“Look in his barn,” I said to the people as I backed out. “Look and you will find it.”
-30-
From far up the hill I watched as Abelard and his family searched the barn. They found the offending pelt and burned it. While the flames roared, I left for other parts of Gèvaudan to ravage.
Months later, I would return to the Loupe farm, and find it deserted. A neighbor told me they had gone to the new country of America. “Why?” I asked. The neighbor did not know.
With the Loupes gone, and my own family gone, I had free reign over the countryside. Captain D’Enneval was little threat to me. On a fine spring day I came upon a festival and killed several people before the villagers could muster up a defense. Oh, had I human mouth at the time I might have laughed as young Jacques Denis, a partner in D’Enneval’s hunts, came at me with a bayonet. I did not back down, and watched the horror grow in his eyes as my wounds healed nearly as fast as they were created. Only when more hunters and dogs arrived did I run off. Scarcely a month later, D’Enneval was gone, replaced by Francois Antoine, the king’s personal gun bearer.
By this time, however, I was bored. Bored of how easy it was to kill, and tired of this chase. The New World held much glamour, especially in the light of the political situation in France, which in a few years would lead to a revolution. In France there was no place for a young man with no education or money or status to go. America, however, was full of ambitious people. If one could survive in America, one could move up in social status.
I did not relish the idea of spending months on a cramped boat, unable to turn wolf, but options were limited. I made my way to the seacoast and found work aboard a cargo ship.
Six weeks of nothing but sea and salt and sweaty bodies. My throat thirsted for more than the beer we drank after the water went sour. Once land was sighted, I could hardly keep from turning wolf and jumping overboard. Instead I shuffled off the ship along with the others, and kept shuffling until I reached the forest, and then I shuffled off my clothes and disappeared.
-31-
I heard, years later from gossipy French Canadian trappers, that Antoine killed a number of large wolves in Gèvaudan, but the wolf attacks continued until a hunter by the name of Chastel took down a beast with a prayer and a silver bullet. These hunters spoke of the Beast of Gèvaudan as if he were a legend, maybe real, maybe not.
“My grand-père, he was there,” one of the trappers said. “He saw the beast with his own eyes.”
“Surely these tales have been exaggerated,” said another. “They say it killed hundreds. C’est impossible.”
However impossible, the silver bullet myth meant that when locals did suspect a werewolf in their midst, they shot at me with bullets that barely pierced my thick skin. Marvelous.
America had plenty of lovely young things, tasty morsels to devour, and the rampant wilderness allowed me to feed at will, without consequence. Decades passed, I traveled constantly, not caring to settle down, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that I began to notice civilization creeping in on me. I had been wolf for years, never turning human, and it wasn’t until I did turn human again that I was able to think and realize how lonely I was. I still appeared as a younger man of perhaps thirty years, though I was much, much older.
I traveled south, for hunting and avoidance of people had led me far north, into Canada. And now my nose caught scent of something familiar. There, in the wilds of a barely settled, not-yet-a-state Montana, I discovered the Loupe family.
So many years had passed that I imagined the Loupes who had threatened me and hunted me were long dead, and boldly I crept close to their little settlement, a collection of cabins lodged deep in the mountains. The scent was so familiar I began to worry that perhaps Abelard was still alive somehow, in the same manner that I still lived.
This settlement housed not only the Loupes, but a handful of other families as well. I watched as they farmed, and hunted, and traded. My presence gave them minor alarm. I could not tell if they had ever scented another werewolf before. Night after night I crept close to the house where the Loupe family slept, peering through the windows, seeking the source of that familiar scent. There were two young girls in the family, but too young for my tastes. No, this was the scent of one I had met before… a century before.
Finally the eldest son, a boy of thirteen or so called Paul, must have reported my scent to his father, because the following night, as I loped along my usual path to the Loupe cabin, a lone wolf sat in my path.
His was the scent I remembered.
His fur was gray, but had once been a different color. He was an old wolf.
He and I looked at one another for a long time.
In the blink of an eye he had become a man standing before me, naked and old yet still virulent and strong. His hair fell to his shoulders in white waves.
“Hello, Georges,” said Fallon Loupe.
TO BE CONTINUED…
About the Author
Kate Spofford lives in New Hampshire and works as a young adult librarian. In her spare time she writes novels and trains for the circus. For more information, visit her online at https://www.katespofford.wordpress.com.
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