The Hunter from the Woods

Ross, hollowed-out, lay twitching in the snow. Michael heard soldiers shouting, and the hard authority of an officer’s voice: “This way! Move!”

He took his bearings. He was in some kind of courtyard. A small park? Lights glowed on lampposts. There were snow-covered bushes and bare trees and a concrete pathway winding through. Life-sized statues of, presumably, famous Gestapo torturers stood about, and there were small concrete benches where one might enjoy a quick respite from working the electric gut-grinder. The snow had begun to fall harder, no longer the light flurries. He had to find his way out of here. His hip…now, that was bad. The pain in his hip was a thousand degrees of fire, yet he had the sensation that his left leg itself was becoming cold, losing all feeling. Going dead. His nostrils were so full of blood, both his own and others, that he could hardly draw a breath.

He had to get out.

He staggered along the pathway in what was nearly desperation.

A wolf without four good legs on which to run, to evade and escape?

Not good.

He came to a wall. A high wall. Too high.

He went in another direction, burst through the undergrowth and into another wall.

“Blood on the ground over here!” shouted a soldier, off to his right.

Oh, yes. He was bleeding pretty badly, too.

This would be called a cock-up, Michael thought. But he was not yet ready to go belly-up.

He turned away from the voice and ran low, the pain in his left hip nearly making him whine. He ran past two soldiers who never knew he was there. He heard a shot, but it came nowhere near him. “Over here!” came the yell, followed by another errant shot. They were seeing big dogs under every bush.

This courtyard…was there even a way out of it? How had the soldiers gotten in? From the building, of course. He couldn’t go back into there, not with this leg.

He was going to have to get over the wall, while he still had enough strength.

He circled from wall to wall, aware that the soldiers were circling too. A rifle shot hit a treetrunk to his right and sent a tremor through him; it had been much too close. “It’s here, sergeant!” shouted the sharp-eyed rifleman. “I’ve got it!”

Michael pushed through the undergrowth. He came out with snow on his back and a wall before him. On his left a few feet along the pathway there stood a stone bench. On his right, closer to the wall, was the statue of a man with his arms extended and palms offered heavenward, as if asking the help of God in smiting down the evildoers, perhaps with a blowtorch to the genitals.

The wolf measured distances. It was a long jump, especially with the injury.

But he really had no choice.

They were coming. He heard the crunch of boots in the snow. Someone had a flashlight, the beam sweeping back and forth. How many men? Too many to kill all of them. A Gestapo security squad, ten at least.

He had to go now.

He ran back along the pathway.

“There it is!” The light grazed him, lost him, searched for him. “Shoot it!” came the command, but the big dog had abruptly turned and was no longer there.

Michael ran, one leg starting to drag. The pain was tremendous. It stole his breath. If he misjudged this, he was dead. Faster! Faster! he told himself. And when you give it, give it everything.

He leaped upon the stone bench, sprang off its snowy surface with a jolt that this time did make him whine and brought a red mist whirling before his eyes, and in midair he stretched the long muscular black-and-gray body out as far as bones and sinew would allow. A rifle fired and the bullet went past his right ear. Another grazed his tail. A third hit the statue of the supplicant and threw stone chips into Michael’s pelt.

Michael’s paws scrabbled on the outstretched palms. He heard something crack: his bones or the statue’s arms, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He leaped again with all his power, upward from the Gestapo’s hands, and then the snow-slick top of the wall was in front of him and he was hanging onto it with his forepaws and trying to push himself over with one good leg.

The rifles spoke. Bullets ricocheted off the wall. Someone fired a submachine gun in short, deadly chatters. The top of the wall blew up. Smoke and snow spun together in airy whirlpools.

“Cease firing!” cried the sergeant. The last few rifle shots rang out, and the sergeant glared back at whomever had been slow to obey. Then, satisfied he wouldn’t get shot up by his own men, he walked forward and aimed his flashlight at the wall beyond the statue of Rudolf Diels, the first commander of the Gestapo from 1933 to 1934.

“Damn,” the sergeant said. Because the big dog was not lying dead on the ground. Maybe it was on the other side of the wall, they’d have to go and look, but at least it was out of the courtyard. There was a mess to clean up inside. This might send him to the gallows. Maybe tonight he and his wife should take a little trip to the West. Like beginning in the next fifteen minutes. He’d seen many stray animals, but never one like this. Maybe it was a wolf that had escaped from the zoo?

The sergeant, an old veteran with one hand, knew all about wolves. When he was a child his grandmother Tippi used to scare the shit out of him with her stories of wolf men. He still had nightmares about waking up with hairy palms, because in his dreams he was always a boy and he always had both hands. When the full moon shines bright, then the beast shall roam at night.

All that kind of rubbish.

But there was no full moon tonight. In fact, it would soon be morning. “Blast,” he said, mostly to himself. “All right,” he told the men around him, “let’s go out and see if we killed anything.”

They had not.

The wolf was on the move.

It staggered, in great pain. Its left hind leg dragged. It rested for awhile, leaning against the corner of a building just as a weary man might. Then it went on a little further, and staggered again, and again had to find a place to support its unsteady weight.

Snow fell, white upon the streets and bricks and stones of Berlin. The wind picked up and began to keen. Night could be brutal. Night could be the no-man’s land of the soul, and so it was this night for Michael Gallatin.

But he was alive.

A truck carrying soldiers was coming. He turned into a trash-strewn alley and stood against the bricks, the left hind paw up off the ground above a puddle of blood. The truck passed. They were in no hurry, all the soldiers smoking cigarettes with their rifles at ease. They weren’t looking for him.

