Gabriel's Story by David Anthony Durham

Author:David Anthony Durham
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425980
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Part 3

THE FIRST TIME THE BOY SAW THE CREATURE, HE KNEW where the tales of monsters sprang from. He was awakened from a long, meandering dream by the sow’s anxious squeals and Raleigh’s deep-throated neigh. He had his trousers on in a few seconds, boots just after. He ran for the door without lacing them, shoved it open, strode out into the night, and circled the house toward the barn. He wasn’t ready for what he saw there and knew so immediately.

A beast stood poised on the sod fence of the pigpen. It was outlined in the starlight, rendered unreal and ghostly and more fearsome than it might have appeared in the reasoning light of day. The boy tried to name the beast, but he couldn’t create the word in his mind. Its legs were spread wide, its neck was low, and its ears lay flat against its head. The hair along the crest of its shoulders and down its back stood at attention. It had been gazing down at the frantic sow, but when the boy appeared it snapped its head around. It stared at him, head slinking from side to side, paws kneading the turf beneath it. It seemed to consider the boy first to discover if he was to be feared, and then, having decided that he wasn’t, to decide whether it might dine doubly tonight.

The boy read all this in the creature’s eyes, for the beast concealed nothing of its thoughts, or the hunger within it and the need, above all else, to quench it. But only when its lips drew back from its jaws and exposed the white glint of its fangs did the boy remember its name: wolf. He tried to step back, but his feet were stuck to the ground. He tried to call out, but he’d lost his voice. The boy grasped at his thigh as if somehow the action might produce a weapon, or suffice as a call of alarm that he couldn’t otherwise muster. It did neither.

The wolf let out a growl, sank low, and prepared to dive for the boy. It might have, except that the boy’s uncle came bounding around the side of the house, rifle in hand. The man aimed and fired before the wolf had fully taken in his presence.

What happened next neither the man nor the boy could fully say later. It was as if the rifle’s blast took the wolf away with the speed of the bullet. The animal simply vanished, leaving nothing but empty space before them and ringing silence and the question as to whether it had been an illusion. They might have thought so, except that the wolf let up a howl of protest from the safety of the black fields, a cry ringing with indignation and resentment and with the pent-up lusts of a lifetime. When it began to fade, lesser creatures picked up the call and added to it. The night came alive with cries of canine camaraderie, from

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