tangled in its fur
but I am not it I am human
and humans hunt too and this,
this chase, par force de loup, no huntsmen needed,
is better and faster and bloodier
than any with horns and hounds.
and a wolf alone shares trophies with no one
and a kill alone is witnessed only by the moon
and the blood alone drips like regret to the dark earth
and is lost among the mud.
it’s said (by men) that wolves have no names:
that names devour the silent cooperation of the pack,
the comfort-cruelty-community of a group –
I have a name–
but if a name dies when a whole becomes a fragment
then perhaps that’s a greater grief than abandonment.
perhaps belonging is its own loss.
I have never belonged I have always had a name
even the beast in me knows I am something other than this
22
You
‘Wolves, sire. We only tracked one, but where there’s one there’s a pack, so the rest will be close by. And there were three deer half-eaten in the royal forest.’
The huntsman is grim-faced, freshly returned from the forest. His tidings feel ill-fated. Your father was merciless in his hunting of wolves when you were a boy, and you who loved your hounds always thought it a shame when they dragged in the carcasses and hung their pelts on the walls. But you know better now, and fear the violence of the outcast hunters. They must be creeping back across the rivers and the mountains, slipping into the kingdom from the east like the invaders they are.
In your years of exile, you heard stories, plenty of them, of men who lose their skin and reason and go out wolfing in the night. The garwolf, they would call such a man locally. Humans transformed into mindless, violent animals, such that they might eat their own kin and enjoy the feast. The first time you heard the story, you dismissed it as a folktale; the second, as an embellishment. By the third you had begun to wonder what it was that haunted their woods, to give birth to such tales, for there must well have been something, and that something bloody-minded and sharp-toothed.
But these stories do not belong here. If such wolf-men everroamed your kingdom, they’re long gone, hunted down with the rest, and these tales are unfit for Christian men.
When your knights hear the wolves are back, they’ll want to mount a hunt. No time to waste: wolves left loose in the forest will become a problem. It’s an ill season for riding out, though, the ground soft with winter mud, and the hounds sluggish with cold. All the more reason to address the threat before it grows.
You’re interested to see how Bisclavret acquits himself in a hunt against wolves, and whether his fierce courage will serve him as well against them as against the boar. But you’ve not seen him since the wedding, now three nights ago. A messenger sent to his wife brought back the message that he has been taken ill, and that his cousin is caring for him. If you could, you would visit to see how he fares, but he has not been ill so long as to warrant such attention from his king, so you must content yourself with waiting.
‘Very well,’ you tell the huntsman, and turn to your seneschal. ‘Have them make arrangements, and send word to those within a day’s ride.’
He gives you a look that suggests he’s noticed the lack of enthusiasm in your voice. Perhaps he wonders when hunting stopped being enough to give you pleasure, and you might wonder the same thing, except that you have known this ebb and flow of happiness all your life. It comes, and it goes; sunlight one day, shadows the next. You are deeply shadowed, now, wandering the ramparts late at night as though searching for something, with no real idea what you’re looking for. Bisclavret’s arrival brought a momentary colour to your life, but now that radiance is fading, and even he cannot stop the colour seeping away again, grey disinterest descending like rain.
The physicians call it melancholy, an excess of black bile, another excuse for purgatives and blood-letting; the priestsare inclined to call it sin, or weakness at the very least, and recommend prayer and penance. You have tried both cures, in years past, and found little relief in either. Each time the fog descends you fear that this time it will never lift, and each time it does, and all is restored; this is the hope you must cling to, when the shadows are darkest.
