10/14/2019 - I shouldn't be alive.
We’d been making our way up the Cascades. I’d finished up the Portland video. Great town, by the way. Had some good times in that crazy place. That’s where I picked up Star. She took to me immediately. It was nice to have company for once, and she stuck around for a good couple of days as I wandered around through the PNW wilderness. That girl is insatiable. Every day with her I felt exhausted and drained, but the nights… oh how the nights were worth it!
I don’t know exactly where we were when it happened. We’d picked out a little flat rise among the ferns and evergreens to set up the tent. It was a beautiful, magical place. I sat in the tent and watched the dying light filter through the trees, accompanied by the beautiful music of the patter of raindrops on the ferns. Star fussed over the fire, cooking us dinner. She always seemed to be worried that I was getting enough to eat and drink. She was especially concerned that I was getting enough iron. I didn’t mind it. Steaks, spinach, and beans? I hadn’t eaten that well since St. Louis.
It happened that night. The growl was like nothing I’d ever heard. Deep, rumbling, and full of menace, it was close and loud when it woke me. The next few moments are a haze of violence. I remember the sound of nylon being shredded. I know I heard Star scream. Then, the pain.
…
I woke up in Harborview Medical Center in agony to a world of bright lights, plastic tubes, and beeping noises. My chest hurt from where they’d administered CPR in the helicopter. My nostrils burned with dry oxygen from the cannula. But my leg… my left leg… I was shaking with pain. I pulled back the sheet and looked. My leg was swollen and purple. A hundred staples held it together, making a y pattern in my thigh. Whatever it was, it had almost taken my leg off. They’d already scheduled my amputation surgery for the next morning, and seemed completely astonished that my leg hadn’t died and become gangrenous. The police asked me a bunch of questions, but in the end, I had more than they did. They said it must have been a bear. I don’t know. Maybe. Bears don’t make a sound like that, but then again, maybe it sounds different when they’re actively trying to kill you. The other weird thing is that there was no sign that Star was ever there. They found no trace of her. She wouldn’t have run off and left me to the bear, would she?
10/15/2019
My leg hurts like hell. But it’s healing at an incredible rate. It’s red, swollen, and hotter than the surface of the sun, but it looks like I’ll walk again. Now if only I could get them to give me enough food. No matter how much I get, I always seem to feel hungry.
10/16/2019
The nurse almost screamed when she saw me walking around to go to the bathroom. What the hell did they expect? I’m not an invalid. They seem to really be freaked out by how fast my leg is healing.
10/17/2019
Time for Hannah to make her exit. This place is starting to get weird. The way they’re talking about my injury, I expect people in black suits to show up in my room any minute. Besides, I’m never going to be able to pay the bill for all this.
10/18/2019
Freedom! I grabbed my stuff and snuck out in a laundry cart. The leg is stiff, but I can walk! I’m not sure what I’m going to do when the staples need to come out. I guess I’ll just have to deal with that later. Pliers, maybe? One weird thing. There’s this grey powder all over my bag. No idea where that came from.
10/19/2019
I’m worried about Star, but I have absolutely no idea where we were when we were attacked. Decided to island hop my way up the coast toward Vancouver. Leg is itching like mad. Two of the staples seemed to come out on their own. 98 to go? I found a nice little town on one of the islands. I hope they have a good burger. Or six. If you’re out there, somewhere, Star, I hope you’re ok.
Hannah collapsed in her chair and sighed. The tearing and the shrieking were over with. She'd shifted back to human form, and could look forward to a few hours of respite. Lycanthropy felt like a volcano. The only way Hannah had to try to manage the terrible lupine energy was to expend it in an eruption of activity. It was after a hunt, or a few hours of playing - the two experiences differed little from one another - that she had some grasp of the humanity she'd known before. And now, in the depths of the first new moon since her first transformation, she had her first real opportunity to reflect. She switched on a desk lamp, folded her laptop, and pulled her journal hidden in plain sight among a stack of books at the top of her arching desk. She opened it and began to write in a lilting Kurdish script...
...
They say I have a wolf. That was the way it was described to me after I was bitten. That there was this other thing inside of me that would need certain respect and attention, and with which I would need to contend for the rest of my life. They spoke of it like an alter ego or a separate personality. Maybe it's a defense mechanism. Maybe it's a way to imagine that there is a corner of oneself that is original; that is unchanged. Maybe it's a way to feel like the urges and instincts aren't really *yours*.
I'm not so sure.
