Wild Woman
E. H. Warrington
“This wasn’t a wolf,” I say, and raise my eyes to look at Scott’s profile.
He chews on the inside of his cheek, pissed. We hit a dip in the dirt road, and I fumble with the autopsy report.
I don’t want to be doing this, but they’ve got a dead hunter and two missing ones. I glance at the photos again: pale gums from which two teeth’ve been smashed with blunt force, a lacerated thigh, and a round wound between the shoulder blades. I think of all the animals I’ve seen injured and tell myself this is no different, this is flesh, but humans are different. They are capable of things animals aren’t. I remember being a child, running wild on Halloween and overhearing some of the local boys, would-be hoodlums in wife-beaters and track pants, bragging they knew someone who shoved a lit firecracker up a cat’s ass. Humans are evil.
“You think it’s a wolf because of the cuts on the thighs.” Scott doesn’t respond, just raises his dark eyebrows.
I force myself to examine the bloodless striations, deep gashes. I know what he’s thinking; he’s a Conservation Officer. I play along because we have an hour to kill before we get to the hunters’ abandoned camp, and I can’t just sit here, disagreeing with him while I stare at his jawline.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s break it down. Bears typically crush spines, drag their victims, and maul them.”
Scott lowers his chin, agreeing with me.
“And,” I continue, “our dead guy’s suffered very little musculoskeletal damage. Cougars are snipers, precise, deadly. They rip out the throat or crack the skull with their teeth. Dead guy’s got no cranial damage. A wolf chases its prey to exhaust it and if they can’t attack the neck, they slash at the hindquarters, hoping to hamstring or disembowel. There are slashes in his thigh muscle. But this wasn’t a wolf.”
Scott doesn’t say a word. The rain rattles like a snare against the metal of his truck.
“What about the other stuff?” I gesture towards the face in the photo, the dead man’s missing teeth, the bruising around his mouth, but then we hit a particularly bad hole, bashing both our heads against the roof. Scott cusses and takes a moment to glance at the picture, his dark eyes squinted to focus.
“You think the missing teeth are a result of a fall,” I ask, incredulous. “That he tripped while being chased? By a wolf? And the wolf didn’t attack him while he was down?”
“Coroner says a piece of wood was wedged in his mouth.”
“Wedged?”
“Dead guy has,” and Scott swallows, “splinters in the back of the mouth. It’s possible he fell and was unable to stop himself. Smashed his open mouth against a piece of wood, cut wood, no forest floor debris. Means it was probably a piece of firewood. Maybe the wolf didn’t wanna go in the camp.”
I cleave my tongue to the top of mouth. I’m getting nowhere. “And the hole in his back?”
“Right. Hang on.” Scott navigates a tight switchback. We fishtail, my stomach catching, and then with the dexterity of long-practice, he wrangles us back in line. “There was a tent peg embedded in his back. It severed his spine.”
“A tent peg?”
“Yep.”
“He fell on that, too?”
“Maybe.”
I don’t think so. I open my mouth to respond but can think of nothing to say. If it wasn’t an accident, then who did it? Who would wedge a piece of wood in a man’s mouth and then sever his spine with a tent peg? But, then, who would shove a firecracker up a cat’s ass?
“You see this?” I point to the wounded leg, beneath the lacerations, dark wine circles deep and individuated. “These are puncture wounds. Something slashed at him, then bit him and let him go.”
“Wolves don’t let go?”
“You ever seen a wolf bite?” I don’t wait for his answer. “When I was in grad school, my prof was rehabbing a timber wolf with a leg injury. It bit him in the forearm.” I clamp my hand around my forearm for emphasis, feeling the delicacy of my own bones, my thin flesh. “The wolf bit down so hard that it fractured his radius in five places and crushed his ulna. The pressure popped his muscles right out of their sheaths. This,” and I point again at the puncture wounds on the man’s leg. “This wasn’t a wolf.”
I hold the photo up, trying to see better in the rain-dim light, the noise of the engine vibrating through my jaw. “Plus, there’s only four incisors and no carnassial imprints.”
Scott shifts in his seat.
