Roman Wolfe's Adirondack Ordeal Part Five

Chapter  15

                                                                 ****

                                                                Surprise

            Darkness surrounds me, black as tar.  Like osmosis, I could feel my body slowly absorbing it.  Darkness is building up inside of me.  The kind of darkness that is a precursor to extreme violence.  A calm quietness surrounds me, like the inside of a century old tomb.  But I feel no immediate danger, which is corroborated by Wolf’s silence.  There is turmoil embedded in the darkness that exists somewhere inside of me, like a rumbling, dark storm cloud preparing to shoot a bolt of lightening.  I feel the coldness of it emanate from the canyon of darkness that’s building inside of me.  Out of that darkness I hear the ominous voice of the German philosopher, Nietzsche, telling me that: “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”  It’s true; I can see it, feel it.  But the dark abyss of death doesn’t just look into you, it bores into the core of you, like a voracious worm in an apple.  I felt it.  The abyss is boring into my mind, steering me toward violence.  It is wresting control from me, trying to dominate me.  The abyss sprouted hands and arms that reached out and pulled me into it when I was in Vietnam.  It was trying to do the same thing now.  In Nam, I looked into that abyss and the abyss found a hesitant, originally unwilling, but talented companion.  Gradually we embraced and I fed many dead bodies into its ravenous maw.  It had a voracious hunger for death and was as insatiable as an astronomical Black Hole.  Morality and goodness were dissolving within me.  Wolf was howling and reverting back to his original wild nature.  I was losing control and had to decide if I really wanted to lose control.  It appeared that there would be two battles: one external battle with Jake and Tom, and a simultaneous internal battle with a past partner, the abyss.

            Evil lies in all of us.  Hopefully, goodness dominates.  But when we look at each other, do we truly see an honest, objective assessment of our friends, relatives, strangers?  I seriously doubt it.  We only see superficially, what’s on or close to the surface.  We don’t see into the hidden depths of those people.  And, because of that, we all tend to underestimate the evil in individuals and society, just as we all tend to optimistically overestimate their goodness.  We see their smiles, but never really see the rictus on the face of their personal abyss.

            After Nam, my personal abyss lingered and I struggled to escape its poisonous fangs and razor sharp claws.  Escaping unscathed, I knew, was impossible, but I thought I’d done it with only a few deep scars.  That is, I thought I’d done it until the Gibsons intruded into my newly found, relatively peaceful, but sometimes depressed, life.  Now that abyss opened, again, for me; welcomed me back into its deadly and blood saturated clutches.  It stirred the dormant darkness within me, like long settled dust that’s stirred by a violent wind.  I felt the cloak of its darkness wrap itself around me like a shroud and a voice asking for acceptance.  Once accepted, it would be activated and when activated it would be difficult to resist its power and ominous allure.  Though a severe threat to civilized laws, the barbaric, lawless need for death of the abyss was exactly what I needed, and wanted.  So, once again, I accepted it and welcomed its embrace.

                                                            *

            It was nearly 2:30 A.M., November 20th, when I heard Wolf howl his warning.  Then, about thirty-five minutes later I heard his close-by, faint growl.  About the same time, the forest noises stopped, something the nocturnal animals heard made them quiet.  I knew it wasn’t the result of any noise that I had made.  It could be that the animals sensed Wolf, but his growl was very low, plus his growls normally only occur within my head.  No.  It was the Gibsons arriving.  I felt the malevolent force of their presence shortly after Wolf’s warning.  It was as if the air turned thick and foul, assaulting my senses and pressing its fetid weight upon my flesh.

            Jake and Tom didn’t know exactly where the camp would be.  It was a few hours until dawn, and they were in a hurry to capture us while they were still under the cover of night.  Because of this, I guessed they were walking hurriedly and the animals heard their somewhat hurried, somewhat careless movements, though I knew for a fact that it was extremely difficult to be quiet in the dark, with limited vision and the necessity to hurry your movements.

            The moon was low in the sky and the tree branches blocked-out what little light it gave to the thick forest.  It was like being in a cave, hard to see, but good for me.  The darkness liked me and I liked it, a friend, a colleague that assisted my dark skills.

            I soundlessly unsheathed my combat Ka-Bar knife and froze into position for a few minutes before I heard the soft crunch of frozen vegetation coming from almost directly east of me, over my right shoulder, as I faced north.  The moisture on the ground froze as night time progressed, allowing me to hear faint crunching sounds.  The noise was slightly prolonged, as if someone heavy was walking in a special way to avoid making any more noise than necessary.  They must have sensed they were getting close or, perhaps, as I’d hoped, they saw the faint glint of the red coals, or smelled the wispy tendrils of smoke still rising from the slow-burning campfire.  The campfire was doing what I had intended, being a beacon for them, like moths to a flame.  Every muscle, except my diaphragm and eyes remained motionless.

            A couple of minutes later, I heard a small twig snap, followed by the slightest noise of what sounded like clothing brushing against a bush, low branch, or tree truck.  Those noises came from a northerly direction.  Three, distinct noises; in all probability, human made.  Wolf certainly wouldn’t have made them.  I thought about the squirrels I had encountered the day before, so I waited, just to be cautious.

            I hadn’t waited long when out of the shroud of night time blackness Tom approached from the north, performing his high-stepping, ghost walk.  He came into view slowly, like some hellish wraith.  His undarkened, oily, white face shone even though their was very little moon light, another careless mistake for a woodsman.

            I didn’t stare at Tom, however, because sometimes hunters have an acute sixth sense which tells them that they are being watched.  It’s a primordial reaction; part of some long-forgotten hunting and/or survival instinct.

            Now I refocused my listening to the east of me.  Jake was the heaviest of the two men, but he was also the quietest.  I could sometimes hear the faint crunch of frozen weeds, but I never heard any twigs snap, or any rubbing clothing as he circled toward the south end of camp.  I turned my head slowly northward, toward Tom.  I could see him clearly now, a black shadow, that looked like a thick moving tree trunk.  He was almost at the edge of our camp site, shotgun held close to his body at an angle that went from his right hand, on the butt near his right hip, and his left hand, on the pump action, with the barrel angled out past his left shoulder, the classic, right handed, “hunter’s carry” position.

            I returned my focus to Tom.  It didn’t surprise me to see him use the approachment technique as he came within range of the campfire.  Nor did it surprise me that he slowly, quietly approached the tree that I was hiding in because it was strategically located for a good view of the entire camp site.

            He walked directly under me, never once looking upward.  I could have jumped down on top of him, slit his throat and it would be all over for him, right then and there.  But, no, I thought, as I restrained myself from that mighty temptation.  I was rewarded for my patience when Tom leaned his shotgun against the tree trunk, directly below my position.  If I had jumped from the tree, I’d have made too much noise as I shifted my weight, preparing to jump, then even more noise as I landed on him.  Then he may have made a startled noise before I could cut his throat.  Those noises, and those actions would certainly be seen or heard by Jake.  My primary weapon of surprise would be ruined, prematurely, and probably with grave consequences.  It was better to wait and stick to the plan.

            Tom quietly pulled out his large Bowie knife.  He was doing just as I had predicted earlier.  Know your enemy, I thought.

            I was elated that Tom had rested his shotgun at the base of the tree, within my easy reach, when I jumped to the ground.  Actually, I thought he’d hand it to Jake prior to pulling out his knife.  This unplanned stoke of good luck encouraged me and hope became pregnant within me.

            Where was Jake?  I’d lost track of him.  “God damn-it!” I thought, as I slowly looked from side to side, then back to Tom.  No sign of  Jake in the blackness of night.  But right now I needed to concentrate on Tom.

            As Tom approached the make-shift tent I could see his head-bobbing with confidence.  I’m sure he felt that way as a result of seeing the sleeping bags and especially at the sight of seeing my boots─I had to take them off anyway, so I put them to good use─the toes pointing skyward.  He’d think that we were both sleeping and, from my boots, he could tell exactly which side of the tent I was on.  The boots happened to be on the side of the tent closest to him.  To him it must have looked perfectly inviting.  I couldn’t see his face, but it must have had a huge, self-satisfied grin plastered on it.  In his warped mind, he knew he had me in the perfect position for his favorite kind of attack.

            I detected a very faint sound.  I slowly turned my head as far as I could, not wanting to turn any other part of my body for fear that the movement might be seen.  I could see Jake standing at the southern edge of our small camp clearing.  Tom paused, turned to look at his father, and when Jake signaled, with a nod of his head, Tom stepped closer and closer to the tent.  He held the big Bowie knife in a hammer grip, at head level, blade pointing downward, a power grip for plunging the knife deeply through the tent and deeply into the object that is inside the tent . . . me.

            Jake and Tom could have both emptied their shotguns by firing simultaneously into the tent, but I was positive that they wouldn’t do that.  They’d both want me to die slowly, their revenge for my killing Lester.  Slow, terrifying, knife torture was more their style.  I knew them.  I’d studied them; figured them out─which was not very difficult.  They were in my mental grip.  I could sense their thoughts and actions, though it was more difficult to do with Jake.

            Tom looked at Jake, again, when he was only about ten feet from the side of the tent where my boots stuck out.  Jake silently hand-signaled for Tom to attack by first placing his shotgun in his left hand.  Then he pointed at the tent and raised his fisted right hand, as if it was holding a knife, then made repeated, downward stabbing motions.  A huge, sadistic grin spread across his scruffy-bearded, bear-like face.  It was the kind of grin that conveyed its intent in a split second.

            They intended to maim me in order to incapacitate me.  Then, I’ll bet, they intended to torture my innocent eight year old daughter before my agonized eyes and mind, as I was wounded, bound and helpless.  They would make the torture last all day, maybe two, if they could, in order to inflict as much misery, pain and agony as they could on the both of us.  Then, when Grace was finally dead, they’d again avenge Lester’s death by using their blades on me.  They would, of course, cut my penis off, as I had done to Lester, only they wouldn’t just cut it off quickly.  I figured they’d cut it off ever so slowly, an eighth of an inch at a time as I writhed in the kind of torturous agony that only a very few terribly unlucky humans could ever know.  Of course, that’s just my guess, based on what I’ve seen of their mad, Cro-Magnon characteristics, mental sets, assumed polluted DNA helixes and vicious, sadistic, immoral attitudes and behaviors.  They were mad dogs, carnivorous, blood-thirsty beasts in human form.  I wouldn’t surprise me at all if they were also fundamentalist, ultra-conservative fanatics in some branch of religious gibberish, also

            No civilized laws would save Grace or me from their repugnant, bestial and maniacal behavior.  No law out here but Darwin’s Law: Survival-of-the-fittest, where might-is-right and the smartest, toughest and strongest survive.  I had to kill them, the same way that a cop would shoot to kill a criminal that drew a gun on him.  I’d either die or they’d die, as simple as that.  I had no time to worry about civilized laws.  The only law here was the law-of-the-jungle: kill or be killed.  No hesitation.  No remorse.  No shame or guilt.

