4 Ch 4 The Other Side of the Family

I didn't feel like listening to another lecture, especially without mom around to keep things from exploding between me and my dad. I also didn't want to lose the camaraderie my dad and I had tentatively found. He sounded tired, like he was drained, but pulling on hidden reserves to get him through this.

The way he was looking at me wasn't his usual condescending smirking glare. Nor was it the demanding drill instructor, no-nonsense-tolerated, stiff-ass attitude I often got from him when he taught me anything about being one with the wolf.

I sat up. He had said "like the man I was becoming". It actually took me a second to realize he was going to try and speak to me like an adult, someone of equal standing. It was about time! I took a breath and leaned forward a bit myself. I didn't trust myself to say anything other than, "I'm listening".

Dad gave a small wane smile that proved to me he was going to try. I had a feeling his normal way of talking to me was buried just below the surface. I was sure it was ready to come out the second I acted immaturely enough in his opinion to blow it. His self-deprecating smile was an acknowledgment of what normally happened when we tried to have any conversation since Mom died.

"Your mom and I had many discussions in our time together about the wolf that is part of me. Our conversations covered history, spirituality, physiology and psychology, practicality, and sexuality."

His eyes held a bit of humor with that last word as he looked at me. Shit, I think I knew where this "adult" conversation was heading! As if I needed a talk on sex! I was twenty years old now! I bit back a sigh, trying not to roll my eyes or show any other sign of attitude, promising myself that for my mother's sake I would hear dad out. His grin only got bigger as he shook his head slightly.

"Let's start with history," he said, surprising me. "Specifically my history. You know I met your mother at college, and that I came over to the United States from Europe. I've told you my parents had passed away, and that's partially and probably true. You know my mother died giving birth to me. My father..."

I didn't understand the look in his eyes. Pain, sadness, compassion, I don't know. It was memory driven for sure as he thought about his past. He refocused on me and continued before I could figure out what to say.

"My father gave into the wolf. Like I almost had before you pulled me back. But before he gave himself over completely to the wolf, he gave me his history, what he knew of it."

I wasn't sure I understood exactly what dad meant by giving into the wolf, but I wasn't going to interrupt his story to ask him.

"My grandfather had been found in the Black Forest as a baby, or well a toddler maybe. It was the end of the Russian revolution and soldiers were still about. There had been some sort of battle. He had been found in the ruins of an old deserted monastery. The soldiers had carried him out of the forest and left him with an old peasant couple in the first village they came across.

"It didn't take long before the couple figured out they had a demon child on their hands, one who could change into a wolf. They thought he should be drowned but couldn't bring themselves to kill a child.

"Needless to say, my grandfather grew up without much human contact, learned to stay in human form around humans. The old couple died while he was in his teens. When he got olderhe mated with the local wolves in the forest, not trusting human companionship. One day one of the half-grown pups started following him around instead of staying with the pack. That was my father."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had real wolf heritage in my blood? We were werewolves because a werewolf mated with actual wolves? No, that wasn't right, there was a werewolf to begin with. Or was that mating as incidental as being able to be human because of a werewolf mating with a human?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Where was the boundary between wolf and human? Or was there one? Was that lack of a boundary what made us werewolves?

My shocked speculation was noticed by my dad who just grinned slightly at me and kept on talking as if that little tidbit meant nothing.

"My grandfather taught him all he could about humans, which wasn't much, and everything he knew about living as a wolf, which was plenty. At some point my father's curiosity about humans outweighed his wolffish comfort in the forest.

"He found and married some young girl. They lived in the cottage once inhabited by the old couple that had raised my grandfather. My father was grief stricken when my mother died in childbirth. There was an older couple in the village that had just lost a child. The woman offered to nurse me. I lived with them, though my father was always near.

"My early childhood was pleasant enough I suppose, until I was about two or three years old and started experiencing pain. That's when my father took over the raising of me, moved me back to the cottage. I don't know how long the pain lasted. Days. My father force-fed me. I remember him dribbling water into my mouth. When parts of me would shift, he would shift those parts of himself, showed me what to do, showed me what I could become. At some point during the worst pain, I remember a big wolf standing over me, shoving me with his snout, sitting off to the side looking at me. That's how I met my grandfather.

"My grandfather was wolf more often than he was man, and didn't seem to understand why I preferred to be human more than wolf. My father defended me though, both in wolf and human form. He thought maybe my human preference was because I had a human mother.

"By the time I was in my teens, my own curiosity about the world was too much. I had learned as much as I could from the humans in the area, learned how big the world was, and longed to see it for myself.

"My grandfather had stopped coming around. Father took to the woods looking for him, fearing some sort of attack. Father was gone for a few days. He came home one night announcing he had found my grandfather dead in the middle of the old monastery ruins, natural causes we assumed.

