We Had Names

“It’s just wine,” I lied to Fang as he buried his face into my chest. To this day, I am unsure whether or not Fang truly believed a word I said or if he just nodded because he needed to believe. Either way, he nodded.

Suddenly the blood dribbling off the ax-head was no more than liquor running down a drunkard’s beard. Father remained stoic throughout the whole ordeal. “The villagers have no dealings with wolves,” he had tried to explain once. “Those that live out West, our old neighbors even, know that wolves are a threat to lambs.”

At first, I had thought that he had been trying to convince himself rather than us. However, Father needed no convincing. He had the same mist covering his eyes that the others had right before they stepped out of their forest huts, for the last time, and began their long trek westward to the village. He was a true believer in the Cult of the Lamb. That was what the sage who listened to the sprites called Father’s newfound faith, but Father insisted on some other name. 

“Besides,” he added to soften the blow for… I don’t know who anymore nor do I think I will ever truly know. “Wolves that are just left in the woods lose their civility. Yes, they go traipsing amongst the trees, snouts to the mud during the day and during the night to the moon, searching for their old masters who have gone to none other than the village. There they exact their revenge and eat the lambs which God’s son is said to shepherd. There they commit sacrilege out of petty anger and become no more than servants of the Anti-God.”

In later years I would learn that Father had meant The Devil. At that moment I did believe that his name was Anti-God and so did not point out my Father’s inaccurate tellings of his news faith - that force which drove us away from our homes in the forest.

“They had to be put down so that we could truly move ahead with our lives,” he repeated that line now, unemotional and still misty-eyed as Fang, but a boy in those days wept into my chest.

So it was for some time that Fang cried into me and I stared at Father and Father looked away into the mist. When at last Fang had settled he turned to me and proposed that we journey into the forest for the last time.

We lived in a sizable hut surrounded by choked trees and a dense thicket of black leaves. Before us lay a small, flat yard with a mossy boulder that I once had called my kingdom when Fang and I would play. We would try to usurp one another, pushing each other off of this rock which to us was once a mountain in height. To our right lay a small plot of land that had never really been maintained or used for much save for foraging berries in the spring and summer. On our left were the pens where once we had kept our wolves.

Such civil creatures they were. Capable of collaboration not only within their pack but also with humans if the humans were just smart enough to howl, to open a channel of communication between themselves and lupin-kind. It had been taught to us by the sage that back in the day man could harness the power of the wolves to fight against his enemies. He could call the gray-marred beasts from the hillocks and dens within the forest as a knight might call his vassals to arms, save for the fact that while a knight needed a horn all we needed was a proper howl. It was even said that back in the day man could transform into a wolfling of some kind. Half wolf and half man. 

I looked over at the den which would have been baying with a litter of fresh born pups and fat and exhausted den mother. There was no noise. No jovial wagging tails or patterning of paws. There was just a row of stick fencing and a little mud hut that thankfully hid away the wolves when they were asleep. It made it easier to think that our old companions were just asleep. And that’s all death is. A long sleep.

That is what I believe.

My old people, those that dwelt in the forest, did not have such an explanation. Death was unknown to us. Not to say that we were not aware that things died. No, they did so frequently. Forest people like venison and pork as much as any villager and even if they didn’t wolves had to eat. No. Death was just it.

When mother died, coincidentally just a few months before we had decided to move out west, we had hosted her funeral in her favorite grove. The sage, a weather-beaten old man with eyes the color of clover and a heart the made of the purest gold, rose atop the pyre which we were to burn after the mother had been buried. “We offer our condolences to the family,” he named us each, in turn, Father, myself, and Fang. Then after some formal jabberings about the sprites and the cyclical nature of the forest he concluded. “So we commend the body to the forest. And we thank our deceased sister here for her continued efforts to keep the forest alive. From women to food to grass.” 

In hindsight, it was no wonder that when the robed-men came around preaching about their Cult of the Lamb (for they came around from time to time) that my Father joined. The robed-men said they knew of this place called Pearly Gate and it was then described to me as a place where the dead and the living could live hand-in-hand. The forest knew the beginnings of things but not the end and so Father abandoned his faith. Yes, abandoned is quite right for Father hated the sprites for their silence over Pearly Gate and the ever after that was “promised” to man after their death. That anger would hook him into the faith of the forest and the sprites until the end of his days and likely it would reel him into those pitiful places that Pearly Gate loomed over. 

“Do you think the wolves will be west?” Fang asked. We were walking beside the shores of a lake. My toes dug into muddied sand and I was surprised to find that my mind had been wandering the past for so long. “Do you think we are moving to Pearly Gate to see mother and the wolves?”

I nodded. “Makes sense,” I said. But I didn’t believe it. Fang needed to though and it was apparent from the glow in his cheeks that I had given the answer he wanted. “They say that at the dusk of life one can see Pearly Gates. The sun sets to the West so it makes sense.”

“We will see mother?” He asked again.

“More beautiful than any sprite,” I answered. That had been what we were told by the robed-men.

“And the pups?”

I told him honestly. “Maybe, you will have to ask the robed-men.” I wouldn’t dare tell him the robed-men’s truth. Wolves ate lambs and lambs were sacred. Lambs lay scattered throughout Pearly Gates for God (the village sprite) shepherded them. 

“Hey,” Fang asked. I nodded. “Do we have names?”

I turned on him. “Of course. You are Fang and I…”

Fang shook his head wildly as if it were being thrashed by a torrent. “What are we? The robed-men are Christ-men. But what are we? What do they call us or what do we call ourselves?”