            In my mind I saw dark, dead, disfigured faces with grotesque stares of horror: a scene from Nam.  Thinking of the horrors that I saw in Nam, I wouldn’t be surprised, if captured, if Jake and Tom attempted to make me eat each piece of my penis as part of their torture.  If I wouldn’t─or even if I did─they’d probably cut me up in order to disfigure me horribly, but not create enough blood loss to cause a quick death.  They’d probably cut my ears, nose and lips off, as well as my fingers and toes.  Then they’d clearly set them all on the ground in front of me, so I could see and agonize over what they were doing to me, pieces of me scattered along the ground.  Of course, they wouldn’t cut my eyes out because they want me to witness the horror of them dismantling my body, piece by piece.  They’d want me to see, then feel the agony of my body being sliced up like luncheon meat at the local deli.  No amount of pleading or begging would make any difference, it would only increase their pleasure.  And if any of the cuts bled too profusely, they would simply cauterized the skin with a red-hot blade that had been stuck into the hot coals of a campfire.  This would prevent my immediate death from loss of blood and enable them to torture me for hours, perhaps days.  My task was to prevent this agony, especially for Grace.  So, here and now, the laws of civilized man no longer applied.

            The deathly silence was shattered as Tom screamed, maniacally, as he sprinted the last ten feet to the tent in a split second, then was airborne in a Superman-like leap.  As he leaped towards my side of the tent, he was still screaming so loudly that the echo seemed to bounce off each and every tree.  The intensity of the rage within his satanic scream sent a chill up my spine.

            Time slowed for me as Tom appeared to float in the air, over the blanket-tent, his body stretched out to its full length, horizontally, with his right hand holding a Bowie knife in a downward, stabbing position.  The weight of his body forced the blanket-tent to collapse easily, as planned.  Then it was quiet and still for a few seconds.  Tom’s hand wasn’t slashing and stabbing through the blanket where he thought my pinned body would be.  Only a little movement came from his arm and then a low, weak, whimper came from the tent.  Jake looked shocked, then walked, then ran to Tom to see what had happened.

            Jake yelled as he was running, “Did yuh git ‘im, son?  Did yuh git the dirty bastard?”  Jake stopped suddenly in front of the tent, staring at Tom as Tom’s strong body struggled weakly on top of the collapsed tent.  Jake stared, frozen in place by this totally unexpected sight, while the pleasant-feeling darkness grew inside of me and Wolf growled viciously.

            Tom slowly rose, struggling to his knees with great effort, the blanket rising with him like an apron tied to him.  He turned slowly toward his father.  Tom’s face appeared as white as fresh snow.  He looked down at his chest, stomach and legs and saw the long, sharpened, sapling stakes that he had jumped onto, some of which were now protruding from both sides of his riddled body.  On unsteady legs he looked at his dad and tried to speak.  Like a fish out of water his mouth opened and closed, but all that came out was a spray of blood, bloody saliva and reddish foam.  He was having great difficulty bending his neck to look downward because one of the stakes tore through his lower neck, under his Adam’s Apple, possibly puncturing the jugular vein.  The stake stuck out the back of his neck, just missing his spinal cord, or maybe deflected by it.

            Jake’s thick-boned jaw dropped to his chest, his eyes locked on his son’s horrified, bug-eyed expression.  Probably for the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to do.  Jake stood still, as if paralyzed and anchored to the ground.

            My plan had worked and within my personal abyss there was a smile which was completely empty of the slightest guilt or remorse.  I’d seen this kind of grotesque killing in Nam─the Viet Cong soldiers seemed to favor this type of “punji-stake” killing.  But I viewed it as a mandatory job that had to be done ruthlessly and I was satisfied that I had accomplished the job successfully.  Tom would be dead soon.

            It was after Grace fell asleep that I had cut about two dozen, very sturdy sapling stakes, about one inch in diameter and two-feet long.  I sharpened the thinner ends into points that were as sharp as spear points.  I then sliced the sides of the points, at about a thirty degree angle, and pulled that slice out away from the sapling to make a barb, like a fish hook, a couple of inches from each of the sharpened ends─in Nam they were called punji-stakes that were usually found with the sharp end pointing upward from the bottom of a hidden pit that American soldiers would fall into─those punji-stakes were usually coated with animal or human feces to cause rapid, life-threatening infection.  Thus, once a stake punctured the body, the barb would make it very difficult to get the stake out without further tearing the inner body tissue, muscle or organs that they came into contract with.  I also held the sharpened tips of each stake in the fire for a short time, to harden them, and then set half the punji-stakes into narrow, four to six inches holes that I had bored into the nearly frozen ground with my rugged combat knife.  I spread them out all along the area that my body would have been in, if I had been really sleeping there.  None of the punji-stakes could be seen from the front of the tent─they were covered with a blanket.  I placed the other stakes on Grace’s side of the tent.  I was certain that Jake would allow Tom to jump on top of me, like he had in the cabin when he had me trapped in the bunk bed, under a blanket.  What I didn’t know was if Jake would jump on the tent, too.  At the time, I wondered if Jake would want to jump on my side and have Tom jump on Grace’s side of the tent.  I cursed the terrible vision I had of this really happening to Grace, but was greatly disappointed that Jake hadn’t also jumped on the tent and been impaled on the punji-stakes with Tom.

            Jake, in surprised shock, now stepped close to Tom, then pulled the woolen blanket off several punji-stake shafts to relieve the pain that the weight of the blanket was causing as it pulled down on the stakes that were embedded in Tom’s staggering body.  But once Jake removed the blanket he could see the full extent of the damage─Tom could not look downward due to the stake in his neck─and the horrified look that Jake gave Tom made Tom panic.  His eyes bugged-out as he made croaking sounds while his mouth opened and closed in a futile effort to speak.

            There were seven stakes in his body.  One was through his neck, one went clear through each thigh, one penetrated the lower stomach-groin area, one in the upper abdomen and two in the chest.  Some stakes probably punctured his arms, but the must have pulled out when Tom stood.  The only stakes that didn’t penetrate the body entirely were the ones sticking out of Tom’s chest.  The breast bones prevented deep penetration of the chest cavity.  I also noticed that Tom’s clothing was ripped in other areas where the stakes had ripped through the cloth, but not through any skin.

            As Tom and Jake both stood frozen in preoccupied shock and horror, I returned my blade to its sheath and jumped down from the tree to grab Tom’s shotgun.  Jake barely heard me through the thick mental haze of his shock.  But he did respond slowly by turning to look at me.  I aimed the shotgun at his chest.

            “Drop your shotgun, Jake.  Do it very carefully,” I said, through clenched teeth and pent-up anger.

            Jake did as I said and uttered not a word, but his eyes were like bear traps aimed at my head.  At this moment he wanted to rip my head off my shoulders and with his massive size and strength he could probably do it.

            Tom started pulling feebly at the punji-stakes, but all that came out was an increased flow of blood.  His body swayed on weak legs, fragile fingers trying to grip a stake.  His coat, which wasn’t thick enough to stop the penetration of the stakes, was stained with blood, the large stain looked black─in the dark, blood looks black.  His hands slipped off the slick stake and his arms fell to his sides.  Now I could see the blood flowing out of his coat sleeves, onto his hands and then drip from his fingertips.  He stumbled as he grew weaker, his hands were greased with his own vital blood.  He began shuffling his legs forward as he staggered toward his father.  I wondered what it was that kept him on his feet, his body had taken tremendous punishment.  I forbid myself any feeling of pity, shame, or remorse by mentally crushing them immediately.  That kind of sympathetic crap and self-doubt would only get me and Grace killed.  I knew that I should never pity someone I’ve had to kill because the pity I felt would freeze my instincts and reflexes, and get me killed, and the person trying to kill me would certainly feel no pity or sympathy for me as he laughs at my prostrate corpse.  “Fight fire with fire and don’t die stupidly,” Wolf growled at me.  After all my tough talk, however, I realized that though I had killed shame and remorse, I still felt pity for my enemy.

            Tom looked at his father as if Jake could save him, do something to fix him, get him out of this situation, as Jake had probably always done before.

            Tom couldn’t talk with that punji-stake through his neck, and when he tried, again, to say something to his father, more frothy bubbles and bloody spray exited his open mouth─indicating lung damage.  His mouth still tried to talk, but only opened and closed─not even a croaking sound could be made─as before, like a fish out of water.  Tom’s lips drooled red from the corners and down the sides of his chin.  Slow but steady streams of blood flowed out of both nostrils.  He walked towards Jake like Frankenstein’s monster, stiff legged, arms outstretched.  Then unconsciousness, from lose of blood, felled his body.  His weight plunged forward, stiffly, driving his chest and head into the ground, causing the two chest punji-stakes, that had not completely penetrated this area before, to be forced completely through his chest and out his back.  Jake, his actions still frozen in shock, couldn’t catch Tom, but his─and mine─ears were working well, so we both heard the crunch of bones as the stakes drove completely through Tom’s chest and out of his back.  Those stake points must have been blunted as they passed through Tom’s bony chest because they didn’t penetrate through the back of his coat.  As Tom lay face down on the ground, the two stakes made the back of his coat look like an inverted V-shape, like a miniature tent.  He lay lifeless at his father’s feet, although his body twitched convulsively with its final death spasms as if all his muscles were violently resisting giving up their young lives.

            Big, vicious, cruel, tough, merciless Jake Gibson still couldn’t move.  The look of horror on his face could only have been duplicated, with heavy make-up, in a Stephen King movie.  The realization that both his sons were dead paralyzed his mind and muscles.

            Jake stared downward at Tom, then sucked air through his gapped teeth.  As his shock thawed, he knelt, placed his shotgun on the ground, then he sluggishly stepped to his son, paying no heed to the shotgun that I had aimed at him.  He looked up, then back at me, with heavy-lidded eyes that were as black as charred flesh in hell.  Suddenly his eyes opened wide and the fiery inferno in them leaped from his eyes to scorch me.  Then he refocused on Tom, removed his gloves and stroked the hair on the back of Tom’s head.  After a few seconds, he turned to look at me.  He said, “Me boys.  They both be dead now.  Yuh kill’t both me boys!”

            Jake stood up slowly.  He threw his hat aside and took off his heavy winter coat, bent over and spread the coat over the back of Tom’s head and back.  While still bent over Tom’s body, Jake’s lips moved silently, as if in mute prayer.  The irony of that sight caused my eyes to bulge with disbelief.  It appeared that even murderers, now-a-days, believed that their God is on their side, condoning their treacherous killings and, perhaps, even willing those acts of terrorism to occur.  It was a sickening sight, I thought, to use the facade of religion to condone murder and other torturous and heinous acts of terror against the human body.  That irony sickened me.  I had to swallow hard to keep the contents of my stomach from rushing up into and out of my mouth.  The taste of sour bile lay in the back of my throat, nearly gagging me.

            Beyond Jake a sleek whiteness took shape, as if out of a misty fog.  Wolf appeared to me, making a warning growl, but a warning of what?  Jake was no threat now, immobile and drowning in his own sincere grief.  But Wolf always gave a warning of immediate danger and his growling continued.  I was confused by it and was too slow translating it to the word “Grace.”

            I heard a twig snap behind me, catching me off guard.  I turned to see Grace walking toward me.  I screamed, “No, Grace!  Go hide!”─Grace had awakened when Tom screamed as he attacked the tent.  But before I could turn back to face Jake, he was only a yard away from me in a bent-over position, his back parallel to the ground like a charging lineman on a football team.  His head and back went under the barrel of my shotgun and his massive head drove into my solar plexus with such force that I flew backwards and fell to the ground on my back.  I bounced off of him and gasped for breath as I rose, with difficulty.  I was dazed.  Strange, I thought, that Jake didn’t try to hold onto me as I went to the ground, even stranger that he didn’t simply pick up his shotgun and shoot me.  No, I thought, as my mind cleared  He didn’t want a quick death for me and that’s why he didn’t shoot me.