Michael lowered his head. Franziska, the wolf thought. Oh my God.

Picture it. Poor Franziska, fighting for the life of her noble knight.

And earning only bruises and a poison pill for her sacrifice.

The green eyes dimmed. It seemed to Michael that in the battle called life a skirmish had been lost. It seemed to him that on this day the sleepwalkers had won just a little more ground.

I will hold you forever, he thought.

And then through the pain of broken heart and damaged leg he considered the fact that he was alone, hurt and naked in Berlin, and if the ex-Ice Man was correct, some fearsome secret weapon called the Black Sun was being prepared to destroy the enemies of the Reich.

A few days, Rittenkrett had said.

Michael thought: That gives me a few days.

If I can survive the night.

He had more stamina and resistance to pain as a wolf. When he became a man again, he was going to need crutches and a long sleep. So…among the pigeons with rifles and the sheep with machine guns stalks the wolf. But he had the feeling that the closer he got to the Black Sun, the more he was going to need everything the wolf could give him.

A slight movement to his right suddenly riveted his attention. Down at the far end of the alley.

What was that down there? He sniffed the air, and smelled…

A white dog, dirty but still white enough, came a step closer and then stopped. Its ears were up, and it too was sniffing the air. Smelling his blood, Michael knew. He took a whiff of essence: female.

Another dog appeared at its side. Small and brown. A sausage dog. Male.

A third one nosed up beside the female. Another female, sand-colored with a long snout. She was mottled with sores, and Michael could smell her sickness.

They all stood still, watching him. The snow fell down and the wind blew, and Michael Gallatin shivered and felt the blood running out of him.

A fourth dog moved through the others.

They parted to give him way. No wonder. He was the man. A big black Doberman with powerful haunches and eyes the color of amber stones. He got between the wolf and his charges and stared fixedly at the new arrival, which meant Do you want to fight?

Michael Gallatin, for all his size and the fact that even as wounded as he was he could tear them to shreds in a matter of seconds, put his head down almost to the concrete and rounded his shoulders.

No, I don’t, he replied.

The Doberman remained in guard position. Michael suspected that had been his job, before life in an alley. The white dog started to come forward, and the Doberman gave a whuff of Stay and pushed her with his snout. She stayed; she was his bitch.

The dogs of Berlin, Michael thought. The castoff pets, the companions of dead people, the unwanted and unloved. Now scavaging for whatever they could find in the garbage cans, and living…where, exactly?

The bitch with the sores on her body came up beside him. She sniffed at him, and to be polite he returned the compliment. She regarded him with eyes full of pain and, perhaps, true wonder. She was old. In her last days, her aroma said. Thin and diseased and homeless: a hopeless triad.

She came closer. He could tell she’d seen a lot, this old one had. Had seen a hearth and bedroom slippers. Had seen maybe a child’s joy. And a mother’s sadness, too. There was a lot in there. She had a regal air about her, a self-possessed dignity. Michael thought she was like an empress whose lovely domain had one day suddenly crumbled around her, through no fault or doing of her own. Possibly it was one of the bombs.

The little sausage crept up and, very carefully, sniffed. He couldn’t reach what he was after. When Michael shifted one inch, the sausage yelped and skittered away.

Then the white dog came, the beauty. The one who in another life would be companion to a fashion model in Paris and lie about on velvet cushions politely asking for liver treats. She came cautiously, stopping and then coming again, step by graceful step.

The Empress spoke in a low throaty grunt: He’s okay. Then the Beauty came on the last few paces, but she was trembling a little, like any high-spirited female might be in the presence of such a wounded monster, and she was ready to run.

Finally, then, the Doberman arrived.

He took stock of Michael at a distance, and with a sidelong appraisal. He sniffed the air, gave a quiet growl to let everyone know who was the Commander of this army, and then he pretended to look everywhere but at the wolf. The snow whitened his coat, and he gnawed at himself out of petulant irritation. Then, abruptly, he came right up to Michael and stood staring at an ear while the wolf, for the sake of getting along, gazed directly at the ground.

A tongue licked him. Just slightly. Darting in and away.

The Empress had found his gunshot wound.

The Little Sausage ran around in a circle, snapping at some memory of table scraps.

Then the Commander nudged Michael’s ribs with his muzzle. A nudge neither hard nor soft, just testing the bones. The message was: Maybe we can use you.

Michael was thinking the same thing.

The dogs drew away from him and began to trot toward the far end of the alley. The Empress turned back and waited, and then one by one the others stopped to wait too, until finally the Commander paused, one foreleg raised in a military pose.

Are you coming? was the pack’s question.

Michael Gallatin lifted his face to the sky and felt the softness of the snow. He felt also the oncoming dawn, far before the light arrived. He thought that the pack must have found or dug a shelter somewhere. He wondered if the Empress knew all the underground tunnels where the trains used to run when Berlin was a city with a heart, a soul and a mind.

The Black Sun.

He realized he might be the only one who knew. The only one who’d ever heard of it. Well, he’d let someone kill him some other day. When he was good and ready to die. When his job was finished.

But this wouldn’t be the day.

The dogs were waiting for him.

Michael thought that sometime soon he would find a silent place. A place where he could stand without being seen. A place where he could look out across the city and the sky. And in that place he would howl to the stars, he would howl to God, he would howl for the injustice and insanity of this world and he would howl for her.

My Franziska.

But for the rest of this night, perhaps only just this one, he would sleep among the angels.

And, undefeated, Michael Gallatin struggled on.