Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter Trilogy

Book : Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter

by Brian P. Easton

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Horror; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

It takes more than silver bullets to kill a werewolf. This is an an omnibus edition of the three books in the Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter trilogy. Sylvester James knows what it is to be haunted. His mother died giving birth to him and his father never let him forget it—until the night he was butchered by a werewolf. Alone in the world, Sylvester is taken in by Michael Winterfox, a Cheyenne mystic. Winterfox, once a werewolf hunter, trains the boy to be a warrior—teaching him how to block out pain, stalk, fight, and kill. Bit by bit all that makes Sylvester human is sacrificed to the hunt. Now, Sylvester’s hatred has become a monster all its own, robbing him of conscience and conviction as surely as the Beast’s bite. As he follows his vendetta into the outlands of the occult, options become scarce. And he learns it takes more than silver bullets to kill a werewolf—to kill a werewolf, it takes a hunter with a perfect willingness to die. This edition features the previously published Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter, Heart of Scars, and The Lineage in Brian P. Easton's Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter trilogy.

Release date: September 20, 2016

Publisher: Permuted Press

Print pages: 560

Sample

Prologue

 

When I was twelve, I couldn’t wait to be a man. And I thought I’d be one when I turned thirteen. That meant everything to a boy who, more than anything, wanted to be like his Papa. What I wanted was to make him proud of me because I had caused him so much grief. I thought if I did everything right, I could make it up to him.

My father’s name was Foster James, and he was French-Canadian. He met my mother, Abigail, in Nova Scotia where they married and settled after World War II. Mother was half-Cheyenne Indian. I was born in Halifax in 1950, and it was the nurses who named me Sylvester Logan. They said they couldn’t stop my mother’s bleeding. I don’t think she ever got to hold me.

We lived in an old house in Lethbridge, Alberta, near where Mama had grown up. Her parents were gone, and Papa’s had died when he was young, so we only had each other. Papa had been a woodsman most of his life; he said it ran in his blood. From being with him, I learned to read the forest’s secret language of sight and sound. The time we spent in the woods together was the finest I remember. We’d find tracks in the snow or mud, and he’d quiz me on which animal made them. Or he’d point to a tree and say: “I wish I knew what kind of tree that is,” which was my cue to provide the answer. He taught me to fish in the summer, to hunt in the autumn, and to trap in the winter.

I always believed that Papa held me responsible for Mama’s death. There were times he would look at me like I was a ghost, and when I would ask him what was wrong, he would force a sad smile and shake his head. But most of the time, when he just stared through me, I could almost read his mind: “I know you,” he seemed to say. “You’re the one who killed my wife.” I always felt ashamed.

I don’t remember ever hearing Papa laugh, but he didn’t cry either. Real men didn’t do such things. He believed tears were a sign of a weak spirit, and there was no place in my father’s life for weakness.

When I would cry, he would be stern and tell me to let it turn to something else. I suppose it was his way of dealing with pain, a mental exercise that changed weak emotions into strong ones. It also turned tears into anger.

Every year Papa took me rabbit hunting with my black Labrador, Brutus. The autumn of my ninth birthday, the three of us had found an area where loggers had left piles of dried brush and dead limbs—just the sort of places rabbits like to hide. Brutus flushed three from a particular pile, and Papa sent the first one rolling. I trained the bead of my .410 shotgun on the second, but as I tightened against the trigger, Brutus bolted into my line of fire. He yelped and tumbled into a heap. I rushed to him and dropped to the ground; his blood leaked onto my trousers as I held him. His eyes looked so surprised before he wilted in my arms. I buried my face in his neck and sobbed, “I’m sorry, Brutus.”

Papa kneeled behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Crying won’t bring him back,” he said. “Turn it to something else, boy. Tears don’t help anyone.”

I tried to do what he said, like he taught me, but all I could think of was that I’d killed my dog like I’d killed my Mama. Papa’s hand tightened as he pulled me away from the dog. I clung to him and cried, but he just patted me on the back and then held me at arm’s length.

“Look at me, Sylvester,” he demanded. “Real men don’t cry. If you want to be a real man, then let it turn to something else. Turn it toward the rabbits. Do you understand?”

For the next two years, whenever I hunted rabbits, I didn’t do it for the sport or for food…it was a vendetta. I wanted them dead because they’d made me kill my dog, and there was a cold sense of retribution every time I pulled the trigger.

 

Around Christmas-time each year, Papa and I traveled northwest into the mountains to visit an old man named Michael Winterfox. Michael had been a friend of my mother’s family ever since he and my grandfather served together in World War I. They’d fought in a Native American military unit in France. Granddad never came home, but Michael promised to look after his wife and daughter.

Papa had a lot of respect for Native American tradition because, he said, he was descended from French trappers who owed a lot to the Indians. He was especially fond of Michael, who epitomized Indian tradition. Michael, like my grandfather, was Northern Cheyenne. He lived by himself in a cabin near the Peace River. Papa said he was far away from the rest of his tribe, and he liked living alone. It seemed

to me like he was hiding.

Michael had been something of a momâhtátane—as the Cheyenne call their holy men—in his younger days, and he was the last remnant of some obscure warrior society. Knowing that, and just the way he looked, impressed the hell out of me. He had a lean, wrinkled face and long snow-white braids. He wasn’t a big man, but when he met us at the door with his corncob pipe clinched between his teeth, he seemed ten feet tall.