            After the brutally jarring collision, Jake had rolled his body over, like an agile, full-grown bull and ran past me, using his momentum to spring to his feet and grab a left handful of Grace’s hair─I heard her scream in terrorized surprise, fear and pain─and yanked her close to him.  Somehow he managed to have his Bowie knife in his hand.

            My mind screamed in terrible agony at the turn of events─I had had him covered with a shotgun.  I had him dead in my sights.  I should’ve pulled the trigger.  I called myself the biggest fool alive, and silently screamed obscenities at my terrible foolishness; my damned carelessness.

            “Don’t freeze,” I told myself.  “Don’t freeze.  Think!  Think!”

            Jake grinned, sucked air through his teeth, again, and shouted with bitter hatred, “I never shoulda unnerest’mated ya, Boy, but now yuh fuckin’ bastard, I’m gonna shows yuh how it feel ta has someone kill yur kin.”

            Quickly and roughly he pulled Grace off her feet as he yanked her head up by a fistful of hair and placed the blade so it lightly touched and cut the skin of her throat just enough to send two rivulets of blood streaking down her fragile and pale neck.

            Grace began screaming from the pain.  She grabbed at Jake’s forearm for support as her feet dangled in the air.

            ”Think!  God damn it, think!” I silently shrieked at myself.

            Wolf had warned me and now Jake had turned the tables on me.  I had underestimated him, too.  Was I that much out of practice, that much out of shape and soft, compared to my Nam days?  Stupid bastard, I called myself.  Son of a bitch!  I had him by the balls, helpless, and I let him get away.  Damn-it to hell!

            “Think!  Think!  Self-abusive, name-calling won’t save Grace,” I screamed at myself.  Only I can . . . with courage and cunning from Roamin’ Wolf.  What to do, I thought.  I must delay Jake in order to give myself time.  I needed time . . . just a little, just enough to free Grace.

            “Action!  Action!  God damn it!” I thought.  “If not physical action, then verbal action, to gain time,” I said as I removed my hat and coat to prepare for action─I had already removed my gloves earlier.

            “We underestimated each other, Jake.  You thought I was a helpless wimp, but if it weren’t for your forethought in hiding those canoes in a different spot, we’d have beat you for sure.”  I put a pretend, confident smile on my face and grinned directly into his eyes─which was not easy.

            I saw him slightly relieve the pressure on Grace’s hair and neck as he let her feet touch the ground.  Immediately, Grace could breath normally, so she tried to scream, but only a low, raspy sound passed over her lips.  She started squirming and twisting again so Jake yanked her off the ground again and her dangling legs made her look like a marionette with Jake as her crazed puppeteer.  Grace’s legs were writhing, out of control, with herky-jerky spasms, her face a screaming, distorted picture of pain.

            Jake replied, “An yuh never woulda find ‘em, even though they be only a short way from where yuh sees us hide ‘em.  We covered ‘em up wid branches an’ such.”  But I gives yuh credit, Boy, fer havin’ some gumption.  Yuh fool us a couple times when we be trackin’ yuh.  Smart, but not smart ‘nough.  Now if yuh wants ta really be smart, yuh takes them canoes, like we did, an’ yuh sinks ‘em in the water right next ta some big bushes that hangs out inta the lake.  Then yuh ties the rope from each canoe ta the bottom branches of the bush so they be hidden un’er the bush where no one knows they be, exceptin’ the person who hides ‘em there.  They be alumin canoes─he meant aluminum─so nothin’ in the water goin’ ta hurt ‘em.  Now let’s be getting’ away from all the bullshit, cause now yuh gonna sees yur kid die like I sees mine die.”

            Grace, whose face was in a painful rictus, again, started pulling with both hands at the arm that Jake held under her chin, as if she were trying to do chin-ups for exercise.  Jake lowered her so her feet touched the ground again, probably because her squirming was making his balance become unstable.

            Immediately, I said to Jake, with a convincingly false smile, “Jake, you don’t look so tough to me.  You’re not really a mountain man, like your son’s thought, are you?  You’re really just a puny . . . that means very small, Jake . . . a puny little hill-man, not a rugged mountain man.  Just a dumb, ignorant, weak little hillbilly boy pretending to be a man.  Look at you now, hiding behind a little girl.  Did you hide behind your mommy’s dresses, too?  You look like such a damned sissy using a little girl to shield yourself.  You must be really scared of me to do that, right?  Hey, I know that you want to look as tough as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but really you’re what Arnold would call a “girly-man,” aren’t you?  Hey there, girly-man, come out and fight a real man.  You want to prove how tough you are?  Well, you certainly can’t do it hiding behind a little girl, Mr. Girly-Man.  The only person I ever saw hiding from a fight behind a little girl was a weak, little, sissy boy.  Are you a weak, little sissy boy?  You sure look like one.”

            Jake’s eyes burned red with rage.  I continued to provoke him.  “I see you like a knife, girly-man, but you probably never fought a real man with a knife, sissy boy, so I can understand why I must really scare you.  I can tell by your ugly face that I scare you, don’t I, sissy boy?  Hell, it’s rather obvious that you’re afraid of me, or you wouldn’t be hiding behind the little girl.  Man!  That’s really pathetic.  Surely you can see that, too.  Must scare you to admit it to yourself, though, huh?  Of course it does.  It’s so obvious.”

            Jake’s face contorted with rage.  I continued, saying, “Damn!  Must burn your ass to admit that a little guy like me is more of a real man than you are.  How tough can a girly-man be when he has to hide behind a little girl to protect himself.  Shit man!  Look at you!  You’re a sissy full of bluff and bluster.  Too bad your two sissy boys couldn’t see you now.”  I pointed at him and laughed hilariously, then said, “You’re really just a scared little boy, a girly-man pretending to be a tough, real man .  If you think you’re so tough, Jake, why not fight me, girly-man?”  I sneered mockingly at him, then pursed my lips and made kissing noises as I pretended to be kissing him.  “Such a pretty girly-man you are, too,” I taunted.  “I bet you like to kiss both boys and men, don’t you?”  Then I laughed as loud and as mockingly as I could.

            Even the dim firelight and the moonlight couldn’t hide the fact that Jake’s face suddenly turned scarlet, as he sucked furiously through his teeth in anger.  He yelled, “Yur dead, Boy.  I’m gonna carve yur face up inta ‘amburg, Shit Face, an’ then I does the same wid yur girly.  Yuh puts down dat shotgun an’ we sees who be bedder and tougher wid a knife, an who be more a man.”

            “Sorry, pretty-boy, girly-man, no deal.  I’ll only put the shotgun down if you release the little girl who is protecting you from big, bad me.  Then the fight will be a fair fight and you won’t be a scared, girly-man hiding behind a little girl like a scared, little boy.

            Jake was livid; his face radiating pure hatred.  “Oh, sure, Asshole.  I lets yur girl go an’ yuh blows me away wid the shotgun.  Besides, Boy, it be a fist fight I really wants wid ya.  Changed my mind.  Don’t needs no knife to carve yuh up.  I cut yuh up wid me fists.  I lets ‘er go if yuh agree to a fist fight.  No weapon ‘ceptin’ bone and muscle.  Deal, Wimp?”

            When I paused to look at Grace’s terrified eyes, Jake shouted loudly, “Oh!  Now who be the girly-man?  Yuh just be a wimp wid a big mouth.”

            “Deal!” I shouted, “If you let her get away from you,” I growled at him as, my friend, the pale wolf prowled in the background of my mind.

            Then swiftly he had Grace dangling off the ground, by her hair, again.  She screamed.  As she screamed, Jake tossed her away from him, like tossing a twig into the bushes, about ten feet to his right.  He switched his Bowie knife from his left hand to his right hand and we looked at each other.  Then he placed his knife into its sheath, on his right hip.

            I pulled the shotgun in toward my chest, holding it tipped at an angle that ran between my right hip and my left shoulder, the “hunter’s-carry” position.  Then with my left hand I pumped the shotgun and the shells came flying out until none were left and the ground in front of me was littered with little red tubes.  I pointed the shotgun into the air and pulled the trigger.  The firing pin clicked, a clear indication that the shotgun had no more shells in it.  Then I stood motionless, facing Jake.

            When Jake paused, as if to realize that I was now unarmed and he could rush me and kill me with his knife.  His right hand moved slowly towards his knife.  Quickly, I said, “You’re not both a coward and a girly-man, are you?  The deal was between two men, right.  The deal wasn’t between me, the man, and you, the girly-man coward, right?  The deal was no weapons, right?  So why are you becoming a chicken and reaching for your knife?”

            Jake grimaced, sucked air between his teeth, then grinned robustly as if he really thought he was going to win this battle, easily, and surely didn’t need his knife.

            His own shotgun was behind me, so he couldn’t reach that without going through me.  So, it was to be bones and muscle only.  “OK,” I thought, “let’s dance.”  However, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that he wouldn’t eventually have his knife in his hand.

            I spoke to Grace.  “Stay out of the way, Grace.  Don’t go near him again, and don’t watch us.  Don’t watch us fight.  Go hide.”  When she hesitated, I screamed at her, “Damn it, Grace!  Go hide!  Now!” She ran scared and crying from the killing field.

            “Oh, Sweet Meat,” Jake said, mockingly to me, “soon yur gonna be drinkin” yur own blood.  That be for sure.”  He laughed demonically as he stepped cautiously toward me─and me toward him.  He looked like a giant oak tree slowly moving forward, directly at me, long, thick limbs reaching for me, his body slightly angled forward like a huge, hungry grizzly bear reaching for food.

            Wolf howled, loud and clear, but this time the howl didn’t come from the outside, it came from within me, as if from deeply inside the abyss.  I felt as if I had gnashing teeth, sharp claws, wily strength, and speed.  Finally the Roman Wolfe had become the Roamin’ Wolf.  I heard myself growl just before I shouted, “Let’s dance!”

            It was difficult staying calm, confident, and in control.  Roamin’ Wolf lived for moments like this.  Roamin’ Wolf would go to places that would make Satan, himself, fart fire and shit brimstone bricks.  Roamin’ Wolf had already been to hell, a place called Nam, where he never once saw Satan bathing in the conflagration of napalm─the devil’s reputation was all grand hyperbole.  Satan is really just a red wimp, with a hot temper, looking for his little red wagon and his special, lacy and frilly-dressed dolly that’s in it.  Besides, even if he was real, the napalm in Nam was, most likely, a bit too hot for the devilish, horned bastard to handle.

            Suddenly, and unexpectedly, I felt as if my finger nails were growing into claws and my canine teeth lengthened, while my nose (muzzle) and ears lengthened.  I also felt itchy, as if hair (fur) was growing rapidly on my otherwise bare skin, and my coccyx tingled, as if it were extending outward, away from my body (tail) and improving my balance greatly.

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                                                            Chapter  16

                                                                  ****

                                                        Night of the Wolfe

            I remained alert, but motionless, as Jake slowly and cautiously approached me.  He had said that he wanted a fist fight, with the only weapons being bone and muscle.  It seemed, at first, to be a tremendous advantage for him, but I accepted the challenge knowing that it placed Grace in a safe position, at least, temporarily.

            I thought, Sure, just a fist fight, until things don’t go his way─I hoped they wouldn’t─then he’d opt for the knife,  I was positive of that.

