Hunger of the Wolf Read Online Free Page B

grandfather of the dead man in the snow was a boy.
    Dale Wylie stood in the brickworks baseball diamond and watched his brother, Max, sprint around the corner and across the crushed red field. Dale had no time for rising excitement; his brother was there so quickly. Max panted his urgent message: “I found a dead dog.”
    A line drive cracked by, to the howled outrage of Dale’s teammates. Like Dale cared about the other boys when there was a dead dog waiting. His brother led him by the hand through the quiet streets of small but respectable houses, down to the intersection of the ravine and the traintracks. Under a mantle of pine branches lay a dead husky, its eyes already consumed to squandered holes by the tenderness of maggots.
    â€œYou want to bring the boys down to see?” Dale asked.
    â€œNah. They’ll just poke it. That’s why I brought you.”
    â€œWe have to bury it.” No justification between the brothers was needed. Boyhood has its codes.
    â€œI know a place out of town. We could be home by supper.”
    By nightfall they had only reached the junction of the train tracks across the river, and the grandeur of the sunset meeting the water was no more vivid or apocalyptic than the punishment waiting for them at home. On the weedy banks beside the bridge, Max lay down the dead husky he had been carrying so he could rest, so they could contemplate the border they were about to cross. If they followed the river through the stubbly fields, they would eventually reach a place of no human habitation. If they turned back, home.
    â€œMaxie, do you think he belonged to anybody?”
    Max sniffed. “No collar. No signs up asking for him.”
    â€œMaybe he belonged to a drifter who was passing through or something.”
    Max stared at the husky corpse for a moment, weighing.
    â€œIf he belonged to anybody, would we be out here burying him?”
    They pressed on. Night pressed down. They found a stand of black pine forest, a zone of abandonment between two settlements which would have to do, smoothed out a patch naked from the needles, and dug, their cold fingers clawing at the earth, scraping the stony soil.
    They laid the dog’s body down in the hole, blanketed the corpse with earth, and smoothed the ground with leaves. No prayers, no condolences. Their hustle was their ceremony as they tore back home, lit only by the moon. They knew they had done the right thing. Nothingwould shake their conviction, not the irritated policeman lounging in the kitchen, not the boys’ resigned, disgraced father, not their weeping mother. Neither did the salty cutting lashes from their dad’s belt. The beast needed to be buried in the wild. They had buried the beast in the wild.
    When their friends asked about the brothers’ limping tenderness the next day at school, Dale made up a fib about a broken family teacup smashed by a mistimed ball. The Wylie boys kept their profane pilgrimage to themselves. Their parents had beat a lesson into them, though maybe not the intended one. Max and Dale learned that everything, even sacred journeys, even mysteries as profound as the moon and the stars, every last thing in this world has a cost.
    *  *  *
    If we could scrape away what time does to men, we would love every boy. If we could wash away the grime of the last century, the boy would be waiting at the beginning, his greed indistinguishable from hope. Every morning, six in the morning, at the whistle that called out the turn of the Champlain Steel Company shift, Dale Wylie woke up hungry for bacon. His mother had to feed every needy body, boarders as well as the family, as cheaply as possible, so her sons always woke to the slop of oatmeal, never the sizzle of bacon. Dale woke up every morning in a mortgaged house with his mouth watering from dreams.
    No house was ever as mortgaged as the Wylie house on 17 Flora Avenue. The mortgage was a state of being, like living in three