He also kept some peculiar things around his house—spooky Indian things. They added to the mood that hummed across the Canadian Rockies; it was the feeling of sacred sobriety with a faint undercurrent of fear.

Some nights, during our visits and after I was supposed to be asleep, Michael and my father would whisper to each other for hours. They sat at his kitchen table, drinking homemade hooch and speaking of things too dangerous to know.

 

The Christmas of 1963 found Papa and I doing what we always did that time of year, helping Michael with his extensive trap line. Most days Michael was with us, but on one particular morning he’d gone up to Jessup’s Grain & Feed for additional provisions. Jessup’s was a trading post about fifteen kilometers up the river, where high country folks, like Michael, could buy sundries for themselves and their animals. Michael didn’t like the idea of us doing all his work for him, but my father insisted.

It was a good day for beaver and mink as I recall, and we were both eager to share the good news with Michael. The harvest that day was heavy enough to slow us down, and by the time we started back, the shadows had begun to lengthen across the snow. As the mountains grew darker, our horses became spooked and quickened their pace. Papa seemed unusually anxious to get back to the cabin as well, and he cursed in French under his breath for having lost track of time.

I didn’t understand his concern. After all, we’d been in the woods after dark many times before. I knew that even if we became lost, the horses would find their way back, but Papa wasted no time.

As shadows spun their dark web over the forest, Papa’s anxiety became unnerving. I had never seen him so preoccupied. Traps and gunnysacks full of furs bounced madly against the flanks of my sorrel. It was as though we were running away from something, something my Papa feared.

 

I felt the weight shift behind my saddle, and I heard the crunch of a dozen carcasses as they sprawled across the snow. I called to Papa, but he told me to keep riding. I seldom disobeyed him, but it was he who had

 taught me never to waste game. It would only take a minute to recover the gunnysack, and I could catch up with him before he missed me. After all, I was thirteen. The mare took some convincing, but I managed to turn her about. I had started to collect the furs when the forest made a sound I’d never heard before. My hands froze around the mouth of the sack as the sound cut ripples down my spine. It began low and guttural, then rose like a scream–its crescendo, the howl of a demented gray wolf.

A halo of light made a bull’s-eye on my cheek as Papa’s flashlight approached. He rode to me and practically vaulted from his saddle with Michael’s Henry rifle in one hand. Before I could explain myself, the horses spooked again and bolted into the darkness. Papa clamped his hand over my mouth and lowered his face to mine.

“Do as I say now,” he whispered, and turned me toward a tall fir tree with heavy low-lying rungs for branches. “Climb the tree, and don’t make a sound.”

There was a fear in his eyes I hardly recognized.

My heart raced as one limb led me to the next, and quiet puffs of snow scattered in my wake. The light of the full moon stabbed through the branches like a ghostly spotlight.

When I’d climbed as high as I dared, I nestled against the trunk for support and heard Papa lever a round into the rifle. My stomach was twisted into knots, and the hot breath of dread shot through my bones.

Papa tossed away his flashlight and shouldered the rifle. He pivoted side to side, searching for a target that didn’t seem to exist. In the darkness something churned—a shadow within shadows.

The glow from the discarded flashlight made a white half-globe in the snow, putting a pale halo into the air, which was just enough to reflect deep red eye-shine standing tall over the snow. The eyes shimmered and vanished, and I wanted to warn him, but I couldn’t speak. I had to bite down hard just to keep my teeth from rattling.

Papa swung the rifle barrel where the eyes had been, then spun to meet the sound of crackling ice. Without warning, the flashlight beam went out. Except for the moonlight, which offered little consolation through a canopy of evergreen, the forest was blind.

Frozen, terrible moments passed before the Henry finally roared. Flames flashed from the bore, providing a momentary burst of illumination. In that instant, all I could see was a black form of something monstrous at my father’s back. A symphony of sound and shadow tumbled below me for a moment. Something splattered. Something snapped. Then the mountains fell silent, except for the fading echo of the rifle shot and the sound of some liquid pouring out below.

 

I remember staring at red snow. I remember being pulled from the tree, put on a horse, and some disconnected images of Michael piling up stones for a grave. But mostly I remember watching Michael wipe down a bloody Henry Rifle.

When the shock finally wore off, I melted into tears. But the more I sobbed, the more Papa whispered in my ear: “Let it turn, Sylvester.”

I hid my face and held my breath to stop the tears. I pinched off my heart, and the grief choked me. I would let it turn. Molten tears cooled against my cheeks as the swell began to subside. When the grief finally drained, it had become something else.

Through a watery haze,

 I could see Michael watching me from across the table. His eyes locked with mine.

“I’ll never cry again,” I said quietly, more to myself than to Michael.

The old man studied me for a few seconds longer, then returned to cleaning his rifle. We sat in silence for the longest time as he swabbed and oiled every inch of its iron frame. I tugged at one of the dark stained rags and parted its oily folds, staring down into the Rorschach-test patterns of blood-brown.

“What was it?” I asked, feebly.

Michael just kept polishing.

“It wasn’t a real animal,” I answered myself.

He put the rifle butt against the floor and began wiping the barrel.

“That’s one way to say it,” he sighed.