            All my life I’ve faced an assortment of bullies, most of them with empty heads and large muscles, who think that pure strength will always dominate, always crush, always be victorious.  Sometimes it was true, of course, but Jake was underestimating me, again, and I was so very thankful for that gift of egotistical and careless stupidity, as well as his habitual, over-confident arrogance.

            As Jake approached me, what I saw was a bestial rube, dressed in layers of thick muscle.  But I couldn’t take him lightly, either, or I’d also be stupid and dead.  Stupid and dead was definitely not good for Grace or me.  I already saw, and thus knew, that he was extremely dangerous─I’d never fought someone quite as big and powerful before, but like most big brutes, layered with bulky muscles, he appeared to be slow.  However, I knew that he’d present much more of a challenge than any average Vietnamese or Korean enemy.  Jake was three times their size and weight.  I knew I could never match his brute strength.  The speed and precision of my physical combat skills, plus the ferocious and indomitable attitude of my inner Wolf, would have to counter his massive bulk, or Grace and I would perish.

            Fist to fist, muscle power versus muscle power, I was no match for Jake.  But Jake was in for the surprise.  My mixed martial arts skills─from many different forms of martial arts styles─my Nam experiences, my killer instincts and speedy reflexes, my volcanic rage and, most importantly, the defense of Grace, would combine to defeat him, one way or another─though, in reality, I was not in nearly as good shape as I was before and during the war.

            I’ve always accepted the fact that on any given day, anyone can be defeated, no matter how good he thinks he is and I’m no exception.  But this day wasn’t going to belong to Jake.  It was to be “a day of Grace,” but the “night of the Wolfe.”

            I also knew it wouldn’t only be a battle of skill, but a battle of endurance─my endurance was questionable, but the rush of adrenaline would take care of that.  Mountains of solid rock do not ever win the battle with and enduring and hostile wind.  Mountains get worn away slowly, piece by piece as the wind carries grains of sand that wear away the surface of some huge monolith until, in time, that mountain has been leveled.  Jake, the mountain, had to be, and would be, leveled.  It wasn’t the egotistical, bragging feeling of my super ego, either.  It was a feeling of absolute necessity, supported by reasonable confidence in my combat skills.  It was a strength, not of muscle, but a strength of character, embedded in confidence and wrapped in determination . . . something mysteriously and atypically spiritual, given to me by my spirit wolf who has a ferocious and feral will to survive at all costs.  Rules?  A fair fight?  No.  The only rule now is to survive by being victorious.  A fair fight?  In my experiences, fair fights are extremely rare, if by a “fair fight” one means that the combatants are equal in every way that’s significant to the winning or losing of the fight.  The concept of a “fair fight” is normally the rationalized, bullshit philosophy of a myopic adolescent.  A fight to the death can never include the idea of “fairness” if you expect to survive.  In this case, victory meant death for one of us.  Life itself is often not fair, and you can bet that never in his long life has Jake ever entered a fair fight.  His fights, certainly, were always stacked in his favor, always, or he wouldn’t have entered into them.

            I smelled a wild, ferocious, feral animal odor, a redolent musk of a Wolf.  My body literally reeked of a wolf-like, primal determination to prevail, to pounce and claw and sink my teeth into flesh, to claw and shred the underbelly and to win the single most important battle of my life, of our lives, Grace and Sam and me.

            To my surprise, Jake assumed a late nineteenth century boxing stance that I had only seen on old boxing newsreels.  He looked like John L. Sullivan who was the heavyweight, bare-knuckle boxing champion.  The urge was extreme, but I didn’t laugh.

            Jake’s fists were held at face level, left arm bent half way, about two feet from his face; right arm bent half way about one foot from his face, with the thumb tips of both fists facing directly towards him.  If his fists were opened in this position, both palms would be aimed at his face.

            As he approached and arrived at a distance of about ten feet, I positioned myself into the Forward Guarding Stance, which is best suited for attacking an opponent, and can quickly be altered to the Back Stance which is primarily used for defense.

            When using the Forward Guarding Stance, you face your opponent, looking straight ahead at him, shoulders at right angles to his position, but your legs are spread wide apart, about twice the width of your shoulders, in the opposite direction as the shoulders, i.e., a straight line from the back right ankle to the forward left ankle would point nearly straight at the opponent.  The front (left) leg is bent slightly and carries between sixty and seventy percent of the body weight.  Both heels are flat on the ground.  The right fist is held near the right hip (palm up) and the left fist (thumb up) is held slightly out in front of your body, even with the shoulders, in a guarding position.  When switching to the Back Stance you merely switch your body weight from one leg to the other, i.e., the rear, right leg assumes sixty to seventy percent of the body weight, while the forward, left leg assumes thirty to forty percent of the body weight.  The right fist is still closed (palm up) and held near the right hip, as before, and the left hand is held out in front of you, at waist level, but now the left hand is open, fingers together and slightly bent (like a scoop), with the palm facing downward, toward the left toes.

            Movement from these two stances, when covering short distances, like Jake and I were in now, is accomplished by sliding the front (left) foot forward about one to one and a half feet, and sliding the back (right) foot along behind as you maintain both your fighting stance and your body weight distributions for proper balance.

            Jake was now within striking distance with his very long reach.  He threw a stiff left jab which I expected and promptly blocked with a Forearm Block.  He threw another left jab, but much harder and with the power to not only break, but shatter my nose or jaw, but I deflected that as well, in the same manner as before, but with a much more powerful Forearm Block─Jake looked surprised, perhaps by the power and unusual hardness of the block.  Used correctly, a Forearm Block is a powerful blow to the fleshy underside of the opponent’s left hand jabs, mainly because it’s the bones in the top forearm that smash into the soft muscle and flesh that’s on the underside of the opponents forearm as he jabs.  It’s a surprisingly punishing counter-attack to the typical jab used in most fist fights.  The big difference is that the block isn’t meant to just deflect the opponent’s punch, it’s meant to punish the arm of the opponent.  Used correctly, it is both a block, or deflection, of the opponent’s punch and, at the same time, a punch into the opponent’s forearm, i.e., it’s a very hard block that turns into a punishing punch.

            Jake commenced talking as we circled each other, waiting for an opening.  He said, “Both me boys thought yuh to be a tall, skinny wimp.  An’ even af’er yuh kill’t Lester, Tom still said it be only dumb luck that let yuh do it.  He swore fer certain that yuh would never be makin’ it alive ta the lake.”

            Abruptly, trying to catch me off guard, he unleashed a left cross punch, then a right uppercut.  But he telegraphed both punches with facial expressions and shoulder movement, so I leaned back away from him, feeling the rush of air from both fists as they passed by, about a foot in front of my face.

            I made no reply to Jake, just concentrated on what I was doing and what he was trying to do to me.

            Still trying to break my concentration, Jake continued, “Yuh know, Tom, he wan’ed ta fight yuh hisself, just ta prove he be right ‘bout yuh bein’ a wimp, an’ then he wan’ed ta torture yur girly real slow so yuh can see ‘er die an’ yuh be almos’ dead bein’ sad.  Then he say he would torture yuh nice an slow, jest fer more fun, ‘til yuh be dead, too.”  Jake laughed loudly, but kept his intense gaze on me, as he continued to circled me.  After a few steps he stated, in a half sarcastic, half curious voice, “That be some kine a Kung Fu standin’ that yur doin’?”  He spit, giggled, then smiled as a gob of brownish saliva ran down from the corner of his mouth.

            When he realized that I wouldn’t take the bait and engage him in conversation, he calmly said, “Me sons was good boys.”  Then, angrily, he shouted, “Yuh never shoulda kill’t ‘em ‘cause now I cain’t lets yuh outta ‘ere, Boy! Or yur girly!”

            I made a sudden feint by lunging forward at him, then pulled back, not intending to make contact.  The feint shut him up and made him instinctively retreat.

            “Tricky fucker,” he mumbled, then spit at my feet.

            I could see that he was getting frustrated by my non-responsiveness, as if he was sure that his continued talk would loosen my tongue.  It would frustrate him and I wanted him frustrated.  Frustration in your opponent is very good.  It’s a chain of thought: Frustration causes impatience, and impatience causes careless mistakes, while careless mistakes cause injury and enough injury causes defeat.  Yep, let him talk, let his frustration build to a dangerous level and let it crack his veneer of invincibility.  So I remained silent, focused and patient, just as if I were sparring with my sensei in the karate dojo.

            “Me boys unnerest’mate you, by God.  They sure did.  Guess I done it too.  That be why I’m gonna kill yuh quick, then take yur girly up ta me cabin and enjoy ass-fuckin’ ‘er, then cunt-fuckin’ ‘er, an’ then makin’ ‘er suck on me till I comes in ‘er mouth.  How’s that soun’ ta yuh, Boy?  Soun’ damn fuckin’ good ta me.  An’ I gonna do it till spring.  Then when I be tired of it, I makes ‘er dig’er own grave.  May take ‘er a week, maybe two till it be done, yuh know.”  His smile was menacing and mocking.  “But before she be taken that dirt-nap, I rapes ‘er one last time, fer me boys, yuh know, ‘specially fer little Lester.”

            Shit!  My face was hot and flushed.  I almost attacked him out of pure hatred and rage.  I knew what he was trying to do, make me lose my concentration, become frustrated and make a foolish mistake, as I was doing to him.  Even though I knew what he was trying to do, I still almost got careless by attacking him in anger.  I had taken a step towards him, then stopped, calmed myself and thought, “He had nearly been successful goading me into making a careless mistake and that mistake could very well have been lethal.  Think of saving Grace.”

            When Jake saw me pull back from his nearly successful taunting, he expressed disappointment, though it didn’t take him long to continue his sadistic and mocking monologue.  He displayed a disdainful grin, then laughter boomed from his cavernous mouth.  He continued, “An’ when the hole be deep ‘nough, I ties ‘er little hands ta ‘er feet so she cain’t stand up.  That be when I drops ‘er inta the hole, naked and strugglin’ fer ‘er life.  Now there be a real Kodak moment, right Boy?” he screamed at me.

            He was getting to me.  My patience was running thin.  It was my little girl that he was talking about.  The rape, the torture, the burying alive?  It quickly spread the ominous darkness within me.  Murderous intent surged through my blood as if it were a searing chemical.  I wanted to rip his heart out of his chest and bite a bloody chunk out of it while he watched me with his last few seconds of life.

            “An’ I don’ wanna gag ‘er.  No siree.  I wanna hear ‘er screams.  I sure be enjoyin’ that, yes siree.  She be screamin’, while I enjoys listenin’ ta ‘er death music till the dirt I be shovelin’ inta the grave be stuffin’ ‘er nose and mouth and she cain’t scream no mo’.  An’ then I stops shoveling fer a little bit so’s I can listen ta ‘er choking and maybe gets ta see ‘er jerking ‘er head outta the dirt fer air, an’ all the while she be chokin’ ta death on the dirt-dinner that be up ‘er nose and in ‘er mouth.  An’ iffen she get ‘er breath back, Boy, then I be shoveling’ in more dirt till she be nice an dead.  An’ dat be me final revenge fer me two good boys.  How that soun’ ta yuh, Boy?” he screamed, again, as his bass voice exploded with maniacal laughter.  The rage and bitter hatred in his eyes was unmistakable.