I forget that not everyone speaks zoo-geek. “There are only four teeth marks between the fangs, when there should be six, and the incisors didn’t leave marks consistent with a carnivore. They left rectangular imprints, like a ruminate quadruped, a—”
“I know what incisors are. And ruminate quadrupeds. I don’t think a moose bit him.”
“No. But it wasn’t a predator, either.”
“Something moved him,” Scott argues. “Something big, because he was found hours from the camp.”
I’m about to ask if he could have walked when the truck lurches and I bash my elbow against the door. I don’t want to know what happened out here and more to the point, I don’t care. They were rich trophy hunters up from the States, here for the adrenaline high, killing animals so they could add an inch to their proverbial dick size. And now they’re missing. A part of me sees them in wife-beaters and track-pants. A part of me sees them playing with a lit firecracker. So, a part of me hopes the other hunters are just as dead as the first.
“Whatever bit him, Dr. Travers, had a set of canines two inches long.” Scott leans forward to see better through the lessening rain, fog creeping up the windshield from the heat of our bodies, our breaths. “You tell me, what has flat incisors like a moose and fangs that big?”
I answer before I can think about what I’m saying: “a frugivore.”
He looks at me, his dark eyes taking me in for the first time, running the shape of my face, my mouth, landing on my eyes. “A what?”
Warmth colors my skin and I wish I had a cigarette. “A large primate.”
The truck slows, and his eyes stay on mine as we come to a stop. I think for a moment he’s going to tell me to get out, to laugh, but he raises a single eyebrow in resignation and says simply, “This is as far as we go by truck.”
#
The thick mist, cold and clinging, reminds me this is a temperate rainforest, primeval and suffocating. Sweat layers my skin, suctions my shirt to the small of my back and drives a chill through my flesh. I glance up into the canopy, fingered withes of Sitka and cedar reaching towards each other. Its dark in here. Rocks large enough to crush cars, to collapse houses, sit between trees, dripping water, growing mosses, their smell earthy and dank. They have only ever been moved once, during the last ice age.
Scott stops ahead of me on a slight incline, seeing what I can’t.
I smell something, pungent and cloying, like the musk of decay. It’s complex like the salt-sweet scent of dirty sex and summer sweat.
My throat tightens.
“Stay here,” he says, his voice startling.
His gun’s out of his holster and he crests the ridge, disappearing into the shadows.
Time passes, but I don’t know how much, or how fast. I try to listen for him but hear nothing. The trickle of an unseen stream babbles like distant voices. There’s a pattern in the lay of land here, horizontal striations in the hillside made by the buried lengths of fallen trees. Like the foundation of a log cabin. Only its huge. My eyes follow it sixty, a hundred feet into the trees. I scan the trunks around me, wondering if these trees are younger, smaller than the others. Where are we?
I stand for seconds, hours, breathing in the thick scent, trying to attach it to a memory and coming back again and again to myself, my own body, the copper of blood and the sweat of exertion, an old fur blanket my cat used as a bed.
“Travers!”
It takes me a moment to leave the trance, to re-enter time. How long did I stand staring in the woods thinking: who are you?
#
Scott’s standing in a small clearing between the trees, his eyes wide, his face a mask of emotion I cannot read. He’s cradling his gun in his right hand, but he seems to have forgotten it, his arms limp against his sides like a child. He’s staring at something in my periphery. It’s darker here, eerie, the salal thicker, and the crush of younger trees heavier.
When I turn, when I see them, I think: this isn’t it; this isn’t the smell.
Then I retch.
#
Two canine heads stand impaled on stakes above an ancient cedar stump, a hollow big enough to stand in. Eight, nine feet in the air, their long-fanged jaws gape, jeer, swollen tongues curled as if to taste, to lick. Black blood has turned them piebald, the skin flayed along the cheek of one to reveal muscle, an empty eye socket in the other showing nerves and bone.
They’re dogs.
“I’m so sorry,” Scott says. “I’m so sorry,” like its a mantra, like it can make them disappear. At first, I think he’s apologizing to me.
They have not decomposed. Only the violence they endured, and the coagulation of their blood mars them. I am numb. The dogs are mixed breeds, something someone bred for the cold and endurance. I move closer, against my will, drawn to them. Like sacrifices they leer at me, taunt me.