 

Fourteen .44 rimfire cartridges lay strewn across the table. I rolled one toward myself. Michael had his own bullet molds and loaded his own shells because rounds for a Henry were scarce. I’d seen the strange paper cases before, but I’d never noticed the bullets.

Michael slowly plucked it from my fingertips.

“It’s silver,” he said.

He left the room with the rifle under his arm. I heard him close the backdoor behind him a few minutes later. Gears started turning in my head, trying to link silver to something that made sense.

 

I could hear Michael busting up logs. The chime of the ax called me to him. I stood with my hands in my pockets, too close to his swing to be safe.

“You’re going to stay with me,” he said without missing a lick.

“It doesn’t matter,” was my reply.

I turned and walked into the forest, a thirteen-year-old with nothing to lose.

While wandering through the woods, I might have fallen into a gorge or surprised a grizzly bear. Part of me actually hoped I would. But Michael followed me throughout the day, and near dark he finally came to me and spoke. He talked about how much he’d loved my mother and

about his responsibility to my family. He spoke of a promise made long ago, and in the next breath he spoke of full moons, silver bullets, and an ancient, terrible thing. A werewolf. When he was finished, he asked me what I wanted.

“I want Papa to be alive,” was my natural response.

“You know you can’t have that,” he said.

“Then I want it to be dead. I want to kill it,” I shouted. There was venom in my mouth and newborn rage in my eyes. Michael recognized it.

“You’re too young to know what you’re saying,” he said.

“Then teach me,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “Before I get old and scared.” It was both my request and my accusation.

He continued to study my eyes without retort.

“If I can’t have that, then I want to die,” I said without blinking. “That’s my third choice.”

“The Beast will kill you one piece at a time, Sylvester. Bite by bite.”

The tone of personal experience was undeniable.

 

 

Chapter I:

 

To the rest of the world, Papa and I had disappeared. I never went back to Lethbridge, and I didn’t go back to school. High country people have their own way of doing things. Michael knew if Papa’s death was reported there would be an inquest, and the authorities would never award custody of an orphan to an old hermit. So we sank Papa’s pickup in a deep pool in the lower Peace, and I stayed in the mountains with Michael.

We were over a hundred kilometers from any real town, but we may as well have been on another planet. The Rockies were immense, and the forests vast. It was hard to imagine there was anyplace else in the world. So I subsisted on a steady diet of wild game and fish, wore oversized clothes from Jessup’s, and occasionally chased a barefoot mountain girl or two.

Michael had two unique memorials standing outside his cabin. One was a totem pole he’d spent years carving. The faces of his parents, his older brother, and my grandfather were each meticulously detailed in the wood. The other was as tall as the totem pole but much more frightening. Perched atop the second pole was a monstrous sun-bleached skull; it might have been a boar grizzly’s if one didn’t know better. He caught me staring at it one afternoon in mid-January.

“We’ll soon know how badly you want to make war with the Beast,” he said ominously.

Michael defined the nature of our relationship early. He wasn’t raising a son; he was training a Warrior. He would teach me what he could, if I were willing and able to endure the learning process. Cheyenne mothers used to take crying infants to a tree and drape them by a sling over a branch. They’d leave them alone to cry themselves out, and eventually the child learned that blubbering was useless. From what I knew of Cheyenne discipline, I could only deduce such a learning process would be severe.

Michael disliked the word “werewolf” because it evoked images of a make-believe creature. Collectively he called them the Beast or the Wolves, which he annunciated in such a way that any confusion with actual wolves was impossible. Sometimes he used the term Shungmanitu-Wa-Chah, a designation borrowed from the Lakota people, which means “One Who Is Wolf.”

Regardless, they were a supernatural predator, which had feasted on man’s flesh from time immemorial, and they feared nothing but silver. The very first thing he taught me was to recognize Wolves in any form they might take. Everything changes when the Beast sheds its human disguise, everything but its basic nature.

“If you can look a man in the eyes,” he told me, “and look deep enough, you can read his soul. You can see the one part of the Beast that he cannot hide.” The trick, he said, was remembering to look for it. He assured me I would know it when I saw it. Michael spoon-fed me what he knew of them, a little at a time. Maybe it was so I could fully process and digest the information. Michael himself was very calm when he taught me about the subject, but I didn’t share his full dose of Cheyenne discipline.

I would seethe until my teeth ached whenever he’d tell me something new. It was like feeding an open fire, and he knew it. Hatred would rise like a gorge, and it would leave its bitter trail on my tongue. I refused to let go of my rage, even though it burned me inside out. And there was no release from the guilt that haunted my every waking hour.

Winterfox’s mother had been a má'heóná'e or medicine woman. She had taught her sons, sacred ceremonies and magical rites. But beyond that, Michael had been a member of an ancient Northern Cheyenne Warrior society called Reydosnin, a small, mystical branch of the legendary Dog Soldiers. They relied on the spirit world as much as their natural senses. The Reydosnin Warriors, fearless and relentless as all Dog Soldiers were, also performed fantastic feats of prowess, agility, and stamina. These “super” Dog Soldiers had been able to track man and animal alike in total darkness, engage multiple armed opponents, withstand agonizing pain without a flinch, and never miss a target when they fired an arrow or hurled a tomahawk. They were expected to be perfect in every way that mattered to the Northern Cheyenne. Initiates for the Reydosnin order were selected from Dog Soldiers who had repeatedly

demonstrated superior skill and judgment in battle.

