Wolf Moon Read Free

perform properly, Schroeder beat the animal until it crawled and whimpered. Thus broken, it once again became malleable.
        Schroeder trained the animal for eight months before testing it.
        One chill March day, Schroeder took a husky about the same size as the wolf and put it in the cage, locked the door, and spoke aloud the Indian command for "kill, " which was supposed to turn the wolf into a frenzied beast.
        The wolf did not turn on the husky.
        Schroeder spent an hour alternately calling out the command and threatening the animal.
        When it was finally clear that the wolf would not attack the husky, Schroeder opened the cage, withdrew the dog, and then began beating the wolf until the animal seemed ready to turn on its master.
        But Schroeder had been ready for that. He clubbed the animal across the skull with a ball bat. The animal collapsed into unconsciousness.
        This training continued until the year that Schroeder met the Chase brothers and arranged for them to rob the bank of which he was part owner.
        By then the wolf was obedient, as he proved when he murdered the one Chase brother and cruelly attacked the other.
        The wolf no longer remembered the smell of smoky autumn winds and the taste of cool clear creek water and the beauty of sunflowers in the lazy yellow sunlight. He no longer even remembered his mother and father.
        There was just the cage. There was just his master. There was just the whip. There was just the prey he was sometimes ordered to kill and rend.
        He was still called a wolf, of course, by everyone who saw him.
        But he was no longer a true wolf at all. He was something more. And something less.
        On a fine sunny dawn, the roosters stirring, the wolf awoke to find that he had company in the large cage.
        A raccoon had burrowed under the wire and was just now moving without any fear or inhibition toward the wolf
        Instinctively the wolf knew something was wrong with the raccoon. For one thing, such an animal was not very often brave, not around a wolf anyway.
        And for another, there was the matter of the raccoon 's mouth, and the curious foamy substance that bearded it. Something was very wrong with this raccoon.
        It struck before the wolf had time to get to its feet.
        It ripped into the wolf's forepaw and brought its jaws tight against the bone.
        The wolf cried out in rage and pain, utterly surprised by the speed and savagery with which the raccoon had moved.
        In moments the raccoon was dead, trapped in the teeth and jaws of the wolf as it slammed the chunky body of the raccoon again and again against the bars of the cage.
        And then the wolf, still enraged, eviscerated it, much as the wolf had been taught to eviscerate humans.
        Then it was done.
        The wolf went back to his favorite end of the cage and lay down. His forepaw still hurt and he still cried some, but oddly, he was tired, exhausted, and knew he needed sleep.
        When he woke, he stared down at the forepaw. A terrible burning had infected it.
        He still wondered about the raccoon and where it had gotten all that nerve to come into his cage and attack him.
        Soon enough the wolf went back to sleep, the inexplicable drowsiness claiming him once again.
        

3
        
        In the summer of '98 the folks in Rock Ridge were just starting to sink the poles and string the wire for telephones. I knew this because all three of the town's newspapers told me about it right on the front page, in the kind of civic-pride tone most mining-town papers use to prove that they really are, after all, a bunch of law-abiding Christian people.
        On a sunny June morning filled with bird song and silver dew, I sat in a crowded restaurant located between a lumberyard and a saddlery. The place smelled of hot grease, tobacco smoke, and the sweaty clothes of the