf would make it. He didn’t fire again. Maybe he should have. Of course, he should have. But an irrational curiosity impelled him to see if the wolf would succeed or not. Strange how he felt a part of himself cheering it on. “Come on boy! You can do it! Come on!” as he had done once with his pet dog Butch, when not so long ago, the world had been normal.
But the other part, the one repeatedly honed by the desperate need to survive, wished him to be mercilessly skewered on the spear-like uprights that encircled his property. The rest happened quickly, a leap towards the safety of the woods on the other side, a heart-rending yelp, a whimper of agonizing pain, and then a silence.
Obviously, the wolf had been able to jump the same barrier coming in. But in his frenzy to get away, he had miscalculated. Or had it been the damaged leg? From behind the tall, withering grass, the farmer could see its pink trembling tongue hanging sideways from its black snout and a long steam of blood-tinged saliva dripping onto the dried, leaf-covered ground. He imagined its once-keen, predatory eyes finally dimming and coming to rest on the tantalizing last glimmer of the brook which meandered sluggishly against the embankment that the beast had intended to reach when he made his fatal leap.
He watched as the sharp, glistening rod reflected the last rays of the day’s sunlight, protruding triumphantly through its black-furred-haunches towards a cloudless sky. Behind the farmer, in the tall grass, his domesticated herd of radiation-scarred, bleating mutant sheep, frenzied wide-eyed and fearful, churned the dry ground into a dust cloud with their pounding, deformed hooves. And before them stood the grizzled farmer with a shotgun resting across both forearms and the boy standing silently behind him.
He didn't know if the boy had just joined him or whether the boy had witnessed the wolf's desperate flight and gory death. Ollie was a deep sleeper, and he had assumed him still sleeping in his room while the whole messy thing had been going on, and would have much more preferred that the boy had not witnessed it.
“Serves him right!” he said nervously under his breath to Ollie, more as a question than as a statement as he placed his wrinkled hand on Ollies radiation-scarred shoulder. The boy’s toothless gums were bleeding, and the farmer preferred to look away as he spoke to him.
“Killed bout twenty of our chickens. Cost us two sheep, ” the farmer added in a semi-pleading, apologetic tone.
“Is he dead grandpa?” Ollie asked.
“Deader than a doorknob,” the farmer quipped, trying desperately to hide the deep compassion he was struggling to deny. “That’s one less wolf we gotta worry about!” he added in the least emotional voice that he could muster.
“Can I go see if he’s dead?”
“If you want to Olli. There’s a lot of blood.”
The boy broke into a stumbling run towards the spear-like uprights with their grizzly trophy held proudly aloft as if a sacrifice to some bloodthirsty deity.
Meanwhile, the farmer raised his hand to shield his pink eyes from the glimmer of the sun as it began dipping slowly below the distant defoliated tree-line. He followed behind as his grandson stumbled through the dry grass, patches of yellow hair-like corn tossed in all direction by the strong breezes, and the wolf’s thick black fur and tail swaying defiantly, parting in sections, revealing its radiation-scarred tissue beneath.
A pool of blood and saliva had puddled beneath the limp body and the farmer found the boy speechless while gazing emotionlessly at the skewered beast that he had only recently seen running defiantly with a mangled chicken in its jaws. Then the boy caught sight of his own reflection in the gory, watery mess. His eyes no longer blue, his hair no longer yellow, his skin no longer a smooth, pale white, and he broke down and cried.
“Now son, this is the way it has to be,” the farmer said imagining that Ollie was weeping for the wolf.
‘Why grandpa? Why couldn’t we just let him take what he wanted to eat?"
"It’s either him or us son! There is no other way."
The boy reached out tentatively and petted the wolf’s dead haunches with his scarred six fingered hand.
“You’ll be alright. You‘ll be OK!” Ollie whispered softly into the wolf’s darkness as the shimmering brook babbled incoherently in the radioactive gully below.