The training was so rigorous and the standards so exacting, only a few of the most elite Dog Soldiers ever became Reydosnin. Many died from the brutal training techniques, and Reydosnin masters became increasingly rare. The society had always been small, but as the ranks of the order grew thinner, a Reydosnin master named Night-Wolf had a solution.

In an attempt to pull the society from the brink of oblivion, Night-Wolf selected male children born of Warrior fathers and trained them from infancy. But time was running out for the people of plains. Despite stories of Dog Soldiers slapping away army bullets with the flat of their tomahawks, the great Reydosnin weren’t bulletproof. The death of Roman Nose, the Dog Soldier’s greatest leader, heralded the end of that society. The Reydosnin order vanished without a trace, but Michael Winterfox had been one of the chosen infants.

The training of his extinct order was the best Michael had to offer. If I could survive it, I would have something to bring to the Beast besides passion and my willingness to die. He made no promises, or a single guarantee, and he admitted that, over generations, time had diluted what the Reydosnin had once been. But if I would accept no other course but vengeance, and was resolved to offer my life on the altar of my father’s memory, he could show me the ancient tools that would do honor to his spirit. I wanted those tools almost as badly as I wanted Papa back.

Michael began to initiate me into the Reydosnin mysteries about a month after he’d buried Papa. I had no earthly idea what I was walking into.

It began gently enough, with Cheyenne rituals that I don’t pretend to understand and details I vaguely remember. Soon, I was fasting and keeping vigils for days at a time. After awhile, the lack of food and sleep crossed the limits of anguish and became a narcotic. I hallucinated and heard voices like rolling thunder in my brain. I lost all sense of where I was or what I was doing, but somewhere inside, the fires of hatred reminded me why.

Michael and I sweated often in a buffalo-hide lodge, and smoked prayers to the Great Spirit. Grief, like a flood, engulfed me daily, and I’d turn it to fuel for the conflagration in my soul.

When the time of initiation had passed, Michael began to teach me how to fight. He explained that it had little influence on the Beast, but I would encounter others who would stand in my way. There were four degrees in the Reydosnin fighting tradition: range, armed, weaponless, and spirit combat. The first three were natural, he explained. Any man could be taught to fire a weapon, use a knife, or fight barehanded. But to tap into the Great Mystery was a prize few could attain.

In the old days, Reydosnin would use bows to attack from a distance, but we had firearms. The first weapon he taught me to use was the same iron-frame Henry rifle he’d loaned my father that fateful night. Michael didn’t always keep silver bullets in the tube. Lead was sufficient for glass bottles and tin cans. Papa had already taught me to handle long guns, but I’d never fired anything as powerful as the Henry. The mottled purple bruise on my shoulder throbbed endlessly.

Michael opened an old footlocker in his bedroom one morning and produced a 1911 Colt automatic pistol, a souvenir from the Great War. He handed it to me. It was too large for my hands, but holding it felt right

somehow. Coffee cans and empty whisky jugs stood in for the Beast as I poured round after booming round through the .45. Soon my hands trembled from the weight and the repeated recoil. I could barely hit a thing regardless of how carefully I aimed. Michael explained the nature of the 1911.

“It’s not an extremely accurate weapon,” he admitted. “Not like the Henry. You have to fire from the hand, more than the eye.”

I quickly caught on. The Colt fired consistently where it was placed, and once I learned to make the adjustment, cans and crockery began to fall.

In the midst of all the firearm exercises, Michael was cautious not to neglect other aspects of the Reydosnin path. We would walk together at night, both of us unarmed, deep into the mountains. The first time we did this, I questioned his decision not to bring the rifle. He muttered something about the Wolf that killed Papa and how it wouldn’t be back here for a long time. He didn’t explain himself, as he stopped to extinguish his lantern.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked in the pitch-blackness.

“I think so.”

“You’d better be sure,” he insisted.

His voice trailed off in the distance, the only indication he had left me. He didn’t make a sound. My first impulse was to call out for him, but I knew better. I tried to collect my bearings in the darkness and feel my way through the forest. For all I knew, he might have been standing a few feet away, watching my futile, groping efforts; or he may have gone back to the cabin. With Michael, you never knew. I didn’t make it back that night, or the next day. I thought I might freeze to death or meet with a more menacing fate. The possibilities were endless. I turned my fear to determination and all traces of panic had vanished by the second night. Still, I was completely lost until he came for me the next afternoon.

“We’ll try again later,” was his only response to my failure.

Between periods of instruction in armed combat, particularly the tomahawk and the long knife, Michael would blindfold me for days at a time. He said a man’s eyes were deceptive and would betray him if he relied on them too much. He taught me to listen for movement, feel the ground for subtle vibrations, and sniff the air for odors.

I’d put balls of cotton in my ears and pinch off my nostrils to force my remaining senses into accountability. He said a Reydosnin Warrior could siphon energy from his other senses and focus it on a single faculty. If he needed to see like a cat, he would rob from his ears. If he needed to smell with the acumen of a dog, he would deprive his vision, and so on. As the training became more demanding and intense, the specter of futility came whispering in my ear.

