was ever seen again of the Toop child or Gabriel-Ernest, but the latter’s discarded garments were found lying in the road so it was assumed that the child had fallen into the water, and that the boy had stripped and jumped in, in a vain endeavour to save it. Van Cheele and some workmen who were near by at the time testified to having heard a child scream loudly just near the spot where the clothes were found. Mrs. Toop, who had eleven other children, was decently resigned to her bereavement, but Miss Van Cheele sincerely mourned her lost foundling. It was on her initiative that a memorial brass was put up in the parish church to “Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his life for another.”
Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.
SYMPATHY FOR WOLVES, by John Gregory Betancourt
I could hear wolves scratching like dogs at my door again. It was a full moon, or close to it, and I still felt a stirring deep in my soul, a longing to join them for the hunt, just as they longed to join me. I fought it, as I always did, and those wolfish instincts subsided for a time.
As I pulled back the shade and peered out, I marveled at the crystalline perfection of a crisp Montana night. It was January, and a coating of frost had silvered the land, etching a pattern of crystals around the window panes.
I couldn’t help myself. I opened the window and leaned out, sniffing the air, letting my senses heighten and expand well beyond the human norm.
Six gray wolves stood on the ridge behind my house, noses up, smelling the air this way and that, letting loose yips and soft communicative growls. Their leader, who called himself Bear-Hunter, was an old male with a long white scar down the left side of his haunches. He’d gotten it years ago in a brief fight with a bear (he lost). Bear-Hunter glanced at me and gave a plaintive cry.
“Not tonight,” I whispered. “It’s too cold. I’m human.”
I leaned back and shut the window. Suddenly I shivered uncontrollably. It was a bitterly cold out there. I didn’t envy them their freedom. On nights like this one I knew I’d made the right choice in trying to remain a man. If I’d given in to my wolf instincts and let myself go, given in to my desires to be a wolf, I’d be suffering like them. No, I was better off holed up in my house with its oil heat and its thermal windows and its wood-burning stove, a human safe and secure and, if not entirely happy, at least warm.
The wolves began to bay, calling one to another, pack to pack, and other wolf howls answered through the still night air. There were at least thirty separate voices, probably more, and as I listened to the rich timbred sounds I began to identify one and another and another. Rabbit-Hunter, Silverpaw, Snowfoot, all the rest, coming down from the hills to see me.
They knew I had a soft heart. And finally, as they circled my house, crying, I could resist their calls no longer.
I strode to my door, threw it open, and one by one they slunk into my living room. Old Bear-Hunter came last, gazing up into my face with his piercing yellow eyes, as if searching for some trace of my lost wolfhood. I met his gaze for a second, then looked away, submissive. He could be leader; I didn’t want the responsibility.
And on that cold, cold, bitterly cold night, as I stretched out on my sofa before the crackling fire, I could hear the soft lapping of water from my toilet bowl, hear the soft rustling of paws prying open the refrigerator door and rummaging through the meat bin for coldcuts and steaks, hear the squeaking of springs as heavy feet circled three times on my bed before lying down.
And, as often happened on these cold and lonely nights, all these wolves who had once been men joined me for a brief time in my humanity, and I joined them in their wolfishness, laying my head upon my paws and pulling my tail around my nose for the night with a reluctant yet somehow happy sigh, and the pack was whole.
THE DRONE, by Abraham Merritt
Four men sat at a table of the Explorers’ Club: Hewitt, just in from two years’ botanical research in Ethiopia; Caranac, the ethnologist; MacLeod, poet first, and second the learned curator of the Asiatic Museum; and Winston, the archaeologist who, with Kosloff the Russian, had worked over the ruins of Khara-Kora, the City of the Black Stones in the northern Gobi, once capital of the Empire of Genghis Khan.
The talk had veered to werewolves, vampires, fox-women, and similar superstitions. Caranac, who had brought up the subject originally, said:
“It is a deep-rooted belief, and immeasurably ancient, that a man or woman may assume the shape of an animal, a serpent, or a bird, even an insect. It was believed of old everywhere; and, everywhere, it is still believed by some. Always there has been the idea that there is a borderland between the worlds of consciousness of man and of beasts—a borderland where shapes can be changed, and man merge into beast or beast-and-man.”
MacLeod said: “The Egyptians had some good reason for equipping their deities with the heads of birds and beasts and insects. Why did they portray Kheper, the Oldest God, with the head of a beetle? Why give Anubis, the Guide of the Dead, the head of a jackal? Or Thoth, the God of Wisdom, the head of an ibis, and Horus, the Divine son of Isis and Osiris, the head of a hawk? Set, God of Evil, a crocodile’s, and the Goddess Bast a cat’s? There was a reason for all of that. But one can only guess.”
“I think there’s something in that borderland—or borderline—idea,” Caranac agreed. “There’s more or less of the beast, the reptile, the bird, the insect in everybody. I’ve known men who looked like rats and had the souls of rats. I’ve known others who belonged to the horse family and showed it in face and voice. Distinctly, there are bird people—hawk-faced, eagle-faced, predatory. The owl people seem to be mostly men, and the wren people women. There are quite as distinct wolf and serpent types. Suppose some of these have their animal element so strongly developed that they can cross this borderline—become at times the animal? There you have the explanation of the werewolf, the snake-woman, and all the others. What could be more simple?”
“But you’re not serious, Caranac?” Winston asked.
Caranac laughed. “At least half serious. Once I had a friend with an uncannily acute perception of these animal qualities in the human. It was an uncomfortable gift. He was like a doctor who has the faculty of visual diagnosis so highly developed that he constantly sees men and women and children not as they are but as diseases. Sometimes, as he would describe it, when he was in the subway, or on a bus, or in the theater—or even sitting tête-à-tête with a pretty woman—there would be a swift haze; and when it had cleared he was among rats and foxes, wolves and serpents, cats and tigers and birds, all dressed in human garb, but with nothing else at all human about them. The clear-cut picture lasted for only a moment—but it was a highly disconcerting moment.”
“Do you mean to suggest,” Winston said, incredulously, “that in an instant the musculature and skeleton of a man can become the musculature and skeleton of a wolf? The skin sprout fur? Or in the matter of your bird people, feathers? In an instant grow wings and feathers? In an instant grow the specialized muscles to use them? Sprout fangs—noses become snouts—”
Caranac grinned. “No, I don’t mean anything of the sort. What I do suggest is that, under certain conditions, the animal part of this dual nature of man may submerge the human part to such a degree that a sensitive observer will think he sees the creature which is its type.”
Winston raised his hands in mock admiration. “Ah, at last modern science explains the legend of Circe! Circe, the enchantress, who gave men a drink that changed them into beasts. I agree with you, Caranac—what could be more simple? But I do not use the word simple in the
