Wolf-Alice-1

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    Could this ragged girl with brindled lugs have spoken like wbbr></abbr>e do she would have called herself a wolf, but she ot speak, although she howls because she is lonely -- yet &quot;howl&quot; is not the right word for it, since she is young enough to make the he pups do, bubbling, delicious, like that of a panful of fat on the fire. Sometimes the sharp ears of her foster kindred hear her across the irreparable gulf of absehey answer her from faraine forest and the bald mountain rim. Their terpoint crosses and criss-crosses the night sky; they are trying to talk to her but they ot do so because she does not uand their language even if she knows how to use it for she is not a wolf herself, although suckled by wolves.

    Her panting tongue hangs out; her red lips are thid fresh. Her legs are long, lean and muscular. Her elbows, hands and knees are thickly callused because she always runs on all fours. She never walks; she trots allops. Her pace is not our pace.

    Two-legs looks, fs sniffs. Her long nose is always a-quivering, sifting every st it meet<var>.</var>s. With this useful tool, she lengthily iigates everything she glimpses. She et so much more of the world than we  through the fine, hairy sensitive filters of her nostrils that her poor eyesight does not trouble her. Her nose is sharper by night than our eyes are by day so it is the night she prefers, when the cool reflected light of the moon does not make her eyes smart and draws out the various fragrances from the woodland where she wanders when she . But the wolves keep well away from the peasants shotguns, now, and she will no longer find them there.

    Wide should<var>..</var>ers, long arms and she sleeps suctly curled into a ball as if she were cradling her spine iail. Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and bee part of it, although it does . Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the tinuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.

    When they found her in the wolfs den beside the bullet-riddled corpse of her foster mother, she was no more than a little brown scrap so snarled in her own brown hair they did not at first think she was a child but a cub; she s her would-be saviours with her spiky es until they tied her up by force. She spent the first days amongst us crouched stock-still, staring at the whitewashed wall of her cell in the vent to which they took her. The nuns poured water over her, poked her with sticks to rouse her. Then she might snatch bread from their hands and race with it into a er to mumble it with her back towards them; it was a great day among the novices when she learo sit up on her hind legs and beg for a crust.

    They found, if she were treated with a little kindness, she was not intractable. She learnise her own dish; then, to drink from a cup. They found that she could quite easily be taught a few, simple tricks but she did not feel the cold and it <s>藏书网</s>took a long time to wheedle a shift over her head to cover up her bold nakedness. Yet she always seemed wild, impatient of restraint, capricious in temper; wheher Superior tried to teach her to give thanks for her recovery from the wolves, she arched her back, pawed the floor, retreated to a far er of the chapel, crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated -- reverted entirely, it would seem, to her natural state. Therefore, without a qualm, this nine days wonder and tinuing embarrassment of a child was delivered over to the bereft and unsanctified household of the Duke.

    Deposited at the castle, she huffed and snuffled and smelled only a reek of meat, not the least whiff of sulphur, ></a>nor of familiarity. She settled down on her hunkers with that dogs sigh that is only the expulsion of breath and does not meaher relief nation.

    The Duke is sere as old paper; his dry skin rustles against the bedsheets as he throws them back to thrust out his thin legs scabbed with old scars where thorns score his pelt. He lives in a gloomy mansion, all alo for this child who has as little in on with the rest of us as he does. His bedroom is paierracotta, rusted with a wash of pain, like the interior of an Iberian butchers shop, but for himself, nothing  hurt him since he ceased to cast an image in the mirror.

    He sleeps in an antlered bed of dull black wrought iron until the moon, the governess of transformations and overseer of somnambulists, pokes an imperative fihrough the narrow window and strikes his face: then his eyes start open.

    At night, those huge, insolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a refle of himself; he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upoher side of things.

    Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to ve late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas.

    By the red early hour of midwinter su, all the doors are barred for miles.  The cows low fretfully in the byre when he goes by,  the whimpering dogs sink their noses in their paws. He carries on his frail shoulders a weird burden of fear; he is cast in the role of the corpse-eater, the body-snatcher who ihe last privacies of the dead. He is white as leprosy, with scrabbling fingernails, and nothiers him. If you stuff a corpse with garlic, why, he only slavers at the treat: cadavre proven?al. He will use the holy cross as a scratg post and crouch above the font to thirstily lap up holy water.

    She sleeps in the soft, warm ashes of the hearth; beds are traps, she will not stay in one. She  perform a few, small tasks to which the nuns trained her, she sweeps up the hairs, vertebrae and phalahat litter his room into a dustpan, she makes up his bed at su, when he leaves it and the grey beasts outside howl, as if they know his transformation is their parody. Unkind to their prey, to their own they are tender; had the Duke been a wolf, they would have angrily expelled him from the pack, he would have had to lollop along miles behind them, creeping in submission on his belly up to the kill only after they had eaten and were sleeping, to gnaw the well-chewed bones and chew the hide. Yet, suckled as she was by wolves on the high uplands where her mother bore a her, only his kit maid, who is not wolf or woman, knows er than to do his chores for him.

    She grew up with wild beasts. If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, pig the lice from one anothers pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all and her silend her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talkis and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the kind lions mouth: but how  the bitten apple flesh out its scar again? Mutism is her lot; though, now and then, she will emit an involuntary rustle of sound, as if the unused chords ihroat were a wind-harp that moved with the random impulses of the air, her whisper, more obscure than the voices of the dumb.

    Familiar desecrations in the village graveyard. The coffin had been ripped open with the abandon with which a child uns a gift on Christmas m and, of its tents, not a trace could be found but for a rag of the bridal veil in which the corpse had been ed that was caught, fluttering, in the brambles at the churchyard gate so they knew which way he had taken it, towards his gloomy castle.

    In the lapse of time, the trance of being of that exiled place, this girl grew amongst things she could her name nor perceive. How did she think, how did she feel, this perennial stranger with her furred thoughts and her primal sentiehat existed in a flux of shifting impressions; there are no words to describe the way she iated the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as her sleepings. The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfe because it showed us what we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely k. Then she began to bleed.

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