I visited Papa’s grave as often as I could, but never said anything to him. I was growing accustomed to my silent misery, attached even. I felt vulnerable when the pain began to subside, and would rip open the scabs of my heart to keep the pain raw and real. I needed

the pain more than ever to withstand Michael’s tormenting regimen. I needed the misery to remind me of my oath to avenge Papa, so I would never question my decision. I sat at his grave till morning more than once, fattening my grief so I could swallow it whole and digest it into anger. Hatred had become a curdled mother’s milk to me, and emotional masochism a way to cope.

The first year in the mountains was the hardest. I’d come to Michael a soft and helpless orphan, but he’d finished what Papa had begun; he made me into a man. The training was more advanced and difficult than ever, but I’d advanced as well. By the summer of 1964, I could find my way back to the house blindfolded at night—no matter how far away Michael led me. My senses had become finely tuned instruments, and though I hadn’t mastered manipulating them, I began to understand the theory behind the technique. It was a mental exercise like turning emotions, but much more complicated.

Shutting down physical pain was also in the Reydosnin’s litany of skills. It was not as difficult as turning emotions, but certainly more demanding. Emotional struggle required a certain amount of quiet concentration, while physical pain is more in-your-face. It had to be done on the fly, while Cavalry bullets were buzzing by your ears.

I was still learning to fight with hand-to-hand weapons. The tomahawk and Bowie knife I trained with had become permanent extensions of my arms. But drill and practice as I might, I couldn’t adjust to the tomahawk’s awkwardness. It threw off my whole approach. Time and again Michael parried the ’hawk blade and then avoided the mock knife thrust. Finally, he snatched the tomahawk from my hand and hurled it across the yard where it notched into the warning pole.

“Who carries a tomahawk anymore, anyway?” he said with a wrinkled grin.

It was still important to learn two-fisted fighting, so he added a second knife to my repertoire. Without the bulk of the tomahawk to slow me down, my armed combat techniques improved drastically. Michael and I simulated weapon-to-weapon combat until it was routine. We worked slowly and incrementally to a frantic exchange of knife thrusts and slashes. If one of us had struck the other at that pace, it could have been a mortal wound. But Michael’s reflexes were still sharp, and he pulled his blows with split-second timing. Mild bruises and “love scratches” were all I sustained. Not once did I best Michael in any aspect of the training, but when he said it was time to move on, I knew I’d met his expectations.

The training took a brutal turn in the autumn. Until then I’d only practiced shutting off the pain from injuries I accrued during exercises. It was time to take it to the next level.

“Understand,” Michael said soberly, “this is the next step of the process, a vital step.”

In the old days, Reydosnin masters would literally torture their recruits to teach them how to master pain.

“I don’t want to hurt you like that,” he admitted. “But I want to train you right. I’ll leave it to you. Do you still want this as badly as you once did?”

He made it clear that if I chose to forego the next step, he could take me no further. But I hadn’t come so far to quit, and I wasn’t afraid of the pain he promised…but I should have been.

Nothing he did to me would be permanent, but the old masters had been quite the inventive bunch. I’m reluctant to describe the exercises I endured during that time—mostly because of how it might reflect on Michael. By modern standards it was nothing short of child abuse, but we were hardly living by modern standards. On this matter, suffice it to say; I learned to dismantle extreme physical agony in a series of mental steps. Not a day has passed since then that I don’t thank Winterfox for it.

Michael had an old radio in the kitchen, which was our only link to the world beyond the Rockies. Reception was clearest in the wee hours of the morning, so occasionally I’d rise a half-hour or so before Michael to listen to the newscasts from Calgary and Edmonton. In 1965, the war in Vietnam began to dominate the airwaves, and I followed the reports with rapt interest. One such morning in the spring, while a newscaster rattled off statistics from Hanoi, Michael emerged unexpectedly through the front door with a string of trout in his fist. He plopped them on the table and peered through the window over the sink, scratching the back of his neck.

“What’s happening?” I asked, a little concerned with his distant stare.

“Got visitors,” he announced. “Probably lost. Just the same I want you in the root cellar till I come for you. Go out the back way.”

I obeyed the order without question, but I recalled a similar instruction an eternity ago.

Two constables from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came calling that dawn, and Michael waited for them on the porch. He even had extra coffee brewed by the time they arrived. Introductions were made, and the Mounties explained their business. They were looking for a man and his son who’d been missing for about a year and a half. Co-workers at the lumber mill where the man had worked indicated this area as a possible destination. The Mounties asked if he had seen them.

“Year and a half, you say?” Michael pondered aloud.

“Yes, sir,” replied the older policeman. “It’s a long shot, I know, but the case is still open.”

There wasn’t a lying bone in Michael’s body, but he knew what the truth would bring.

“I’m an old man, and my memory’s not what it was, but I do seem to recall a man and a boy who came through here hunting a year or so back. I believe the man said his name was…Foster?”

“That’s our man,” affirmed the younger Mountie with a triumphant grin.

“I don’t suppose you know what became of them?” asked his elder, chastising his partner’s unwarranted zeal with a stern, sideways glance. 

“As I recall,” Michael began, his pipe in his teeth, “He said something about Nova Scotia. This man’s a fugitive?”

The younger constable’s expression fell as he shook his head in mild frustration.

“No, sir. Nothing like that.”

“You might try the trading post to the west of here,” Michael offered.

“We talked to Mr. Jessup yesterday,” reported the junior Mountie. “He couldn’t help us.”

