The Great Gray Wolf of Minnehaha Creek (Preamble to the story "The young man and the forest")

The Great Gray Wolf, of Minnehaha Creek, only the wilderness could feed him, love him, bed him, and those who knew him, heard of him, wished him gone (even his own kind), in the Great Northern Minnesota Wilderness, in the early 1960’s. He strutted down little Minnehaha Creek, near the village in the woods, as he used to do unnoticed, roaring eupeptic hours, it was as if, when he was gone, he would leave his ghost, we all thought, carved in the form of a shadow, in every tree, swaying in the wind, he was the highwayman, the murderer, the gunslinger who fired rawhide pistols, the brooding hunter of the desert, the brook was his tavern, he was a branch of a nearby river, and upriver it was populated by men with a handful of laws, who had cabins, paid taxes, and who walked and smoked pipes and cigars, along those banks, those peripheral banks, damned if they were alone.

If it was alone, and if it was attacked, the beast could leap twenty-five feet when it pursued its prey. This one had voluminous fur, as thick as any Alaskan fur. This one was missing patches, as if to get rid of any loose fur, so his enemy wouldn’t spot him, spotting his trail. He had deep yellow gold irises. He had many gray tints to his fur, which made his observers think he was old, perhaps older than he actually was. With his long mussel, he would break the bones of his enemy, particularly coyotes and golden jackals. He had run with the dogs, on a few occasions, having some kind of instinctive heritage with them. Compared to the dog, the gray wolf has a larger paw size and longer legs, and this gray wolf even tipped that scale. The bones of its tail were as hard as steel. Its long canine teeth grabbed its prey at 12,000 kPa of pressure, its main weapon. More than twice the bone-crushing pressures of dogs. And his saliva prevented his wounds from becoming infected and having many scares.

This was the life of being scrutinized and searched for his escape acts, to be shot on sight and dragged out of the woods; the town needed someone, anyone, big enough with the youth, the strength, the courage, the cunning to walk those cold fields in winter, to search those dense woods, uncompromising, with rage to accomplish the task, to put the wolf on a gallows, on a tree branch, once and for all, and hang the beast, and put an end to it.

Those days with no tomorrow, were gone where you could walk bravely with a rifle over your shoulder in the woods, in that 1200 acre woods where you ran wild, said it was your territory, like your grandparents used to do, and expected no calamity. And many hunters left their cabin and returned to the Twin Cities (St. Paul, Minneapolis), because of the fear that that beast instilled in them.

There was a young man, who had a sidekick, a girl, just the two of them, not counting the village populist, with the same blood, ran through his veins, similar to that of the gray wolf, a slight strain of it at least. , polluted and incorruptible. He was twenty-two years old and she was seventeen. And the old wolf, who can say?

For four years he had heard the worst of all, about the gray wolf, bigger and older and more malicious than any other recorded and documented wolf: -it was a century before, that the Indians had a legend of such a beast, bigger, older, and ruthless enough to challenge all of humanity. Chippewa Indians had lived in this area once, it was male, white male, they lived no more, no black, no red, no yellow, only white male now, maybe that’s what created this hard stone wolf, to to endure mankind, to sharpen their killing skills, deadlier than the dog, the bear, the great-horned deer, compelled by an intrinsic savagery of the ancients to take revenge, a ceaseless game of retaliation against the white man, with rules savages, which ended all the voices of conscience, the name of the give was to stop the breath of the other, forever, listen to the heartbeat, the steps and obtain their trophy. These were the burning legs, the heart and soul of the gray wolf, the almost immortal spirit, the drunken spirit, of the wolf; therefore, they needed an equal to the wolf, with human reasoning.

And so it seemed to the young man: one December morning – not only natural but quite fitting – to bear the task of finding, luring and killing the Great Gray Wolf, never having seen him – the young man swore an oath to himself. He even came into view and ignored his dreams; therefore, he would search the woods without an axe, it was as if he already knew, he could cover the wolf with a cloak of death, the nameless wolf, other than ‘The Great Grey…’ and his nickname of ‘ghost’. ‘Perhaps he came to this conclusion because he had what the village people called “bad luck killing wolves, hunting or whatever”, but perhaps it was simply that fate called him to a greater task. That had never occurred to the town-let populist, it never occurred to him.

Nº: 559/28-12-2009