"Father started to bury him there at the old monastery in the forest. His digging had revealed a small cemetery there full of a dozen or more skeletons that were obviously werewolves. Some were full wolf, who don't bury their dead, or part wolf and part human. All adults. We kept looking and found where the infants that never lived past a few months or maybe even survive birth had been buried. There was at least thirty of those infant graves!He took me there, and we made sure to rebury everything deep enough so there wouldn't be a risk to us by them being found."

I tried to picture it, the unmarked graves of children who couldn't survive the pain of the change. Maybe they were born with boundary walls within them that didn't allow free access to the wolf. I understood better now the deep current of possessiveness I'd always felt from dad. Seeing that many dead baby skeletons is what made him hold me so tightly. It explained some of the pain and compassion I had seen in his eyes moments ago as well when he considered his past. I couldn't imagine handling what was left of so many small bodies.

"Somewhere, at some time, there had been a pack of werewolves living at that monastery. I made a point after that of shifting around any wolves we met, in the hopes of finding another werewolf.In all the time of living there, none had ever made themselves known to us.

"My father and I came to the conclusion that they had either died during the Russian revolution or ran off either to deeper parts of the immense Black Forest where they might have lost their humanity living as wolves, or they might have left to other parts of the world."

Dad paused, waiting I think for me to process all that. He sighed. When he continued he sounded drained again.

"And that's about it. Father saw my restlessness, my desire to find out anything about how we came to be. He gathered up every possession in the old cottage, every coin, every trinket. He took me to town, sold everything, sold the land that the cottage was on. He even sold some furs from his kills. He gave it all to me.

"He told me to go out into the world, see what I could find, to be careful. Then he added that when my journeys were done, if I had found nothing that gave me peace, then I could return and howl from the old monastery. If he still lived, he would come to me. "

Silence for awhile. Not only could I not think of absolutely anything to say, I was too scared that anything I said would come out wrong and blow this chance to hear dad talk about his past like this.

"He's probably dead by now," dad finally mused quietly, "but he might still be alive. I don't know if the wolf lives as long as the man. My father took to the forest when I left. I doubt he ever came back out of it."

The sad smile on his face made me consider what dad's life had been like. He left his home and the only family he had. He came to a strange land. The woman he loved was killed in front of his eyes.

Mom had been fascinated to look at the world through wolffish senses. Where dad drilled the practical uses of those wolf senses into me, mom made sure I noticed the beauty of it as well. I think she spent most of her time with wolffish eyes in her human face, her nose often flared to catch various scents.

"The rest you know. I made my way across Europe, covering the ground in wolf form, my sparse belongings bundled up so I could carry them with my teeth.

"I spent my time learning about the world from watching from the outskirts of cities. Peeking through many a window to watch television when I came across one, learning languages as I traveled. I laid outside school windows, listening to what I could.

"I had made my way to Italy when I heard about the free education and opportunities available in the states. Spent the last of what I had getting here. Finding your mother was a godsend."

Dad paused, his face softening into that look he reserved for Mom as he thought about her.

"Living here on the reservation, away from most people, made things so much easier for me. There's privacy at the reservation you don't get in the world out there. No one wanting identification among other things," he added wryly."A different spirituality that was worth investigating as well."

I was angry for a second that he made it sound like my mother was nothing but a way for him to live somewhere in peace, even though I knew better. My anger was misplaced. I knew the bonds of love that had existed between my parents. Deep breathes to calm down before he really noticed. His gaze sharpened then. He took in what he saw in me. It seemed to confuse him.

"I know you don't want to hear it, seeing as how you're about to go out and explore the world yourself, but it's different out there. You have to remain vigilant. You can't get careless."

A bit of the condescending drill instructor was coming out of him. I tried not to stiffen up and pull away. He and I had already had this conversation many times. He constantly harped on about being careful and vigilant whenever I went anywhere on or off the reservation.

It was a refrain he had hammered at me since I first shifted, after I had spent days in painful agony during my first shift right after I had turned three.It was his first and ongoing lecture. Many times I had yelled back at him that I had heard it enough. I bit my lower lip to keep from saying anything now.

He noticed of course. He swore slightly to himself under his breath, raking both hands through his hair. He got up and took the towel into the laundry room, coming back to just stand in the doorway, eyes filled with pain.

"Look, I'm sorry. I know you've heard the drill. You're going to be tempted out there in ways you don't even think about around here, both as a wolf and a man. Don't hate me for worrying about you. I couldn't make it out there, it's just to much, too foreign. Too many people, just too much," he repeated softly, his eyes filled with memories that seemed to haunt him.

I've never seen him like this, distracted and somehow vulnerable. He was a wolf, I realized, struggling to live in a human world without the one human that made the journey worth the effort. And what was I?