Never let it be said high country people don’t take care of their own.

“Well,” Michael said, spitting a fleck of tobacco from his tongue, “it’s a big area up here on the Peace.”

Defeated, they drank a cup of coffee, thanked him for his cooperation, and rode south. Once they’d slipped into the early-morning mist, Michael silently escorted them a comfortable distance from the cabin.

 

1965 was an eventful year on many levels. It began with the RCMP’s unpredicted visit. One Sunday each month Michael and I made a trip for supplies, but I began going alone so Michael could have more preparation time for my training. On one Sunday, later that same spring, I lost my virginity to Mr. Jessup’s oldest daughter, Roxy. She was an older woman of seventeen.

I didn’t tell Michael about it, but he figured it out right away. My concentration had suffered, and the fire in my belly had been, “turned to something else.” Michael pretended to be angry with me, but except for his performance with the constables, he wasn’t a very good actor. The euphoria of my new discovery didn’t last very long, and it certainly didn’t change anything. The event that truly hallmarked the year was about to blindside me.

It took almost a full day to get up to Jessup’s Grain & Feed and back, and naturally I looked forward to getting there more than ever. I struck out before sunrise on Michael’s sorrel mare, which knew the route better than I did. It was early May, and though the air was still cool through my flannels, the signs of summer were abundant. The Henry rifle was sheathed in the buckskin saddle-scabbard as always, and a handful of silver cartridges jingled in the cavernous pockets of my extra-large brown dungarees. Billows of mountain steam filled the passes and gorges, and I could taste the dew on my tongue.

The glory of a Rocky Mountain sunrise sprayed a liquid gold that scattered the shadows and warded off the morning chill. Everything around me was enchanted with mystery and burgeoning with life. I drank in the smells and sounds of the thriving wilderness, and I basked in my temporary respite. Papa’s harmonica was one of the only items of his that I was allowed to keep. He used to play fireside tunes on it when we were camping. I loved the sound it made, and every free moment I could steal was spent learning to play it.

I tethered the mare to Jessup’s hitching post around noon, and was greeted by the familiar smells of whisky, feed, and fur. The trading post was little more than a glorified shack built from sheet metal and sundry pieces of scrap lumber, with a massive creek-stone fireplace inside.

Mr. Jessup

 a burly bear of a man with an obnoxious personality until you got to know him. I stood in the doorway as he dickered over the price of beaver traps with an imposing character in dirty lineman’s boots. Two other patrons picked through the scant supply of tack while I peeled the grocery list from my shirt pocket and approached the counter. I waited for Mr. Jessup to notice me. I didn’t know if he knew about his daughter and me—or how he might react. Directly, he turned away from his negotiations and looked at me as if I were lost.

“The old man stay home again, Sly?” he asked in his characteristic grumble.

“Yes, sir. I believe he’s fishing,” I lied.

“Well, you know where everything’s at,” he said with uncomfortable emphasis. “Help yourself, and I’ll get the rest when I’m done here.”

The man in the lineman’s boots smiled at me with unwholesome interest as I collected the supplies; flour, coffee, tobacco, and gunpowder were the usual staples. I added an extra pair of trousers for myself because they looked like they might actually fit. When I placed the sundries on the counter to be tallied, I noticed the man in the lineman’s boots was gone.

“Need two sacks of horse feed, too,” I said, as though we didn’t always.

Jessup hoisted the heavy bags from the shelf behind him.

“So, the Chief sent you for the goods all by your lonesome, eh?” he chortled.

Michael tolerated the racial epithets because he knew he was respected in the same way one respects a hard freeze or other forces of nature. It bothered me more than it did him. Mr. Jessup scratched his notepad with a pencil stub while I tried to determine how wise it might be to ask if his daughter were around.

“I guess you’d be wonderin’ about Roxy, eh?” he snorted, as though he’d read my mind.

I’d never felt so awkward, and I could feel my face burn. Mr. Jessup chuckled, amused at my blushing silence, as we carried the sundries outside.

 

A .44 caliber rifle will completely destroy your average squirrel, but that didn’t mean I had to kill an elk for my dinner. I’d learned that the concussion of a big bore weapon could stun smaller game just by striking just next to it. So the sorrel munched on new clover, tied to a stump not far away, while I spit roasted a couple of squirrels over a fire. I stretched out beneath a tall oak and cleaned the Henry while sunlight streamed through the branches and kissed my face. When the game had cooked long enough, I set the rifle aside and pulled pieces of meat from the small bones. I’d barely eaten half of the first squirrel when someone stepped out of the brush and into my little encampment.

He had a bulging burlap sack slung over one shoulder. He was tall, with faded black lineman boots, and a yellow-toothed grin. It was the same man who’d smirked at me at the post. His features were chiseled and centered with a heavy, dark-brown mustache that completely obscured his top lip. There was a bit of a thump in my fourteen-year-old chest when he crouched on the other side of my fire like 

he’d been invited.

“Gon’ zhare that varmeent boy?” he asked in a Frenchman’s brogue.

“Help yourself,” I answered, gesturing toward the spit.

At the time, I believed I’d given up the rest of my meal because I was taught to respect my elders. It was also a high country courtesy, and I wasn’t all that hungry anyway…the truth was, he frightened me.

