Read Online The Wild by Christopher Golden - Free Book Online Page B

vision,but he dared not close his eyes again. If he did not move, he would die here. He knew that. Here was meat, and in the meat, life. He had been given a chance. He had a hunting knife in its sheath at his hip, as well as flint. Get up, Jack. You have to build a fire, or you’re done.
    His right hand tingled with a trickle of warmth. Though his fingers were numb, he thought he felt the brush of fur on the frozen skin. With deep concentration, he tried to lift his hand, and though his limbs felt like lead, he just managed it. But he would need more than dull clubs made from frigid fists to survive, and so he tried to move his fingers.
    Pain lanced up into his hand and all the way to his elbow, like red-hot wires feeding through his veins. Jack cried out, but the only sound that emerged from his throat was a ragged hiss, a sort of death rattle. The sound terrified him more than anything. What sort of death was this for a man who had lived by his wits and his fists, and who had extinguished from his heart any trace of fear he had ever found? No, this was not a fitting end. Jack had been determined to conquer the wild, and he would not let it destroy him now.
    He heard something, the twitch of a nearby tree branch, and stiffened.
    â€œHello?” he rasped, barely a whisper. “Is someone there?”
    There was no reply, but then he felt it, that familiar presence, the weight of the wolf’s regard. With a shuddering breath, he let his head loll once more to the side, and there it was, standing in the trees off to his right with its head high, some kind of small, furred creature in its jaws. Blood stained the wolf’s chest. Its eyes gleamed in the smoke-dark winter evening.
    Not death, but life!
    Jack could not breathe. This huge wolf had seemed, before, to peer at him from some spirit world, from the wild heart of the Yukon. But now it trotted toward him, paws leaving tracks in the snow. His mother had spoken of a spirit accompanying his death, but Jack should have listened to his own heart more. This beast was not observing him but protecting him. She had often spoken of spirit guides, and perhaps this might be his own.
    Yet the gray beast existed as more than a specter of the mind. It came to him now and dropped the small dead thing into the snow. Pinning it with its paws, the wolf tore it open, blood spattering dark against winter white, and then quickly snatched it up and edged closer. It had no fear of Jack, and rightly so. He had become so weak that he could barely move and hardly think. The blood spilled down from the dead thing. Jack tried to turn his face away, stomach growling with hunger and twisting in disgust at the same time.

    The gray beast existed as more than a specter of the mind.

    The wolf issued a low, warning growl. Jack went still, let the blood splash his lips and nose and throat, but pressed his mouth tightly closed. Whatever the wolf’s intentions, he’d had enough of surviving on the hot blood of dead things.
    Again it growled, dropping the little corpse right on his face in a move that seemed almost petulant. The wolf sniffed at Jack as though inhaling his exhaled breath. It nudged his cheek with its snout, then grunted and moved away. Halfway to the trees it stopped, tipped its head back, and howled. The sound reached inside Jack, curling around his heart, and filled him with sorrow and frustration, and a longing unlike anything he had ever known.
    The wolf glanced at him again, almost as though it wanted Jack to join it, to run with it through the snowy woods, but Jack could not run. He could not even stand.
    From stillness to swiftness, the wolf bolted into the trees, howling again as it vanished into the winter forest. Jack listened for as long as he could, but when the howling seemed so distant as to disappear, he felt himself sliding back down into darkness, though whether the void beneath him might be unconsciousness or true death he had not the focus even to