            I was relieved that Grace could not hear any of Jake’s foulness, as we continued to probe, feint and circle each other in a dance of death.

            I remained mute, but his ugly, uncivilized, repugnant and torturous intentions were breaking my resolve.  I was supposed to be frustrating him and not vice versa.  I wanted to attack unrelentingly, but a commanding growl, inside of me, told me that I’d be playing right into his hands.  Jake wanted me to lose control, just as my frustrating him was intended to make him lose his control.  But the bastard knew exactly how a father would normally react to another man saying such things about his daughter.  But if I lost control of my temper, body and strategy, I really would cause the deaths of Grace and me.  My strategy should be like his strategy, to verbally assail his two maggot-brained sons.

            I took deep breaths, in through the nose, then out through the mouth.  I was exhaling the second breath when Jake bent down and rushed me, like a charging bull, in the same manner he had done before when he got hold of Grace.  This time I side-stepped his rush and kicked his right knee so it buckled in toward his left knee.  He stumbled to the ground, immediately whirled around on his knees to face me and got up slowly as he clenched his teeth and growled─Wolf growled back at him.  It had to have been painful, but he just rubbed his knee and stared at me.  His eyes squinted and his brow furrowed in frustration.  I smiled when I noticed that he was favoring his left knee.  “Problem with your knee?” I tauntingly asked.

            Jake rushed me and threw a looping round-house, right hand, which I partially blocked with the Upward Cross defense─crossing both arms as they extend upward, over the head like the letter “X,”  However, the blow was so powerful that my arms slid against each other and Jake’s fist deflected off the side of my chin.  The blow still had enough power to knock me back a step, but I reacted quickly by stepping forward and violently kicked Jake’s left kneecap with the heel of my right foot.  I could feel the solid contact of bone colliding with bone.  It was a powerful kick that hurt the both of us, though that certainly wasn’t my intention.  My heel felt numb as I backed out of his range.  Jake lifted his left knee slightly and tried to rub the pain away as he glared at me.

            “Yuh bastard!” Jake screamed in frustrated anger.  “Yuh be payin’ fer that, an’ what yuh did ta me boys.  That be a promise, yuh son of a bitch.  Now fight fair.  A fist fight.  We had a deal.”

            “The deal was no other weapon except bone and muscle, and that’s exactly what I’m using.  You chose to use the bone and muscle of your chest, arms and fists and I choose to also use the bone and muscles of my legs and feet.  I haven’t broken our deal.  Just listen to yourself whining like a cry-baby, little boy.  You aren’t going to do that infantile, girly-man act again, are you?  And you talk of a fair fight?  That’s bullshit!  I’ll bet that you’ve never given anybody a fair chance in a fight.”  I glared at him as the dim moonlight cast shadows across his face, making him look like a Viking berserker.

            I could see the pain on his contorted face.  He rushed at me again, but more slowly because of his sore knees.  And this time he wasn’t bent over, but standing straight up, arms outstretched, hoping to capture me in a rib-breaking, bear-hug.  I countered with a Side Kick to his solar plexus.  Jake’s weight was so great and his forward momentum so strong that I was knocked backward, off balance, falling to the ground on my back.

            The side kick had, however, stopped Jake dead in his tracks, leaving him stunned and out of breath.  But once he realized that I had been knocked to the ground, he rushed to grab me.  Instinctively my left heel lashed out at Jake’s right kneecap, quickly followed by my right heel driving up into his groin.  A rush of air exploded from Jake’s mouth as he bent over, staggered, then fell to his knees with both hands pressed against his groin.  Quickly, I rolled away from him, sprang to my feet and circled him so my body was between him and Grace.

            I glanced back in Grace’s direction.  Now I saw her, and heard her.  She was watching the fight and crying hysterically.  I never even heard her crying before now, due to my intense concentration on this life-and-death struggle.  I yelled for Grace to go hide and not watch, but didn’t have time to see if she had obeyed.  I felt a strong twinge of guilt, but blocked-out further thoughts of Grace, as well as the guilt.  If this battle isn’t won, I thought, Grace will be dead instead of just crying hysterically.  Guilt shouldn’t have any power over me here.

            I concentrated on Jake, who was rising from the ground and recovering from the blow to his groin.  His breathing was ragged and strained.

            I could feel the feral presence of Wolf.  I could feel his strength and cunning.  I even smelled Wolf, a musky, thick odor that blossomed within my nose.  His feral odor was so thick in my nose that when I swallowed, I thought I could taste it.  But it neither smelled badly nor tasted foul to me.  It tasted and smelled right, appropriate, pleasant, natural and reassuring.

            Jake stood before me, his pain subsiding.  I watched him.  I felt mentally alert, and my muscles seemed to actually ache for action, like a taut, coiled springs begging for release, or like a coiled rattler ready to strike.

            Jake dropped his arms to his sides and stalked me, his squinting eyes trying to bore holes into me.  I could feel the intensity of his hatred and his need to avenge his sons.  But I certainly wouldn’t run in fear of him, as so many other men must have done.  I was going to topple this tower of muscle.  It was life or death.  Those were the only two choices I had and in choosing life for Grace and me, I also chose death for Jake.  I must kill this savage mountain man.  Then I thought, “I can’t have survived Nam just so I could die here, in this bleak, cold, shadow-land of leafless trees and bare, nearly frozen ground, at the hands of a psychopath like Jake.”

            That thought angered me, but what angered me even more was the sudden realization that I had Jake down on the ground and I stupidly did nothing to end his reign of terror.  It was definitely the wrong thing to have done─I had been looking toward Grace─and it indicated that I had lost my focus.  I berated myself, intensely, then came to a quick decision as Jake slowly approached me.

            I decided to stop playing defense and go on the offensive.  I doubted that a powerful Front Kick─more powerful than the side kick that I already used─to Jake’s face or solar plexus area would be feasible due to Jake’s tree-like stature.  So I faked a low Side Kick with my left foot and as Jake bent and leaned forward to try to catch my foot, I immediately withdrew it, stepped forward one step, leaped and delivered a Flying Side Kick, with my left foot, to the bridge of his nose.  I heard a sound like that of a snapping, dry twig.  It was the sound of his broken nose, and it was pleasant music to my ears─it was the wonderful sound of Chopin’s Opus number 1 in B-flat minor.

            His eyes watered profusely.  Blood immediately streamed out of both nostrils, mixed with his streaming tears, then rushed to his upper lip, not even slowing down to follow the contour of his upper lip.  Instead, the gush of blood and tears spilled over both lips, like water going over a cliff, then spilled onto his chin and steadily dripped off onto the ground.

            Jake’s hands, in an inverted “V” shape, covered his nose.  His hands were smeared with blood.  He looked stunned, his eyes showing alarm, and for the first time, I saw fear, something that must have been totally and incomprehensively foreign to him.

            This time I didn’t hesitate.  I gathered all my strength, quickly switched to the Modified Horse Stance and delivered a powerful Round House Kick, with my right foot, to the left side of Jake’s jaw.  Again, there was that sound of a dry twig breaking, only this time it was the deeper sound of a thick branch breaking.  Jake’s jaw.

            The kick was strong, with plenty of snap to it, but his jaw-bone broke for two reasons: first, it was a well-placed kick and, second, Jake was out of breath; his mouth was open as he gasped for air and an open mouth is weak, vulnerable.  It breaks a lot easier than a closed, tightly clenched mouth.  That’s why boxers are taught to keep their mouths closed and only breath through their noses.  Keeping the mouth clenched tightly makes the whole jaw area much stronger and less likely to be damaged.  Jake stood there, stunned, unable to believe the damage that I had inflicted already.  He stared at me, his confusion and disbelief obvious in his bloody, facial expression.

            His body swayed, then collapsed straight downward, like the demolition of an old building that had dynamite charges strategically placed next to its basement support posts.  When the dynamite is set off, and the support posts are blown away, the whole upper structure comes tumbling straight downward.  That’s how Jake collapsed.

            Jake was lying on his left side, his left hand over his nose and mouth.  I was moving in for the kill, a Heel Stomp to the right temple area, when I noticed his right hand reaching for his Bowie knife.  A sadistic, vicious, demon like Jake would never think to select a rational option like surrendering.  His life is controlled by a philosophy of extremes: life or death, all or none, pleasure or pain, his way of doing something or don’t do it at all.  He and his sons, I thought, were immoral, unethical, savage, mutant humans who see other people as tools to achieve their own personal, sadistic pleasures and satisfaction.  Unfortunately, it was a victims pain that brought them pleasure and satisfaction.  Now Jake was the victim and he was stunned and enraged by the unfamiliar feeling of being in pain, and losing a fight.

            Before I could reach him, Jake stood up, his right hand clenched around the bone handle of his Bowie knife, his left hand supporting his jaw.

            With my right hand I reached into my shirt for the inverted sheath located under my left armpit.  I unsnapped the blade handle strap and the ten inch Ka-Bar combat knife dropped into my hand.  Jake was puzzled by the location of my blade and how quickly I was able to grasp it.  Then his eyes gave a look of grand surprise as he realized that I had been armed at the cabin and he didn’t know it.  He paused, with his mouth partially opened at an incorrect angle.

            “Bad move,” I said to Jake.  “You should stick to muscle and bone, fists and feet.”

            “We see, yuh bastard.  I’ma gonna gut yuh like a fish.”

            I smiled at him which enraged him even more.

                                                                                          *

            In knife combat I was taught to use a natural grip, nothing fancy, simple is best, at least it is initially.  With a natural grip, the blade handle rests naturally, comfortably and diagonally across my right palm.  The butt of the blade handle can then rest on the mound of muscle and flesh that lies directly opposite the thumb.  The four fingers wrap themselves comfortably under the handle with the thumb securing the grip as it passes over and around the top part of the handle, then coming into contact with the index finger.  The blade is held slightly out in front of the body, at waist level, with the primary sharpened edge held downward─the first two inches of the top edge of my combat knife, from the point inward, are also sharpened.

            Contrary to popular, belief, as depicted in movies and novels, the right thumb should not be pressed against the blade’s finger guard for support.  A sudden, powerful thrust, that suddenly hits a bone, could easily jam, sprain, or even break the thumb.  Furthermore, with the thumb not wrapped tightly around the handle, the blade is much easier to dislodge from the other four fingers─try using a hammer without using your thumb and you’ll get the idea of how insecure your grip is without the use of your thumb.  Same thing with a combat knife.

            With the blade held in this natural position, it’s at a good angle for slashing or thrusting.  This natural grip also offers the advantages of a full arm’s length reach when slashing or thrusting.  This natural grip also allows for a very securely held blade handle, due to the thumb and index fingers securely holding the forward-most part of the blade handle with the butt of the handle being tightly pressed into the mount of flesh and muscle opposite the thumb.  With the blade handle held so securely, I can place my whole body weight into the thrust without the worry of losing my grip (Some knife fighters us a lanyard that’s connected to the knife’s butt area.  The lanyard is a cord loop that can be tightened around the knife fighter’s wrist so that his knife can be retrieved quickly if it slips or is pulled out of his hand.)

            Also, since the first two inches from the point of my blade, across the top edge, opposite the full-length sharpened edge (also called a “false edge” because it’s often not sharpened) was also razor-sharp, which, in effect, makes it a double-edged weapon.  With this kind of blade, I can slash up and down, left and right, as well as thrust deeply into the opponent’s mid-section.