He reached across and plucked the rodent from the flames as casually as if he were reaching into an icebox. He put its head in his mouth and crushed the tiny skull with a splintering crackle. I watched him chew the bits of bones and brains with his mouth open. I lost interest in the rest of my dinner.

“You almoz’ runed eet,” he complained through his mouthful. “Burn to a creezp.”

The juices dribbled down his chin as he continued to devour the squirrel headfirst. His lips smacked with a sickening sound, and he grinned a mouthful of flesh-clotted teeth at me.

“What’z a wild-haired young theeng like you doin’ ou’ here all by you-zelf, eh?” he inquired as he winked.

I don’t remember if I answered him. There were brown splotches on his forearms that looked like crusted patches of blood. The same dark asterisks speckled his boots and his dirty-brown coveralls. I figured the Frenchman for a poacher, an outlaw even in the high country. Then I noticed the tiny balls of blood that hid in his whiskers.

He looked up from his dinner, caught me inspecting him, and our eyes met. A magnetic thread of tension stretched across the fire as I looked into his eyes. There was something there that shouldn’t have been. Like the sound of a rattler’s buzz, it was an unmistakable and unforgettable sign. He must’ve seen my eyes swell because he burst into a menacing laugh; his gaping mouth packed with half-chewed flesh and morsels of bone.

“Zomethin’ zpook you, boy?” he chuckled wickedly.

He had to know that I knew what he was, and I waited for him to leap to his feet and tear me to pieces. But he looked away to finish his messy feast. My eyes darted to their corners to spy the rifle leaning against the tree; not a single cartridge in the tube, much less silver. Through the roar of blood in my head, I fished for the bullets buried in my trouser pockets. I palmed one in a clammy fist and realized how much of an effort that simple act had taken. He looked up again. This was the end; I knew it. He swabbed the juices from one set of fingers suggestively with his tongue, while he pinched what remained of the squirrel in the other hand. I watched his face turn solemn with the grimace of a predatory animal. He was going to kill me. He leaned a bit forward on his haunches…

“Boo!” he snapped.

I jumped like I’d been shot, and frantically seized the Henry. He found my reaction hysterical,

and rolled from his squat, paying no heed to my fumbling attempt with the rifle. I twisted the barrel open while he continued to laugh. Any second now, I thought, he was going to realize what I was doing and cut me down. The silver round disappeared into the tube. I wrenched the barrel back into place and chambered the round as he recovered from his fit of mirth. He stood and tossed the remnant of his meal into the coals, sending a cloud of embers into the air. He cocked his head to one side and lapped his other set of fingers greedily as I pointed the heavy rifle at him.

“Gon’ta zhoot me, eh?” he asked, as though he didn’t mind.

This was the moment I’d suffered for, the opportunity I’d pledged my life to. How many nights did anger consume me till I was rabid for a taste of the Beast’s blood? Those silver bullets had burned holes in my pockets, but until the fangs are snapping at your throat and the breath is fogging your glasses, it’s just so much noise. Just being there, he reduced me to the terrified boy in the tree again.

“What’z matter, you don’ like grown meen?” he taunted.

My finger warmed around the trigger, but I hadn’t noticed how badly the barrel was quaking.

He wiped his hands down his trouser legs. I stood there waiting for an act of God to pull the trigger for me, until I finally squeezed it myself. Thunder echoed through the pass and the bullet cut through the fabric bunched at his hip. He hadn’t blinked. I groped for another shell, dumbfounded that I’d missed him. He began sliding the straps of his coveralls over his shoulders.

“You Papa never told you not to zhoot at peeplez, boy?”

Anger, like scalding adrenalin lit up my entire body.

“My father’s dead, Wolf!” I screamed at him, breaking my extended silence with a vengeance.

He paused for a moment to eye me curiously. His mouth twitched to a snarling grin.

“What you know ‘bout zuch t’ings, eh?”

He was locked on me, the Beast leaping from his eyes. Now he knew. I fought the Henry open for a second time and reloaded a handful of the proper metal with the steadier hands anger had given me.

“Don’ matter anyway,” he growled, and his skin began to darken.

I levered a new round into place and hauled the stock to my shoulder while a warm cocktail of hatred and terror flooded my belly. He kicked through the campfire, scattering its half-burned fuel across the grass. Down the length of the barrel I saw his body begin to transform.

His bones crunched as they realigned themselves, and hair began to knit across his face like the crawl of brown spiders. He was inches from the bore when the report smothered in his chest. The impact of the bullet flattened him like a metric ton of dead meat across the scattered orange coals. His coveralls were burned in a black halo from the muzzle flash, and he feverishly clutched at the red bull’s-eye. Blood streamed between his twisted fingers, while I chambered the next round. He thrashed like a dying fish among the embers, and his eyes, which had been smoking furnaces of hell, were now struck wide in disbelief; it reminded me of Brutus. The silver seized him like a volatile poison that forever trapped him in the

 purgatory of transformation.

The third bullet was an insurance policy that pulped his sternum and everything beneath it. My legs buckled, and I collapsed in the grass with him. Fighting to overcome a gamut of emotions and bring my heartbeat under control, I realized that fear wasn’t the only thing that had washed through my guts. Once I’d collected my nerves I examined the wolfish corpse. Had he been the thing that had killed Papa?

