Cataclysm Baby

Ulmer, Ulric, Ursa

I wait until the winter moon peeks from behind its shadow and then I call to the harrow-hunt this pack, these sons and cousins and half-brothers and grandsons, all these evolutions of my own beast-headed form, an overlapping of altered progenies, some mimicking my own shape and some their mothers’, so that we are become a family united by blood but not body, our forms as far-ranging as our hunting grounds, as the sprawl of forest we’ve claimed for ourselves, where despite our differing shapes we live together by the same rules:

That each kill we make is shared among the pack.

That each wound incurred in the hunt is licked clean by a brother.

That after we hunt we eat. And after we eat we howl. And after we howl we run.

The moon waxes wider each night, and soon there is little time to pause, no matter how empty our bellies or how tired our legs. In single-file, we cross forest floor and snow-clenched clearing, each pack mate putting his paws in the unshared footprints of a father or brother, until together we reach the high rock, the place of decision agreed upon a year ago, when last the forest tribes met.

What spectacle there is to see upon our arrival, what new variety of form only a year past our last meeting: What bear-bodies, what cougar-hearts, what boar-teeth, and among them all the other wolf-head packs, flush with brothers despite the endless snow, the failing prey.

When all are assembled and greeted—when we have each sniffed and nuzzled and marked each other as friends, as temporary extended family—then each father-alpha relates his tale in turn, some with words, some with beast-noise, some with both at once. We speak loudly and with great length, give speeches that consume many nights, that take the whole fullness of the moon to complete.

We speak these many words as if we have to, as if the limitations of syllables could somehow mask the truer language of our shifted bodies.

The failure of our great hunt, the one each tribe is engaged in for the good of all others, it has already been communicated by our lowered heads, our tucked tails, and so even before our speeches all our boys know what we fathers know too: It has been years since any of us have seen a human woman, and the beast-heads make no daughters.

The wives we share our dens with welcome us gladly because they too are short of number, their own males scarce even before the dwindling of the world, but they cannot give us human children, cannot keep our lines from drifting toward wildness.

They cannot, and if we complain they cry bitterly, for they do not see why our children should look only like us, why they should not also take after their mothers.

They say this, but it is not their race that is disappeared, and so our sorrow is not theirs to share. They do not mind their children who are only wolves, only cougars, only bears and boars, because what else should they desire but more of themselves, new packs made stronger by our mingled blood and seed?

When the meeting is over—when the moon enters the waning that awaits it on the other side of our words—only then do we give up one language for another, to come together as one people, one troubled nation of tribes. As one mouth we combine our voices, a cacophony rising as if to crack the earth, as if to shake the heavens, as if to loose the turning moon from her mount and bring it crashing down upon us, the only mass heavy enough to bury our giant grief.

There is this big noise, and then afterward there is my prone form, whole of body but spirit-quaked, hope-bloodied.

All around me, my wolf-children gather, licking my face and chest, pulling loose what matters they find fouled upon my fur, while beside them my beast-headed boys stroke my coat with clawed fingers, make what few words their dumb tongues can make.

All these children, these many pups, and yet gathered to me are no true sons, no sons I wanted, in their place rise only these altered generations, these boys who will not grow up to be their father, not without the mothers I wanted them to have.

And if I refuse to stand? If, like the other alphas, I demand to be left here at the meeting place, the high rock of the woods? If I tell my sons and grandsons that I have failed, that I am no longer worthy to lead their pack, what then follows my quitting them, their family?

Then the song of farewell. Then the song of forgiveness. Then the song of funeral.

Then the song of their teeth upon my throat, upon my haunch and perineum and tendons, the soft spots of the easy kill.

Then in my mind only the face of my own father, the last human visage I saw, which I never again brought forth upon this wilding world, despite all my efforts to prevent his line’s extinction, despite all my attempts to raise these lost boys in his image.