The Hunter from the Woods

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When the pain has passed, there remains the power.

It, too, is born of pain. Yet from it comes the rush of life unknown to ordinary men. After the bones have bent and reshaped themselves, after the gums have burst and the fangs emerged, after the skull and face have become both less and more than human, after the hair has rippled and scurried in its thousands of frantic pathways across the flesh, after the heart has ceased its crashing and the lungs their straining for new breath, after the scents, sounds, colors and forms unknown to ordinary men have exploded upon the senses and nearly driven the reeling brain mad with their profundity of meaning only the wild can decipher…

…there remains the power, and that is the alpha and the omega of the wolf.

The Great White Way

They travel by night.

Along the roads that cut through massive fields of wheat and sunflowers as high as a man’s head, beneath the silent stars and the watchful moon, the caravan of horsedrawn wagons and gypsy trailers creak and groan on their way from here to there. They pass through towns, villages and even-smaller hamlets that have been asleep since sundown, and the dust they raise glitters in the moonlight like diamonds before it returns to the Russian earth. They go on until the circus master, the white-bearded Gromelko, decides to pull his leading wagon to a halt at the centerpoint of two or more rustic towns that have likely never seen a circus since a Cossack first sharpened his saber on a blood-red stone, and there Gromelko uses his hooked nose to smell the summer wind. Then, if the wind is right, he says with satisfaction to his long-suffering wife, This is our home for tonight.

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