            In a knife fight, you need to move fast.  You can’t be locked into any set position; you can’t stand flat-footed which sort of roots you to the ground and makes it difficult for you to react quickly.  My knees were slightly bent as well as my torso.  My legs were spread out about shoulders width, with my left foot slightly ahead of my right.  Most of my weight was on the balls of my feet so I wasn’t cemented to the ground, as I would be if most of my weight was on my heels (if most of your weight is on your heels, you are in serious danger of being caught flat-footed).  My knife is gripped naturally in my right hand and my empty left hand is not extended out away from my body so it doesn’t make a good target.  Extending your empty left hand out to try to block the enemy’s arm is an idiot’s invitation to receive severed fingers or a deeply slashed forearm.  The empty left hand is more correctly and safely held close to the body, out of harm’s way, the same as one sees in sword-fighting.

            Even with such little light, I could see that Jake’s grip was so tight on his blade handle that all the knuckles of his hand were white, like lumps of miniature marshmallows.  His mouth hung open with pink saliva trickling over his lips.  With his left hand he carefully felt his jaw.  When I saw him smile, I knew that I hadn’t broken his jaw as I thought I had.  The disappointment that I felt pissed me off, especially when Jake jerked his jaw and the joint popped back into place.  But what he did next cheered me up.

            Without taking his eyes off me he reached inside his mouth, felt around, picked something out and looked at it carefully.  Then he threw one of his front teeth to the ground and made a move toward Grace, who was standing, in a seemingly catatonic state, by the tree that I had previously hidden in.

            I sprang, cat-like, to cut him off and he stopped.  I yelled to Grace, “Grace! Damn it!  Get away from here.  Quickly!  Go!” I screamed angrily at her.  “Find a place to hide!  I don’t want you to watch this!”

            But she didn’t move, just stared straight ahead.  I yelled again, only turning my head ever so slightly toward her while keeping Jake in sight─he was pleased by Grace’s immobility.

            “Grace!” I shouted, again.  “Listen to Daddy!  Turn around and get away from here!”

            I remained in a defensive martial arts stance.

            As Grace lethargically responded, and turned to walk away, Jake howled heatedly, then shouted, “Are deal be off, boy.  I di’n’t know yuh be some fuckin’ Kung Fu guy.  But I gives yuh credit for foolin’ me ag’in.  Yuh sure be full a su’prises.  This ‘ere baby”─he held his blade in front of his face and stared at it─“be ten inches a razor sharp, cold, tough steel, an’ I’m gonna gut yuh like I did my las’ deer.  I watch yur guts spill ta the groun’ an’ steam in the cold air.”  Yuh ‘ear me, Boy?  By God, I’m gonna enjoy seein’ yur guts and blood splash on this here groun’.”

            It was a bit more difficult understanding him, now, because, even though his jaw was dislocated and then popped back into place, it still had to be sore and maybe starting to swell.  Also, he may still have a cracked jaw bone even though the jaw popped back into place.

            Jake grinned at me as best he could with a broken nose and a very sore jaw.  He smiled and now I could see the gap left by his missing front tooth, as I thought, “Well, at least the low-life jerk won’t be sucking air through there any more.”  Then I saw him take a deep breath and Wolf’s warning growl rang loudly inside my head, a severe warning.

            To me, a deep breath usually means the opponent is getting ready to attack and is filling his lungs once more just prior to his attack.  With blade in hand I remained in the Modified Horse Stance.  From this sideways position, by body offered only a small area for Jake to attack.  I looked over my left shoulder at Jake and said, “Fear that man who fears not God.”  It was a quote from a guy with a foreign sounding name, something like “Kader.”

            Jake paused, as I thought he would, and delayed his attack.  He looked puzzled and responded with, “What kine a shit yuh be talkin’ ‘bout now?”

            He took another deep breath─Wolf growled more loudly this time─and attacked.  He rushed me with his Bowie knife slashing the air into “Xs” in front of himself, at face level.

            I anticipated part of his strategy.  I anticipated that he’d try to use his bulk to bowl me over since I was so much lighter than he.  So as soon as he came forward, I was going to kick into the knee or the groin area, whichever looked more susceptible to attack at that time . . . but tragedy struck me like a baseball bat as the coyote skin, that was tied around my right foot, snagged on a surface root, knocking me off balance.

            I could feel the looseness of the coyote skin as I fell backwards.  I pulled hard and was released from the inopportune snag.

            Jake, seeing my vulnerability and his opportunity, rushed faster toward me, then slowed down as he saw me lift my back, supported by my left arm, and putting all my weight on my left hip and left elbow.  I curled my left leg close to my buttocks, then lifted and bent my right leg for a possible strike─a martial arts ground defense position─as I did the last time I was on the ground.  He’d already come at me once when I was on the ground and it turned out to be a painful experience for him.  Undoubtedly, this thought made him pause in front of me and, as I faked a kick towards his leading knee, he stopped, backed up a step and prepared to use his blade to slash at my foot or leg if I tried to kick him in the knee again.  But I never extended my right leg, as in an actual kick.  I faked the kick, then withdrew it quickly.  Then rapidly I pulled my leg back and bent it upward, together with my left leg.  I was on my back, my knees up to my chest, as I threw both legs, in unison, up over my head so my weight was on my shoulders and neck.  Sudden-like, I thrust my legs outward, in the opposite direction from Jake and using my hands like a gymnast, I flipped over onto my feet.  The whole motion was like doing a backward somersault.  It carried me away from Jake, and when I stood, I was already in position, facing him, and my blade was still gripped in my right hand.

            A martial artist, familiar with weapons, especially bladed instruments, knows that his legs can be just as important in combat with blades as they are in unarmed combat.  My leg reach could and did provide a relatively safe distance between my most vital areas and organs, and Jake’s thrusts and slashes with his deadly blade.  However, caution is of utmost importance, much more so than in unarmed combat, because a carelessly high kick may result in a slashed leg muscle, vein, or artery.  I vastly decrease the odds of that happening by only using low kicks, never above the waist, not in a knife fight.

            When kicking at an opponent’s knife hand, at waist level, the leg and foot usually have the extra protection of whatever footwear is being worn.  If leather boots are worn over the feet and a heavy jeans-type material is worn for pants, then this means added protection to the leg and foot area.  Furthermore, cuts to the leg area, especially from the knee downward, are usually not serious because large veins and arteries are relatively few and minor, and the few major arteries that do exist are either well protected, behind bones, or not even known to most people.  Most experienced blade fighters only know artery, vein and organ targets that exist from the waist upward.  But this, by no means, is meant to minimize the caution needed in knife combat, because a slashed muscle will make a leg ineffective, which minimizes mobility which is a tremendous disadvantage.  As I stated before, fast movements and fast reactions are extremely important in knife fighting.  In most cases, a slashed muscle is more serious than a cut vein that produces a lot of blood.  The bad affects of a cut muscle are felt immediately, whereas the bad effects of blood lose take longer to appear.

            Actually, it’s amazing how well the human body is designed to protect vital areas─with the exception of the groin area─even from razor-sharp weapons.  The outer layer of skin is much tougher than most people give it credit for, then there’s a layer of fat underneath the outer skin, and then there’s a tough layer of connective tissue, called fascia, that covers or binds together body surfaces.  Then, of course, there is the skeletal bones which are resistant to most blades of ordinary size and which seriously interfere with a blade’s penetration into vital internal body organs (e.g. the ribs and breast bones).

            Jake tried to circle around me.  I didn’t know his purpose and worried.  I didn’t know if he was just waiting for an opening in my defense or if he had his eyes on Grace, figuring that the best way to get me was to get to her.  I glanced over my shoulder and saw Grace─she didn’t hide like I told her to do.  I screamed, “God damn it! Grace.  Run!  Hide!

            Jake probably wished that he had never let her go.  But using her as a shield now would be a humiliating thought for such a macho-man─that’s why he let her go when I teased him, especially when I kept calling him a “girly-man.”  But he was losing this battle, so far, and I could see in his eyes that he wished he had never let me trick him into letting her go.”  If he got his hands on her again, he’d cut her throat.

            I quickly turned my head to face Jake.  Since my back was now facing towards Grace, I couldn’t see her.  I could only hope that she would go somewhere and hide like I had ordered her to do.  The blackness of night, once away from the campfire pit, surrounded us like a curtain.  If Grace would at least move a couple of steps into that darkness, where she couldn’t be seen and couldn’t see the fight.

            Each time Jake tried to maneuver around me, I would fake a kick or a slashing or stabbing movement with my blade and he would get cautious and retreat.  Then the thought occurred to me that he didn’t seem to be in as much pain as he should be with a broken nose and a possible cracked jaw bone, one tooth missing, and the lower half of his face being caked with his own blood.  I thought, “Jake must have a high threshold for pain.”  That pissed me off.  All I could think of, now, was that this battle would probably be a drawn out and brutal struggle and, in the end, the one with the most stamina would prove to be the live victor or, put another way, whoever was the most careless would be the dead loser.  I hoped an out of shape ex-Marine, like me, would still have enough stamina to best a tough and rugged woodsman who was injured and breathing heavily, but not grimacing in pain.  “Why didn’t he seem in pain?”

            Jake had his knife tightly compressed in his right fist, with the blade edge-up, pointing towards the crotch of his thumb.  From that position he could only attack the low areas of my body.  And since his blade was edge-up, he would have to stab or slash low into me or slash upward at me with the up-turned edge of his blade.

            Jake lunged forward to thrust his blade at my mid-section, but I side-stepped quickly to my left─his right─and saw his over-extended right arm shoot by me.  I slashed downward into his right arm’s biceps.  Jake saw the slash coming and started quickly moving his right arm to the left.  His maneuver caused my slash not to be as deep as I had hoped.  He stepped back, put his left hand over his right biceps and when he pulled it away it was smeared with blood that looked black as watery tar.  He looked at me and screamed with rage.

            Suddenly, in a blur of motion, Jake, with one hand, flipped the blade over so the blade’s cutting edge pointed toward the ground.  I knew then that his next move would probably be to raise his right arm up over his head and slash downward at my face, neck and shoulder areas.  I watched him closely.

            Jake did raise his blade and just as his arm began its downward movement toward my head, I leaned my whole upper body backward, like a boxer slipping a punch, then waited for Jake’s blade to slice the empty air in front of me.  I was used to that move . . . unfortunately and to my utter surprise, it didn’t go as I had expected.  I felt the edge of Jake’s blade strike my knife-hand forearm.  The blow was hard enough to knock my arm downward so that my fisted knife was parallel with my right thigh.

            Jake started to cheer in victory, but stopped himself after only a few words when he saw that I was still standing.  His face showed tremendous awe and shock at the fact that my arm appeared to by uninjured, though the shirt I was wearing was slashed half way around my forearm.

            When he saw me smile at him, he flew into a rage and, finally, carelessly attacked me by leaping forward and slashing at the side of my neck.  Once again I leaned back, waiting for the arc of his arm to pass by me . . . but it didn’t.  Jake’s knife slashed my left forearm, which was held near my belt.  But no damage was done, but I realized right away that he’d had some serious training in knife combat techniques.  Military, maybe?  Self-taught?  Now I was the one who was caught off guard and surprised.