His hands were gnarled into stiff claws, and his jaw was protruded to accommodate extended teeth. But in the glassy stare, there was no Beast, only the cold seal of death. It was then that the gravity of what I’d done really hit me. I’d killed a werewolf! After I composed myself, the whole experience seemed more beautiful than the morning sunrise had been. I changed out of my soiled pants, and then sorted through the bag he’d been carrying. I was looking for something that might indict him as my father’s killer, but found no such evidence.

Michael was waiting for me when I rode in that night and he saw the makeshift body-sleigh in tow. I dismounted and stood next to the cadaver. He approached with increasing interest, but I think he already knew.

“I killed him,” I blurted out, trying to suppress my victorious pride.

Michael stooped down to examine the body, inspecting the stiff fingers on each hand while I told him the story.

“Do you think he’s…?”

“Not him,” he interrupted. “Probably looking for the other one though.”

His back creaked as he stood up and cut a chunk from a tobacco twist.

“How can you be sure?” I questioned.

“You’re bloody now,” he said in response. “Know what that means?”

“Kind of like not being a virgin anymore?” I beamed.

“It means,” he began, spitting a stream of tobacco juice, “you can’t quit now. Not ever.

“It means, Sylvester,” he said as he put his hand on my shoulder, “the war you’ve been preparing for began today.” There was a touch of sadness in his face—more than usual.

“Michael,” I said, “the war started for me two years ago.”

I was still too young and too naïve to know what he really meant, but he let it go with a half-grin.

“You do me proud, boy,” he said as he squeezed my shoulder, “but we’re not done yet.”

We built a fire to consume the werewolf’s remains and belongings, and I retold the story while we watched it burn. I may have embellished it a little the second time around.

“I have just one question,” he said. “Where’s your other britches?”

 

I’d taken a life. Like my moment with Roxy Jessup, it had been a first. As far as Michael was concerned it was a rite of passage, I’d been baptized. Michael said it called for a ceremony. He explained the Sundance and how important it was to the Cheyenne people. It was

right up there with the Sacred Arrows given to the prophet Sweet Medicine. He said I needed to prove my sincerity to the Great Mystery now more than ever. I’d stepped onto the Beast’s path; I’d need the spirits’ guidance to walk it.

The ceremony itself seemed simple in its intensity. Following several days of bodily deprivation, standing before the sun and offering prayers, the body was exceptionally vulnerable. It allowed the spirit to be more in tune with spiritual forces. Two leather cords were attached to a tall pole; there were sharpened pegs at the end of each cord, which were to be inserted beneath the skin of a man’s pectorals. The pledge would then dance around the pole, tethered by his flesh until the pegs were torn free. Not a particularly pleasant ritual, but it was intensely sacred and no worse than I’d already endured.

It began with smoking our prayers to the Great Spirit and purifying ourselves in the Sweat Lodge…all Cheyenne ceremonies do. The elation of my first kill slowly evaporated as the days of fasting and standing wore on. Eventually everything became dreamlike, and I’m reluctant to say what was real and what was not. But to the Cheyenne, there is nothing more real than a dream or a vision.

I can remember Michael being decked out in his ceremonial attire as he ritually painted my body. I also recall being pinned to the leather straps. Despite what I’d expected, the pain was minimal. It wasn’t so much a dance as it was a series of violent tugs against the pegs in my chest. If I were supposed to be communicating with spirits, they didn’t seem interested in talking to me. I distinctly remember the moment the pegs ripped free; I crumbled to a heap.

 

Most of the pain came when I woke up, the next morning. I was still weary to the bone and every muscled ached, but mostly I was starving. I rolled from my cot and felt something graze my chest. I looked down to see a small leather bundle on a rawhide cord hanging around my neck. It was a medicine pouch. Michael had left me a bowl of cold corn-meal mush waiting on the table. While I spooned the porridge with my fingers I looked through the door and saw the most amazing thing.

It was Michael, whittling beneath his totem pole, with a full-grown tom lion grooming itself next to him. When I approached the door for a better view, the cougar looked toward the cabin, bared its teeth in a hiss and scrambled into the woods. I saw Michael’s head poke around the totem pole to look at me. I walked outside with my bowl still in my hand.

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“He used to come around now and then,” he said, brushing wooden curls from his shirt. “How do you feel?”

“Alright, I guess.”

I considered asking

him if I should have had a vision or experienced something mystical but I was afraid of what his answer might be, and I didn’t want to repeat the ceremony.

“What’s in this?” I asked, touching the medicine pouch.

“A drop of silver,” he said, dusting off his backside. “That’s to keep you straight and true when every road you walk is crooked.”

He reached to touch the carved face of my grandfather.

“Your grand-dad’s proud of you,” he said. “The spirits have given you a name.”

“A name?” I questioned.

Michael withdrew his hand from the totem pole and put one finger gently against my chest.

“Heart-of-Scars. That’s how they know you.”

“I didn’t see anything during the Sundance,” I muttered reluctantly. “Not a vision, anyway.”

“Give it time,” he answered right away. “You’re just getting started.”

 

Two days later, Michael and I hiked to an open field that overlooked the Peace. We’d come prepared to spend a few days. It was near sacred ground, but he wouldn’t say why. He told me how the Reydosnin developed their barehanded fighting style by learning from the animals. To strike with the ferocity of a puma and the speed of a rattlesnake, ...