I haul myself up on the tree’s gnarled roots, get a purchase in the bark with my boots, and reach up. Just as my hand finds fur, Scott, yells, “don’t touch them.”
But I need to know and so my fingertips brush the ragged edges of their flesh just as Scott pulls me back, his hands around my waist, braced for the impact as I thud back against him.
Their heads have been severed. With tools. Not teeth.
Who would do this?
#
We sit on a fallen trunk without bark. It’s been stripped and I realize that we’re in the centre of what used to be an enormous plank house. I wet my lips.
“What tags did the hunters have?”
“Mule deer, black bear, and wolf.”
Only non-resident hunters need a license to kill wolves. The government’s idea of compulsory reporting is a mail-out survey. Fish and Wildlife have no idea how many wolves are killed a year. Ironically, population estimates are derived from the voluntary report of these ‘harvests’: if the harvest goes up, they assume the population has gone up. But wolves are too smart, reclusive, and rare to be hunted with any regularity.
Scott sits next to me, his hands browned with dirt and ash, shirt sleeves pushed up. It took us forty-five minutes to bury the heads.
I want to tell him about the wolves who’ve chewed off their own paws caught in leg traps. I want to tell him about how wolves mourn their lost pack mates and how physically disabled wolves often act as pup-sitters, how ravens help them hunt and play with the pups, how packs use ancient fishing weirs built by Indigenous peoples to catch salmon, how the deposited remains of those same salmon on the forest floor are necessary to the interdependent health of one of the biggest bio-loads on Earth.
I remove a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and light up. He already knows all that. My hands shake so bad, I don’t bother putting the pack away.
“Those dogs,” I exhale. “An animal attacked them before they were… dismembered. Somebody decapitated them, but the violence… the wounds on their faces—”
“Wolves.”
I look at Scott, his flesh goosepimpled now that we’ve stopped moving, the sweat a conductor to the cold.
“They were bait dogs.” He leans forward, rubs his hands on his jeans, like he can’t stand the inactivity, like he’s itching to move, but he doesn’t stand up, doesn’t leave.
“Tell me.”
“They use a drone or a local bush pilot to track wolf circuits. Then the hunters come out here with some mutts; fit ‘em with electronic collars. They’re trained to return to camp when the collars buzz. Thing is, the wolves follow them. Then attack. Dogs and wolves both wind up dead.”
He looks at me, his dark eyes take in my fear, my disgust, and my anger. His gaze moves from mine to my mouth, and before he can ask, my own cigarette dangling from my lip, I tap one out for him. His rough hand cups mine when I hold the flame flickering before his mouth.
“That’s highly illegal,” I whisper.
“You betcha.” There’s a finality to his statement, a futility. Like he knows and can’t do anything about it. Like he’s always known and became a Conservation Officer anyway. I want to tell him that I get it, that I respect it. Instead, I pull on my cigarette.
#
Shivering, I follow Scott further into the forest. The mist drapes the trees like a veil, casting us in shadow. He points to some bark, and I see it, a scraping, but it could have been left by anything: an elk, a bear, a deer. There’s something further in, though, behind the tree he saw, and I step towards it. Bark has been darkened, stained. By blood. I want to tell Scott, but he’s pulled ahead, and I hurry after him.
He holds his hand up for silence and I halt just as he does.
We found the camp.
It’s dead quiet.
And empty.
My skin breaks out in gooseflesh.
Everything is scattered, used, neglected: the tent canvas damp with condensation, the oiled axe handle left too close to the fire pit, a cooler on its side and the sour scent of alcohol. I am a child again hearing zippers in the morning silence, my fingers black as I touch wood still warm from last night’s fire. I am looking at my own youth made uncanny by wreckage.
Scott stands beside me, a statue, assessing the tin mug on the ground, a hunting knife.
There’s blood here, too, in a four-point swath against the wood pile, like someone dragged a bloody hand across its roughness.
“Are there trails around here?” I ask. “Somewhere the missing guys could have gone?”
Scott steps forward, runs a flashlight around the belly of the tent, revealing torn sleeping bags, an upturned lantern, and what appears to be a pile of dried vomit.