            Jake’s face appeared monstrously furious, with his arm still slightly extended in front of him as he stood there with disbelieving eyes.  I took immediate advantage and quickly leaned and shuffled my feet forward, latching onto his right wrist with my left hand.  I immediately pulled his arm downward, forcing him off balance so he’d have to take a step forward, toward me.  He was off balance, now, and his weapon hand was temporarily useless to him . . . I could have easily slit his throat . . . but I didn’t and that inaction shocked me.  Was the killer instinct in me gone, even in such a desperate situation?  I felt panic slicing through me, like tiny razor blades in my blood.  I wondered how I could possibly save Grace if I couldn’t kill a piece of psychopathic vermin like Jake.  “Such a terrible time for me to be morally hesitant,” I thought.  Silently, I screamed at myself, “There’s no place for morality on the battlefield.  Life or death situations don’t lend themselves to moral dictates whether they are religious, social or political.”  I forced myself to act.

            There must have been a lot of adrenalin along with that surge of panic because I suddenly let go of Jake’s arm.  Pulling his arm downward made his face come down to the level of my face.  And as he looked at me, his right arm still down toward my knees, I gathered as much strength as I could and as Jake started to rise, I delivered a vicious left hand Fore-Knuckle Fist into his Adam’s Apple followed immediately by a swift and vicious right elbow to the side of his face.

            Jake dropped his knife, staggered, and with both hands he grabbed his neck as if he were choking himself.  He couldn’t draw air into his lungs and was trying desperately to inhale.  His eyes watered profusely as his face turned blue.  I kicked his blade aside, rushed into him for the kill, but rather than a straight thrust of my blade into his solar plexus area, then sideways, to the left, into his heart, followed by a quick withdrawal, and then a deep slash across the side and front of his neck, I found myself grabbing Jakes hair with my left hand, yanking his head downward while at the same time bringing my right knee swiftly upward.  The resulting collision snapped his head backward.  His eyes rolled upward, his long hair rose and fell over his face, then I noticed something white flew up over his head.  Maybe another front tooth, I thought.  I was correct, for when I looked at Jake’s semi-conscious body, lying on his back, I could see that both front teeth were missing . . . and my knee ached.

            As Jake lay there on the ground (he was breathing now) I asked myself if I really needed to kill him.  I had said that I did.  I had said that I would.  I had said that killing Jake was my only option.  My mind filled with the sudden and terrible accusation that I really was a wimp.  After all my spewed fighting philosophy, after all my tough talk and hard-core, survivalist oriented words and meaningless platitudes, it turns out that maybe I’m a fake, and that my bullshit façade isn’t any more real or valid than that of my views about religion.  I’m not as tough as I thought I was and the Gibsons were right, I am a wimp.  Where the hell did my resolve go?  In Nam there was a strong, tough, stealthy, and confident killer instinct in me.  Where did that guy go?  Where was the wolf in me now?  My mind echoed with the sympathetic growls of Wolf, as I asked myself: “What am I now?  Who am I now?”

            I looked down at Jake and didn’t know what to do.  My indecision was really bad, a sign of weakness and, as I realized this, I was stunned even more.  After a minute of stunned silence, staring at Jake’s large, prostrate, unmoving body, I thought, “Perhaps I could tie his arms securely behind his back, find the canoes, make him ride in the second canoe, alone, while I towed it behind my lead canoe.  That way I could bring him back to the jurisdiction of civilized laws.  But suddenly a phrase exploded in my mind so fast that I thought it would give me a concussion from it’s violence.  The phrase?  “A plethora of laws but a paucity of justice.”  If it’s a quote, I don’t know who said it.

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                                                            Chapter  17

                                                                 ****

                                                                 Invictus

            I stood above Jake as he lay on his back, breathing heavily and semi-conscious.  My breathing was heavy, also, as the sweat dripped off my forehead and off my chin.  I looked at Jake’s chest as it heaved with the effort of trying to furnish enough oxygen to keep his massive, muscular body in action.  Again, I wondered where my killer instinct had gone.  Wolf howled for action, yet I hesitated.  Nam was “kill or be killed.”  Wasn’t it the same now?

            The pale Wolf appeared before me, like a misty, white apparition, his lips drawn tightly back to his gums, pointed teeth bared and glistening with saliva, as if giving me a serious rebuke.  He was such a strong force within me.  An alter ego?  I hadn’t killed in a long time.  I’d hoped never to do it again.  It’s not something I could forget how to do.  More appropriately, should I do it?  Indecision.  Wolf was the symbol of survival that resided in the primeval wilderness of my brain.  But I no longer lived in that wilderness, where “survival of the fittest” dominated the fate of all sentient creatures.  Shouldn’t the “killer instinct” be tempered by reason?  But, does reason have any value in a “life and death” struggle?

            Wolf growled as his misty, white form solidified before me.  I stroked his head and back.  Touching him had a calming effect on both of us.  Our rage subsided as unspoken messages traveled between us, like an electric current.  Civility attempted to penetrate our bodies.  It was a salve to my flesh, but an acid to Wolf’s flesh.  I sent him away and felt him vanish from under my stroking hand, unneeded now, unwanted now, and knowing it.  But I knew that his lair wasn’t very deep into my subconscious; he was always alert, watchful and there if I needed him, like a wild, untamed and cunning guardian.

            I felt a subtle change occur within me.  Sending Wolf back to his lair, in my subconscious, and deciding that it was unnecessary to kill, felt good, but was it correct?  I had Grace to protect and if feeling good resulted in her injury, then I would castigate myself unmercifully.  Feeling good was also a scary feeling because compassion can also be suicide in combat situations.  I’d felt Wolf’s presence since my early youth and there was very little compassion in him, except towards me, similar to an attack dog and his master.  Wolf and I were in this tough life together.  It was a symbiotic relationship; necessary for both of us; beneficial to both of us.

            But seeing Jake lying there, helpless, brought some confidence back to me─a mongoose must feel similar triumph after defeating a deadly cobra.  But I could feel Wolf’s eyes on me, questioning my compassion and indecision, especially in this particular situation.  I didn’t blame Wolf at all.  I was also questioning my thoughts, actions, reactions, indecisiveness; doubting myself.  However, I felt confident knowing that if I needed Wolf, his energy, cunning and strength would surge into me, like adrenaline, immediately saturating my blood and highly stimulating both muscle and mind.  And with Pale Wolf in me, there was little doubt of victory for me, though that was never a certainty.  I had lost fights before.  I’d lose some again.  It’s always a big mistake to think you’ll win every fight, even with my skills.

            This fight, though, I had to win or die trying.  As in Nam, I would be “invictus,” unconquered.  With Wolf’s ferocity inside of me, coupled with my martial arts skills, I could usually kill any man, regardless of color, creed or national origin.  I’d be an equal opportunity destroyer, as long as I didn’t get arrogant and over-confident.  Perhaps, I thought, I already was being arrogant and over-confident.  I wondered if a day would come when Wolf and I failed each other and Death, on its pale horse, came to claim both of us.  Defeat was in the future for every man, like walking toward your own personal precipice.  Indecision made that trip shorter.

            I could feel Wolf stirring within me, knowing what I was thinking about him.  In my mind, I almost always thought of Wolf anthropomorphically, i.e., as an animal with human qualities.  I could see him grin, feel the warmth of his friendly eyes, sense his loyalty to me and even use words to communicate with him, though it was a matter of interpreting his growls.  He understood my questioning thoughts about the necessity of killing─but disagreed with me about the need to kill Jake.  Killing was necessary in Nam, I thought, but was it necessary now?  When could I stop killing?  Could that time start right now?  Wolf’s growl stated an emphatic “yes” in response to the first question and remained mute concerning the latter questions.

            Unusual indecision caused me to lower my blade while looking at Jake’s heaving chest and semi-conscious body.  Wolf warned me that Jake only thought in terms of kill-or-be-killed, and that the risks of me allowing Jake to live were too great.  I thought, “If any man ever deserved death, he did.  Also, as long as he lived he’d want revenge, so for the rest of my life I’d be looking over my shoulder for him, knowing he’s strike at my family because I killed his sons, then come after me to seek his version of justice.  But should I be his judge, jury and executioner?  And what would that turn me into?  An amoral, vengeful, killer?  And, more importantly, was Grace watching?  What would she think of me if I killed Jake as he lay helpless?”

            The human heart, I thought, is nestled between the lungs and protected by the breastbone and the rib cage.  A person’s heart is only about the size of his own clenched fist, and, even in adults, only weights about ten or twelve ounces.  The bottom of the heart rests on the diaphragm.  The heart, being basically a muscular, blood-pump, is similar to the carburetor of a car; smash it and the whole machine dies.  Moral uncertainty prevented me from thrusting my blade’s finely honed, ten inches of steel into the inverted “V” area located where the breastbone converges on the solar plexus.  A deep, upward thrust, into the left chest area, would penetrate the diaphragm, as well as the heart, causing massive internal bleeding and sudden death, like stabbing a balloon full of water.

            The unexpected, by definition, comes swiftly as a total surprise.  So I cursed my own self-doubt and inaction as my right foot was being yanked out from under me.  I staggered, then fell backward like a toppled tree.  Jake had suddenly twisted his body far enough and fast enough to grab the coyote skin, that was now loosely wrapped around my right foot, yanked it up and threw me off balance.  I landed heavily on my back.  As the air rushed out of my lungs, I heard myself say, “Shit!”  I instinctively rolled away from Jake’s grasp.  But when I got to my feet, facing Jake, my normally excellent reactions paused a second due to the realization that, during the fall, I had dropped my combat blade (I should have made a lanyard).  I could hear Wolf’s jaws snap in anger at me as I compounded that error by making the mistake of looking at the ground, in desperation and panic, searching for my knife . . . but taking my eyes off Jake.

            Then, suddenly, Wolf howled loudly, sending a super-surge of adrenaline flowing through my body.

            Jake reached around my chest to grab me in a face-to-face bear hug.  Quickly, I reacted by bringing both my arms tightly into my body, elbows touching my sides and both fists clenched tightly at upper chest level, near the collarbone.  Then, before Jake could apply extreme pressure, to pin my arms to my sides, both fists shot upward, like exploding cannon balls, toward Jake’s chin.  The fists rotated quickly from closed fists and palms-toward-me position, to an open-palms-toward-Jake position, with all my fingers up and slightly curved.  My thumbs were tucked in close to the knuckles of my index fingers, forming a tight-fingered, crescent shape.

            I could feel Jake’s awesome, brute strength encircling my ribs as my Double Palm Heel tactic struck under his chin and snapped his head backward.  His eyes rolled back and his face contorted into an awful grimace of pain as his arms lost their full measure of strength.  He spit out fresh blood from biting his tongue

            If I had my blade now, I would have been cutting deep gashes into both sides of Jake’s Adam’s Apple where the carotid arteries were superficial as they brought oxygenated blood, that was being pumped away from the heart, to the brain.  Thus, bright-red, purified and oxygenated blood, that had already passed through the lungs, would have spurted out in a series of potent spurts, each spurt coinciding with a heartbeat.  And not too many seconds later, Jake would have lost his strength as well as consciousness, and collapsed, dead on the spot.  But my blade was gone, my mind screamed as it raced onto the alternatives.  My right hand, almost instinctively tried to reach the throwing knife that was in its sheath, inside my collar, but the demands of struggling with Jake required both arms and I couldn’t reach it.  The knife was as useless as man’s tits, at the moment.

