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The Wolf--1980
His nose twitched slightly as he searched the air for clues. Otherwise Avatar stood motionless on the crest of the hill. The moon reflected off his coat, creating a silver haze that mingled with the early evening mist. Avatar turned his head ever so slightly trying to catch a breeze, anticipating smells of some kind. A sweet wafting of the night breezes should have carried the smells of at least a hundred animals, big and small, to his sensitive nose.
There was no breeze.
There were no smells.
Emptiness.
His ears stood taut as he listened to hear what he could not smell. It was almost deafening, but it was nothing. It was overwhelming in its nothingness. Total silence.
The wolf looked down over the land below him. It was filled with trees, trees that appeared to be dead. If it was winter, no one passing by —neither human or animal — would even have noticed the starkness. But, this was spring, and there were no animals, no birds, no insects. The air was oppressive. He raised his head and looked toward the horizon to see how far this devastation extended. He saw that its ghostly perimeter formed a circle about two miles in diameter.
A circle of death.
In its center was a cabin.
Differences in shade between the hollow shells of the trees, barely distinguishable to the eye, created concentric borders. These borders resembled the rings found after a tree was cut down, rings which indicated periods of growth and dormancy, growth and dormancy. Avatar stared at the cabin in the heart of this circle of death. He sensed that these ostensible borders represented dormant periods also — periods when death was not creeping further into the woods.
The wolf stepped into the circle, moving silently through the rings of death as he approached the cabin. The silence welled up around him. He could feel it brushing against him the way the underbrush would if it were there. The air joined with the silence, pressing down on him.
As the distance to the perimeter of this forsaken ground increased, Avatar sensed the spirit of another. He was not sure what it was. It was unlike any spirit he had ever encountered, and in his years of wandering, he had seen many. There were good spirits and bad, but the very good and the very bad were rare.
His nostrils flinched. He smelled something! The contrast of nothingness and this smell was overpowering.
"Ah! Another comes to join the fold!" Its words resounded in Avatar’s mind. "The wolf becomes the lamb being led to slaughter." Then it laughed.
Avatar fell to the ground, his hindquarters trembling. A force unseen by the wolf pressed in around him beyond the silence and the heaviness of the air. His fear rose within. He felt his spirit starting to slip away. "I am not afraid," declared the wolf. He was not challenging the force. He was simply asserting his conviction that what happened in this place had no real power over him, "If it is time to give up this body, it is time."
His spirit was breaking its bond with his body, ready to take irreversible flight when suddenly it was seized as if a fist of iron wrenched it from the heavens, squeezing it with such power that it momentarily merged with this sinister force. For an instant the wolf entered the darkest recesses in the mind of this evil one. Such unspeakable horror resided there in calm anticipation that Avatar was more frightened by this than by any harm that might befall him. His fear, which had quickly reemerged as his life force was literally seized, was no longer for himself. He sensed the innocence of another, one who would not long escape this madman.
From deep within, the wolf howled, calling out to those like him. Their energy flowed into Avatar, surging through him, igniting sparks of life until every particle of his being was increased tenfold. The sparks grew into a flame and the flame into a fire which threatened to consume the dark spirit holding Avatar’s life in its grasp. Then just as a hand touching a flame recoils under its threat, so did the dark spirit release the life force of Avatar.
As his spirit returned to his body, the wolf knew his earthly time was not yet over. He stood, feeling a strength in his limbs greater than they had ever known. He gazed at the cabin. The logs that graced the cabin walls were gray as ash. Avatar expected them to crumble into a pile if even the slightest breeze rustled past. His gaze shifted to the window. The dark form of a man was outlined against the pale light in the cabin. Avatar was almost surprised that it was a man. A monster of gargantuan proportions would have surprised him less. When their paths cross again, he wondered, who will survive? Then he quickly turned and ran toward the perimeter. His mission had just begun.
Dark eyes filled with rage peered out the window of the cabin in the direction of the departing wolf. Particles of his dark energy reached out, beginning to rejoin the air around him. He was driven by a desire to see the wolf lying on the ground, nothing but an empty, misshapen shell. At the last second, he jerked back.
The wolf frightened him. Never before had he encountered anyone or anything that could resist him. He didn't understand what had happened. He had held the wolf’s life force in his grasp. He felt it merging with his own, starting to lose its grip on the wolf’s consciousness. Then suddenly it exploded with such force that he could no longer hold it!
What was this power greater than he?
He knew that it was time. He could not, would not, delay much longer.
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