“No. Nobody comes here.” In the dearth of the flashlight, the darkness becomes tangible, a creeping black presence just in the corner of my vision. I try to stay focused on Scott as he talks.
“There’s an old fishing weir a few kilometers from here along the river and the abandoned plank house back the way we came. A Nuxalk elder, in Bella Bella, said he saw a Boq here, and when I was in Klemtu last year, I ran into a fishing guide who said his grandmother used to threaten to boat him up here and leave him with the P’kwus if he misbehaved.”
A snap, a small noise, makes me start and I turn to stare into the forest, my heart hammering. When we arrived, I could see into the trees. Now I can’t see more than forty feet into the woods.
Scott continues, but his eyes run the edge of visibility, like mine. “In town, Bev and Shirley—sisters, fisherman’s wives, Japanese-Inuit—said their brother was looking for eels upstream from here, near the falls, when something threw a rock at him from the trees. He never came back.”
It takes me a moment to figure out what Scott’s talking about. I want to laugh. “A hairy man?”
The Musqueam call him sesq’ets, the Stolo, sacsquec, and the Sta’ailes, sa:sq’ets, but us settlers, us white west-coasters, call him “sasquatch.” The reclusive hairy man of the forest, neither human, nor animal, but cousin to both.
Scott looks at me, his dark eyes searching mine and for a moment there’s a prickle between my shoulder blades, because the Indigenous hairy man isn’t the same as “sasquatch.” For the people who have lived alongside him since time immemorial, the hairy man represents a spiritual claviger, a watcher of the wilds.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say softly.
Scott laughs, but it’s hollow, empty to cover his frustration, his pain at my automatic dismissal.
“You’re all the same,” he says. “Unless you see it, you don’t believe it. Well, I’ve seen things I can’t explain, footprints, blood. Hell, one time I had a guy call me at home, three in the morning, claiming he’d wounded a young one. By the time I get out there, there’s a roadblock. The army’d shown up. I’ve heard stories that would wreck your career. You’d never come out here again.”
“I’m sorry.” I don’t want him angry, not when we’re out here in the middle of nowhere and he’s my lifeline, my go to. I look at him and he knows it, too. It’s just us out here.
“A sasquatch,” I say, trying it out. “People believe there’s a sasquatch in the area.”
“Not exactly. The abandoned plank house we passed through, there used to be a standing house post there in the ’30’s. It was a Dzunukwa.”
I bristle.
“My point is,” he continues, before I can comment, “this is a perfect place for poaching because nobody comes here.”
I don’t tell him that I know people who have seen things as well. It’s inevitable when you’re out in the woods. Things become confusing, indecipherable. I remember my first research partner, laying in his long johns, both of us smelling of sweat and dirt. He told me his grandma used to threaten him with the “toon-ah-kwah,” a wild woman of the woods. She’d make this noise, an eerie toothless whistle between her gums, “tshoo tshaaaah, tshoo tshaaaah, toon-ah-kwah.” She told him if you can catch Dzunukwa, she’ll give you wealth, but her whistling lures the children. If they follow, if they wander into the woods alone, she’ll catch them. And eat them. I’ve seen her gazing at me from cedar carvings, watching with her endless aphotic gaze, her sensually feminine mouth an open “oh” to mimic the howl of the wind.
My fingers like rubber, I pull out a cigarette and am about to light it, when Scott asks, “how well do you know your wolf history?”
My thumb resting on my lighter, I pause, trying to switch gears. “You mean, like nineteenth-century culling and European demonization?” Wolves have been targeted and maligned for centuries by agricultural communities afraid of monetary loss.
“No.” Resigned to a conversation he doesn’t want to have, he curls his fingers for a smoke.
I hand him mine before I can light it, even though it’s touched my lips. I hand him the lighter as well, watching him drag in on it, shadows marking the planes beneath his cheekbones, his neck exposed as he tilts his head back to exhale.
“No,” he says. “Like the Loup Garou.”
A caustic chuckle, incredulous, rips like a shard up my throat. “You’re serious.”
