Though I do not wish it, I
have little choice but to abandon my wife, each week, for three days at a time.
More than this, I must also abandon my humanity, my dignity. Each week I enter
the woods, naked and exposed, and wander the familiar paths among the dark trees
until I reach a point by the water where I sit, prostrated before God and the
forest and my demons. My flesh contracts and writhes in agony and defiance,
battling the cold, my skin produces waves of goose-pimples, and I shiver by the
water for several agonizing moments. Then, as suddenly as the cold and
goose-pimples assailed my corpus, I became warm. My senses heightened, my
discomfort gone, and I became one who belonged in the forest. But my feelings
of abandonment, my lone-wolf lifestyle, persists. I was a man without any who
truly understood me, and I am a wolf without a pack.
It
was then that I first caught scent of my purpose here, for I must feed the
beast within me lest it force me to satiate it in places where Humans would
become the prey. The scent of deer, while indistinguishable to myself as a man,
is unmistakable to me now, as a wolf. Thus began the hunt, which I executed
with practiced skill and instinct, those instincts which at first were foreign
and frightening to me have since become comfortable and familiar, and once I
had finished with my hunt and my feeding for the first day, and lie down to
rest, I was greeted by another realization. The sound of hoofbeats, the unmistakable
stench of man and horse, the sounds of hounds trained to hunt small game
growing uneasy and frantic at their sensing of the beast which awaited them. Though
these hounds did not fear me so much that they did not continue their pursuit. I,
the hunter, have become the hunted.
[based upon the works of Marie de France, (The Lais of Marie de France, Bisclavret, pp. 144-161)]
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