The time comes when creatures whose destinies have crossed somewhere in the remote past are forced to appraise each other as though they were total strangers. I had been huddled beside the fire one winter night, with the wind prowling outside and shaking the windows. The big shepherd dog on the hearth before me occasionally glanced up affectionately, sighed, and slept. I was working, actually, amidst the debris of a far greater winter. On my desk lay the lance points of ice age hunters and the heavy leg bone of a fossil bison. No remnants of flesh attached to these relics. The deed lay more than ten thousand years remote. It was represented here by naked flint and by bone so mineralized it rang when struck. As I worked on in my little circle of light, I absently laid the bone beside me on the floor. The hour had crept toward midnight. A grating noise, a heavy rasping of big teeth diverted me. I looked down.
The dog had risen. That rock-hard fragment of a vanished beast was in his jaws and he was mouthing it with a fierce intensity I had never seen exhibited by him before.
“Wolf,’’ I exclaimed, and stretched out my hand.The dog backed up but did not yield. A low and steady rumbling began to rise in his chest, something out of a long-gone midnight. There was nothing in that bone to taste, but ancient shapes were moving in his mind and determining his utterance. Only fools gave up bones. He was warning me.
“Wolf,’’ I chided again.
As I advanced, his teeth showed and his mouth wrinkled to strike. The rumbling rose to a direct snarl. His flat head swayed low and wickedly as a reptile’s above the floor. I was the most loved object in his universe, but the past was fully alive in him now. Its shadows were whispering in his mind. I knew he was not bluffing. If I made another step he would strike.
Yet his eyes were strained and desperate. “Do not,’’ something pleaded in the back of them, some affectionate thing that had followed at my heel all the days of his mortal life, “do not force me. I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows. Do not reach out. You are a man, and my very god. I love you, but do not put out your hand. It is midnight. We are in another time, in the snow.’’
“The other time,’’ the steady rumbling continued while I paused, “the other time in the snow, the big, the final, the terrible snow, when the shape of this thing I hold spelled life. I will not give it up. I cannot. The shadows will not permit me. Do not put out your hand.’’
I stood silent, looking into his eyes, and heard his whisper through. Slowly I drew back in understanding. The snarl diminished, ceased.
As I retreated, the bone slumped to the floor. He placed a paw upon it, warningly. And were there no shadows in my own mind, I wondered. Had I not for a moment, in the grip of that savage utterance, been about to respond, to hurl myself upon him over an invisible haunch ten thousand years removed? Even to me the shadows had whispered—to me, the scholar in his study.
“Wolf,’’ I said, but this time, holding a familiar leash, I spoke from the door indifferently. “A walk in the snow.’’ Instantly from his eyes that other visitant receded. The bone was left lying. He came eagerly to my side, accepting the leash and taking it in his mouth as always.
A blizzard was raging when we went out, but he paid no heed.On his thick fur the driving snow was soon clinging heavily. He frolicked a little— though usually he was a grave dog—making up to me for something still receding in his mind. I felt the snowflakes fall upon my face, and stood thinking of another time, and another time still, until I was moving from midnight to midnight under ever more remote and vaster snows. Wolf came to my side with a little whimper. It was he who was civilized now.
“Come back to the fire,’’ he nudged gently, “or you will be lost.’’ Automatically I took the leash he offered. He led me safely home and into the house.
“We have been very far away,’’ I told him solemnly. “I think there is something in us that we had both better try to forget.’’ Sprawled on the rug, Wolf made no response except to thump his tail feebly out of courtesy. Already he was mostly asleep and dreaming. By the movement of his feet I could see he was running far upon some errand in which I played no part. Softly I picked up his bone—our bone,
rather—and replaced it high on a shelf in my cabinet. As I snapped off the light the white glow from the window seemed to augment itself and shine with a deep, glacial blue. As far as I could see, nothing moved in the long aisles of my neighbor’s woods. There was no visible track, and certainly no sound from the living. The snow
continued to fall steadily, but the wind, and the shadows it had brought, had vanished.
“The Angry Winter” from THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE, copyright © 1968 by Loren Eiseley and renewed 1996 by John A. Eichman, III, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.