But I notice as he holds the cigarette between his index and middle finger, that his hand is less than steady. “It’s not about the monster, but how they were hunted. The French believed in werewolves. They used to hunt real wolves using dogs. Once they caught the wolf, they’d wedge a wooden stick between its teeth. Then they’d stab it in the back. Between the shoulder blades.” His pupils are dilated, dark pools of uncertainty. I don’t mention how the dead hunter died because I can’t: wedged wood in his mouth, tent peg in his back. My face feels frozen. For a fleeting moment, a second, I think: good; he got what he deserved.
A snap, a shuffle, brings my head around quick, but there’s nothing there.
“You think, what? A wolf bit our dead guy and someone killed him like a Loup Garou because they believed in werewolves?”
Scott’s quiet, his eyes focusing on something on the ground, in the pine needles.
I follow his gaze, and my mouth fills with sour saliva before I realize what it is he’s seeing. It’s like my body recognizes it a second before my brain, like my body doesn’t want me to know. It’s an arm. A human arm. Without skin.
I watch in a sort of stupor as Scott reaches for his sat phone, but his hand never makes it. In the darkness beyond, something lurches, a shadow thicker than the mist between trees.
My hand reaches behind me, grabs Scott’s shirt. He’s live-wire taut, and we both stumble back, trying to move and move quick.
But it’s a human, a man.
He steps from the cedars into the clearing, stopping at the edge of our visibility. The smell hits me a second after the jarring sight of him: the same rich, cloying scent I recognized earlier. I want to gag, my lips curled like a cat’s. Scott’s hand closes hard around my wrist, a brace against my bones. I don’t dare move.
He’s a camper, a hunter. I can tell from the K-bar sheath on his belt and his military vest, but his clothes are a mess of dried blood and smeared scat, his hair matted against his scalp with caked scabs.
The man stumbles and he’s so covered in filth its hard to tell where he’s been wounded.
He meets my gaze and in his eyes there’s a horrific knowledge, a pleading, like he knows what’s being done, and why. I want to ask him, but his muscles contract, his arms and legs distorting as he falls to his knees. There’s confusion, fear, and panic as he begins to struggle to breathe against the repetitive rigidity. He’s going to die this way, here in the dirt, wrenched to the ground, like an abandoned puppet, aware of his suffering and unable to stop it. He’s convulsing to death. Like a wolf poisoned with strychnine.
Scott’s swearing and I realize he can’t get the sat phone to work.
We both hear a sound in the woods, furtive, like the stifled moan of a woman. Scott scans the treeline but it’s me who sees her in the forest, a darkness, a presence, a thickening in the fog. She’s there just a moment, a heartbeat: a thing of fury, hollow eyes and a blood-red mouth.
“Scott,” I whisper, and he drops the sat phone, grabs his gun, but there’s nothing to shoot.
The man, alive on the ground, stops jerking and the eerie silence of his sudden stillness makes me hold my breath. I make a move towards him when he lifts both his hands to touch his neck, deliberately, blatantly.
His hands are covered in blood. It takes me a moment to interpret what I’m seeing. His fingers are mangled, gnawed, bone showing through the blood clotted purple and black. They look as if they’ve been chewed off. He gropes with useless stubs at his neck and it’s only then I see what he’s trying to remove, what he’s reaching for, what he’s scared of: an electric dog collar.
He meets my eyes again, his eyes brimming with tears, begging me for something, for anything. And for a second, for a moment, somewhere deep, beneath my horror, beneath my terror, a thought runs through me like ground lightning: now you know how it feels.
Abruptly he jerks, as if someone has yanked him from behind. Violence shakes him, his bloodied fingers flailing at his neck.
Scott’s voice cuts through the sound of it, swearing and yelling for a help that doesn’t exist.
I swallow, trying not to vomit.
The hunter comes to a sudden shuddering stop, a rag doll loose in the dirt. Blood burbles between his lips, dribbling down his chin. He opens his mouth, as if to say something, as if to speak and a piece of flesh slides into the matted hair of his beard. It’s the tongue he bit off while being electrocuted. The light in his eyes goes out. It reminds me of animals I’ve had to euthanize, the terrible moment when something living becomes inert, the terrible disbelief.