When I see children running down the street and have to fight the urge to chase them, it's me who feels it. It's my heart that beats faster. It's my stomach that tightens with the anticipation of a hunt. When I smell blood, which is apparently a thing now, I'm the one who scans the crowd looking for the easy kill in the herd. The truly terrible thing about all that volcanic lupine energy is not the pain or the horror of it. The truly terrible thing is how much I love it. It's the only thing I really look forward to anymore. Traveling, making videos, talking to my friends online... these things have melted into a past that seems alien to me now. Now there is only the feeling of the grass pushing up through my toes. Now there is only the indescribable beauty of the way the world smells. Whole tapestries of scent for which no language I know is adequate to describe. And there is the scent of the prey. There is the sound if its heart beating faster. There is the smell of its fear. There is the feeling of my fangs tearing into its flesh. There is the way a heart tastes when it is eaten fresh. It is my hands that shake with anticipation as I write these words.
I could write whole volumes on simple experiences like the experience of hunting or of lupine affection or of what it feels like to suddenly possess territorial instinct. But one matter I want to touch on is the pain. This was something I was most concerned about before my first shift. I asked everyone who would listen (and with whom it was safe to discuss, more on that later) the same question. "What will it be like?" I feel I owe it to myself to attempt to answer that question. I say 'attempt' because I don't think the question can be answered in words. Like so much of the experience of being a wolf, it surpasses description. Imagine the most terrible pain you can imagine. Then multiply that by a million. It starts out in ways that you might be able to describe. Breaking. Tearing. Ripping. Feeling like you're being run over by a steam roller. Feeling like you're being drawn and quartered. Everyone's shifts are different, I've found. Some shift sort of like the movies, where your shape changes and hair grows, etc. Some of us literally explode. I think my shifts might look like the one from American Werewolf in London. Whoever made that movie knew some lycans. They got a number of things very much right.
The first feeling is an itching and burning in the skin. Your clothes suddenly feel like burning sandpaper. I couldn't even wear anything the whole day before my first shift. Then there's a feeling in my stomach. It's sort of an ... off feeling. It's a feeling like something is wrong, deep in the middle of me. That's where the pain starts for me. I double over. My stomach goes rock hard and ripples violently. It feels like I'm standing between two train cars coupling together through my midsection. Then my muscles seem to pull at me in a thousand ways all at once. The bone breaking begins. At this point, I'm incoherent and screaming. From there, it gets much much worse very quickly. If you can imagine pain like a fire, I go from blowtorch to center of the sun in about 10 seconds. Then things get fuzzy. It's hard to remember the moments in between. Shifting to a wolf has taught me a lot about how the human mind works and what it expects of the world. There are so many things people take for granted. Language is the big one. Humans are so dependent on language that they ... (they!) can't even imagine what they don't have words for. To become a wolf is to be hurled out of that existence. Where once the world was in neat little semantic packages, suddenly it's a flowing universe of scent and movement. It's such a huge shift that sometimes it's hard to recall lupine experiences. You try to put your memories into little word-boxes, and they just evaporate, like forgetting a dream after you've woken up in the morning. You have to go at it sideways, or, as I've done now, just accept that half your life is going to be in a world without words. It's very easy for humans to attempt to use language to define existence rather than simply describe it. Becoming a lycan will break you of that habit in a hurry. If you can let go of language, then you get to keep your memories. So where does that leave me as I attempt to put words to the pain? Write whatever you think is the absolute worst. Then understand that the reality is in a different universe.
This is my world now. And what scares me most of all is that I like it here. I don't have a wolf. I am a wolf. Even thinking of the pain makes me want to shift again. I have no idea why. I am not a masochist. I don't like pain. But, it's part of the process. Maybe it's that I know that on the other side of that pain is the ability to run free with my nose in the wind. But I can't shake the nagging doubt that it's not quite that simple.
Being a wolf is not all blood and fangs and horror and pain. Only the best parts are. There are a lot of other things about how my life has changed with which even a human might be able to take comfort. I have a family now. Well, okay, I had one before, but this one doesn't want me to submit to an arranged marriage to someone I hate. I was so very lucky to find the Wards. They took me in instantly when they found out what I was going through. They helped me understand. They taught me how to deal with it. They gave me a job at the shop. They gave me a home. I have my own room. My own room. Can you imagine? I have no idea what to do with all the space. They've even taken me in as an adoptive daughter. We're working on finalizing the paperwork to make it official. I've already changed my name though. I'm Hannah Ward. At least... until we have to change our names and move because we're not aging. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is supposed to be stuff that humans would find nice. My family loves me. I have a mother and father, aunts and uncles, even a baby brother. Well, two baby brothers, sort of? I just had a wonderful thanksgiving dinner. That's nice, isn't it?
Not quite as nice as taking the legs out from under an arrogant buck, but... I get away from myself. This is about assuaging the human side of me enough to be able to get to sleep. So what do you think, monkey girl? Have you got your little existential crisis all spelled out, named, and categorized? Have you played with your little word blocks enough so that we can get some sleep? Good. Because I'm tired.
...
She closed the journal, hid it away again in its nondescript hiding place, and collapsed into her bed.