I couldn’t recall. To this day I still cannot. We were people of the forest. Forester did not sound like the right word. Our faith was grounded in the wolves and the sprites but we were not Spriters or Wolfers. We had not been called such by the priests or by our parents or by anyone else in the forest. “Of course, we have a name,” I said. “The wolves gave it to us.”

Fang looked at me expectantly. Yet at that moment I could come up with no names. What were we? We were soon to become villagers and Christ-men. We might even wear robes like the robed-men. But what were we currently?

“White-Claws,” a voice called out from the fringes of the black-bladed forest. We both turned our heads and saw a wolf sitting on the outter limits of the woods where the tree roots and grass gave way to sand and mud. He was gray-nosed, and half-blind, his fangs were loose and yellowed. “We gave you the name of White-Claws. For what reason, I am too old to remember.”

Fang and I asked him many questions, but the most important one that we had asked, and I no longer remember who it was that asked him, was, “Are you a sprite?”

“Are boys who move to the village and deprive themselves of their pups too deprived of their wit? I am a wolf. Have you already forgotten that we can speak to man? Or is that uncommon now? If so then perhaps I am a sprite. Perhaps I am an angel who comes from the robed-man’s god. At this point who knows?” 

I did not bother to answer him, but in those old days, when I was a child in the forest people would instigate a conversation with the wolves in their language. It was never the other way around. Instead, I pestered him to try and find the truth of it. He claimed at once to be both wolf and sprite and angel. Yet to each inquiry he shrugged until it became too repetitive for him to bother answering the question. Fang however was enamored with the wolf and preoccupied most of the conversation particularly with the same questions that he had at first been asking me.

The wolf answered each question in the same manner that seemed to satisfy young Fang, but could not satisfy me. For each answer was like his explanation of his being. He was and wasn’t. He knew everything yet knew nothing and knew nothing and yet everything. He was interested in speaking to two children leaving for the west and yet had simply “stumbled upon us” all at once. His answers were a word tornado, so circular and constantly in opposition. Confirmation and negation, acceptance and denial all in one breath spinning and spinning. Round and round my head his answers swirled until there was no conversation, just the visage of a wolf’s shadow staring at me. Though perhaps that was just his dark eyes as I stared at him… into him seeking some truth. Yet all I got was nothing.

“So you are all leaving the forest, and for what? I wonder. Is it that the forest has lost its magic? I cannot blame you. In my old age, I find that the forest is just trees and grass. Predator and prey. But it is also life and mystery. Intriguing, I think the word is.”

I had no mind to answer the strange wolf but Fang did not hesitate to give his recourse. “Father slew all the pups. I don’t think we are wanted in the forest anymore.”

The wolf neither agreed nor disagreed with the assessment. Rather he remained rather passive about the matter. “Death is rather disheartening. Far too common though. Why does Father leave?”

“He leaves,” I spoke now, “because he wants to know what happens after death.”

To this point, the wolf remained silent. He folded his old paws beneath his shaggy chin and laid himself upon the mud. It was then I noticed just how filthy the creature was. It was holding onto life by the fringes. “You have eyes and a heart. Tell me, which do you believe?” I did not answer.

“The Christ-men do not believe in magic such as that course through the forest. They do not believe in us speaking to animals. Yet they seem to have more answers than any sprite or wolf.”

The wolf arched his eyes in a slow, comical manner. Yet in that humor, there was a seriousness that seemed to reach out and say, “do not try my own game on me.” Instead, the wolf merely snorted sadly through his nose. “You appreciate answers and yet are not forthcoming with one. So I shall play to silence.”

Fang launched out with his barrage of protestations. “I like answers too!” Over and over again. “Does Pearly Gate exist? Why haven’t the wolves ever said anything? The other sprites either?”

At last either amused by the child or pestered into it the wolf spoke. “We are creatures of companionship. Once you have all left from this benighted time, there will be nothing left of companionship. Not like it once was. I shall have only my fellows and the trees. In my years I have seen much death and know that everything that has once lived must die. The forest is nothing but a place of observation. It knows birth and decomposition, death, and decay. So I ask you this. If you were to witness the maggots swarming your Father. If you were to witness the death of everything you know. What would you feel more comfortable with? That there was a village sprite responsible for it all and that Pearly Gate is a place? Or that there was potentially nothing at all? Just life and death and nothing.”

He yawned again, longer and louder than last time. “It was fun getting to converse once more, but now I must rest.”

We traveled home later that day having said very little. Throughout we saw a rocky cliff bearing a clear white waterfall into a crystalline pond. We saw the deer prancing about with the last remaining civil wolves in the forest who by invitation waltzed alongside their fellow-creatures. The robins and the bluejays swerved overhead and I made sure to note each one.

When I entered the door of our hut, I saw Father running his hand down the length of our old table. We would leave it early in the morning and we would start westwards towards the village or to Pearly Gate. Towards wherever the robed-men would point us. He searched for Mother and I simply searched for Truth for I had come to realize in my silent walk through the forest that Truth was a whirl of words. A fairy-tale, some might say if not a philosophical proverb.

We who had once worshiped the forest and the sprites and communed with wolves had gone to follow the robed-men and their crosses for nothing but words. No observation just promises. Promises are locked behind layers and layers of dialog and words. A constant battle of swirling words that would shift how I believed every day and which would define me as a Chist-man and a White-Claw; make me villager and forester all at once.

It for a while seemed to bother my brother too. How definitively indefinite all of this was. He would of course overcome this struggle and adopt the Christ-man name of Christian. While I continued to exist in torrent. Always asking myself if we had names?