A rustle sounds in the forest. In the split second it takes me to look, a yowl tears wide the silence. It shatters my nerves, brings my hands to my ears. A woman wailing her grief, a cougar snarling her wrath.
The sound vibrates in my chest, suffocates me.
Just when I think I’m going to be sick, it stops.
The silence afterward is so complete I hear the bubbling of boiling blood before I recognize the electric collar has gone off again. The sizzling scent of charbroiled skin and the sound of chattering teeth rip through my senses.
Scott moves toward the dead hunter, but a massive rock crashes through the brush, falls just inches from the hunter’s hand as it convulsively grabs at the air with non-fingers.
Beneath the scent of burnt flesh, I can smell the salted ammonia of my own urine, wet and hot as it laces down the inside of my pants.
The fog pulses, curdling like a storm, and the smell fills me, that blanket of familiarity, of everything visceral and animal, instinctual and carnal. I scan the forest, afraid of what I’ll see because she’s inhuman and familiar. I don’t want to see her.
Dzunukwa.
She hunkers, hunched beneath spruce and cedar.
The malevolence ripples around her, tangible. She’s not a hunter, not a stalker. She tells me. She will wait and wait in her relentless vastness. Nothing with a mind must remain here. She wants their sanity. She wants their humanity.
Scott’s hands move fast in my periphery, and I realize no actual time has passed as the gun’s slide chambers a round with a loud mechanical click. I don’t have time to scream before the shot ricochets, a crack like a slap to the face, and I’m deaf just long enough to miss the sound of impact.
Scott exhales next to me and lowers his hands. He’s shaking, and he can’t look at me, his gaze fixed in the woods. His skin blanched.
“Did you see that,” he asks, but pink spittle dribbles down his chin. He falters, tries to take a ragged breath, just as red ink rivulets appear against his shirt.
He falls, and without thinking, without breathing, I grab his shirt, trying to keep him upright, but we crumble together.
She’s an animal; she’s not supposed to be special like us; not evil like us.
Adrenaline washes over me like sheet lightning, and I scream my frustration, my rage, as blood pools hideous in his clothes. I grab the gun, heavy in my hands, and still on my knees, I aim at the thing in the woods.
She’s livid, refracting the fog with the heat of her incandescent anger. She lifts her upper lip, bearing long fangs.
I meet her gaze, look into reflective eyes, and I see myself, my rage. I see myself looking down at the hunter on the ground as he dies. Now you know how it feels. I know how she feels. Because I’m human.
My hands shaking, I readjust my fingers around the gun’s grip, and loosen them one at a time, swallowing my impotent terror. I lower the gun, my fingers aching as I finally let it rest on the ground.
For a moment, in the blackness of her stare, there’s an amber glint, a recognition.
A raven quorks in the distance, clear and cold and for a split second I lose focus through my tears. I realize I can’t smell animal salt and musk anymore, only cordite and the sour tang of my own sweat.
I blink and see her vanish, but Dzunukwa is already gone, leaving behind only an ape, a primate, an animal.
I look down at Scott and he’s looking at me with wide dark eyes, as my hands hover over his chest, afraid to touch him.
“It’s a shoulder wound,” he says, grimacing. “I’ll be alright. There’s a PLB in the truck. Go back and get it. Bring the flares. They’ll send a chopper.”
I nod, trying to stop the shivering, the shaking that wracks me.
Scott’s eyes move beyond me, focus on the woods behind me, then widen in fear.
I turn, my hand finding the gun before I have time to give myself thought.
The last hunter lumbers out of the forest, one arm gone, part of his naked torso flayed, the skin torn to reveal muscle and veins. Barely conscious, he moans something when he sees us and his eyes light in terror.
I think of her and her rage and this man before me, his pain, and his suffering. I lift the gun, my hands steady now, and aim. Scott yells at me, tries to reach for me, but I exhale and shoot.
THE END
E.H WARRINGTON holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature, a Bachelor of Education Degree, and a professional development certificate in teaching English Language Arts at a secondary level. In her life beyond the page, Warrington shares her love of literature with her students. She resides with her husband, her daughter, her cat, and her fish, in beautiful British Columbia.