            Jake growled, in rage, through clenched teeth  He strained to tighten his muscles, compressing my rib cage with such force that I knew soon he’d crack my ribs so forcefully as to possibly drive shards of ragged-edged, rib-bones into my lungs, probably puncturing and collapsing one, or both, lungs.  That would mean that I would have difficulty breathing, with only one lung functioning, or not being able to breath at all, with both lungs punctured.  Death would creep-up on me slowly during my last few seconds or minutes of breathless agony.

            If that were to happen, I could vividly imagine the pleasure expressed on Jake’s face as he stood over me, grinning sadistically, enjoying my last few seconds or minutes of slow suffocation.  He’d be smiling at my body spasms, and upward rolling eyes.  And his final pleasure would be seeing my open-eyed and glazed stare of death.

            As these thoughts were going through my head I found myself giving a loud karate kiai─a fiercely loud shout from the lower abdomen which distracts or otherwise upsets an opponent and, psychologically, increases your own strength, courage and indomitable fighting spirit.  At the same time as the kiai, both my hands had been removed from Jake’s chin, raised to be level with the side of the head and each hand about two feet away from Jake’s head..  My fingers were together─as they would be if you were clapping your hands─then brought simultaneously and swiftly crashing onto Jake’s ears.  The resulting pressure on the inners ears causes great pain, especially if the eardrums burst.

            But Jake only shook his head slightly, shaking off the pain and continued to squeeze me until I thought my spine was about to touch my chest.

            It was then that I heard the terrified screaming cries of emotional agony from Grace.  She didn’t run away and hide as I had ordered her to do.  She was seeing me being squeezed to death in a muscular vise and, although I couldn’t see her face, I knew that the agony and terror on it would make my frightening, demonic, facial gestures of pain, look angelic by comparison.

            Grace’s screams, plus the combined survival instincts of Wolf and I, overcame the crushing pain as I grabbed two hands full of Jake’s long shaggy hair, pulled viciously with both arms until his head came close to my mouth, then bit into his large, broken nose with the full power of clenched teeth and jaw muscles.  I locked my jaws─or was it Wolf’s jaws?─tightly as I growled brutally, then pulled, yanked and twisted his nose, violently, up and down, back and forth, until the sounds of Jake’s screaming drowned-out the sounds of Grace’s screams.  At the same time, I grabbed Jake’s Adam’s Apple with my right hand fingers.  I squeezed and twisted it cruelly, burying my fingers deeply into and behind the soft flesh as I tried to rip it from his throat.  Then, with my left  hand, I poked the ball of my thumb fiercely into the socket of his right eyeball, pushing directly inward, toward his brain.  I felt Jake’s grip loosen immediately.  He struggled and tried to shove me away from him, but, like a bulldog, I wouldn’t release his nose from my clenched and locked together teeth.  His screaming grew louder as I continued to yank my head ferociously back and forth, up and down, as I growled, with crazed effort, through my clenched teeth.  With his powerful arms, he urgently shoved me away, but not having let go of his nose with my teeth, his actions only served to dislodge my thumb in his eye and my grip on his Adam’ Apple.  In his panic, though, his struggling was helping me to tear his nose from his face.  The taste of his blood was thrilling.  But soon the force of his shoving tore off his nose and caused me to stagger backward and fall to the ground, but I never took my eyes off his bloody, misshapen face.

            The resulting blood, gore and milky-white bone sticking out from the center of his face made him look like an even more hideous monster than he already was.

            Wolf had saved me again, saved me from my ridiculous hesitancy in following my warriors code.  Why would I think I could behave in a civilized manner when my opponent was an uncivilized beast who fought by no rules, but his own, and with any means at his disposal?  War isn’t fair, it’s planned, organized brutality.  Personal combat is a war between individuals where being “fair” can’t compete with the need to “survive.”  Wolf understood that instinctively and filled my body with his untamed ferociousness, the primal force for survival.  There could be no mercy, no compassion, no morality, no debate, no hesitancy now.  This battle could only end in death and I should’ve ended it when I had the chance to do it easily and quickly.  Roamin’ Wolf prowled inside of me as I finally realized that this was, unalterably, a “kill-or-be-killed” situation.  I had no more thoughts of bringing him to justice.  Jake or I would die in this mammoth struggle between opposing and unforgiving forces.  I knew, unquestionably, that Jake had to die for Grace and I to survive this Adirondack ordeal.  Only Jake’s death could stop his maniacal, sociopathic juggernaut.

            I was on my back, so I raised my knees to my chest, then arched my back and thrust my legs forward and quickly sprang to my feet to face Jake.

            Jake was frozen in his tracks, touching the warm blood streaming down his face and gushing over his lips.  Then his hands felt the empty space of raw flesh where his bulbous nose should have been, but instead, felt bone, cartilage, torn flesh and his own sticky blood.  He looked at me without moving and in a temporary state of shock.  Rage flashed like fireworks in his left eye as he rubbed his damaged right eye and his Adam’s Apple.

            I breathed deeply, through my nose, but had great difficulty with the almost unbearable pain that breathing created in my expanding ribs.  I knew then that some ribs had been cracked, perhaps broken.  I had difficulty catching my breath.  I couldn’t suck in enough air, as if there was a blockage in my airway.  I opened my mouth widely, and as I tipped my head slightly downward, Jake’s nose fell out and landed at my feet.  It had been blocking the airway to my lungs.  I sucked in huge amounts of air, enjoying the life-sustaining oxygen as if it were my favorite dessert.

            I kept my eyes on Jake as I bent down slowly, picked up his nose, then raised my body in spite of the shooting circles of pain that burst around my rib cage.

            Napoleon said that “Victory belongs to the most persevering.”  He was right and, through the study of karate, I knew that the ability to persevere and maintain a positive mental attitude was most often the difference between winning and losing and, sometimes, between life and death.  I had frequently seen perseverance be the difference between a good karate student and a superb student, when, in fact, both students’ skill levels and potential were very similar.

            Roamin’ Wolfe possessed the reins to my body and mind.  I could hear him growling at Jake with the thrill of our struggle.  Now he controlled my muscles and their actions.

            I looked at the black lump of bloody gore that lay in my hand─in dim light, like moonlight, red blood looks black─and bored my eyes into Jake’s eyes.  Then I casually tossed the nose to him.  Reflexively, Jake caught his nose.  He stared at his amputated nose, then screamed at me with a bestial, maniacal rage that contorted his face into a mask of horror.  He rushed towards me with heavy, plodding and weakened legs, while his powerful arms and hands reached out for me..

            Under Wolf’s confident guidance, I placed my left foot forward, legs about shoulder width apart and waited for him to get closer.  I took a deep breath and just as he was within legs distance, but out of arms distance, I exhaled and my leg exploded with a vicious Front Kick to his solar plexus─a dangerously high kick because of the risk of Jake catching my leg.  I snapped my foot back quickly, keeping it out of Jake’s reach as he stopped in his tracks, gasping for air.  I didn’t bring my right leg all the way to the ground, though.  Instead I brought the heel back to my groin area, then lashed out with another Front Kick to his groin, connecting solidly.  Jake bent forward, grasping his groin.  His body started to fall forward, toward me, so I quickly side-stepped to his right side, then thrust a right-foot Blade Kick─the outside edge of the right foot─into the side of his right knee, sending him crashing to the ground.

            Jake slowly stood, then staggered on his wrenched knee with the frenzied look of a wounded grizzly bear who’s ready to maim and kill.  I could see past him.  I could see Grace.  She had her hands up to her mouth, which muffled the sound of her crying.  There were vertical lines of reflected light on both her cheeks, twin streams of tears reflecting moonlight.

            Suddenly I was aware that I was no longer between Grace and Jake, as I should have been.  I hoped that Jake wouldn’t realize my grave error, but as I looked at his maniacal grin I became deathly afraid that I was horribly wrong.  And even worse was the feeling I had when Jake bent over quickly and picked up the large Bowie knife that I hadn’t noticed.  He stood, bellowing with ugly laughter, like an incoherent psychopath.  Then he swiftly turned and limped toward Grace, slashing the night air in front of him as he approached my own flesh and blood.

            I ran toward Jake, but, again, bad luck fell upon me like a boulder.  The coyote skin, which was further pulled loose from around my right foot previously, when Jake grabbed it and tripped me, got snagged on something.  I stumbled to the ground, losing precious time and, also, losing my chance to catch Jake.  I rose to my left knee, then yanked my right knee upward, pulling the coyote skin free from its bindings around my right ankle.  I sprang  to my feet.  Jake’s body was directly between me and Grace so that I couldn’t even see her, though I heard her screams of, “Daddy! Daddy! Help me!” penetrate my ears like hot daggers.

            Panic reached out to grab me, but I resisted.  When I saw that I couldn’t reach Jake before he reached Grace, I had one option fueled by determination and rage.  Like a lightening strike, my body was ablaze with motion.  I reached for my throwing knife, grabbed it by the handle, yanked it upward, out of my collar sheath, then positioned it next to my right ear.  I screamed at Jake to try to make him turn around so I could have a wide, clear shot into his chest or abdomen area.  Jake didn’t stop.  The pain of my kick had worn off and he was limping faster.   He was screaming insanely through a face full of blood and gore, badly cut lips, missing teeth, torn off nose, and cracked jaw.

            The words of Machiavelli rang in my ears: “If injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

            I shot my left leg forward─like a right-handed baseball pitcher─with both knees flexed.  Like the baseball pitcher throwing a fast-ball to the catcher, I released the blade with my right arm fully extended, at ear level.  I stopped my rapid arm motion with my empty fingers aimed at Jake’s back..  Every remaining ounce of my energy went into that powerful throw, a throw that any major league pitcher would be proud to own for its accuracy and nearly one-hundred miles per hour speed.  The silver blade sparkled with moonlight, like a small, shiny and deadly, missile.  It took less than half of a second to reach that miscreant, juggernaut-of-terror, but that split-second felt like hours of agony to me as I sprinted towards Grace.

            I immediately ran toward Jake who suddenly stopped about three strides in front of Grace.  Grace was lying on the ground, curled up into a whimpering, fetal ball of fear.  Jake’s back arched upward and then backward as both his hands reached around to try to remove the blade which had penetrated six or seven inches into the area between his shoulder blades.  I wished I could have severed his spine and stopped him in his tracks, but that was too much to hope for.  The blade entered his back, to the right of his spinal column.  As I continued to rush toward him I could hear his raspy breathing.  By the sound of his breathing, I knew that the blade had punctured a lung.

            Jake staggered a foot at a time towards Grace.  I felt the garrote in my right hand─I don’t recall reaching for it─when I was about ten feet from Jake, who was standing over Grace’s fallen body.  Jake had his right hand held level with his right shoulder, the blade sticking out of the bottom of his clenched fist, in a downward, stabbing position, toward Grace.

            I was lucky to have reached Jake just as he began to stab downward at Grace─she was in shock; not aware of either of us.  I lashed out brutally with my left heel into the back of his left knee, making him immediately collapse to his knees.  The short wooden handles of the garrote were in my right hand, so I slammed them onto Jake’s right wrist, numbing the nerves and causing the Bowie knife to fall from his grip.  Then I reached across the front of his neck, garrote handles in my right hand, grabbed one handle of the garrote in my left hand and slipped the cord under his chin and around his neck.  He surprised me by standing up, lifting me with him.  I twisted his body violently to his left, away from Grace.  Without letting go of the garrote, I spun my own body around 180 degrees, which placed our bodies back to back.  This also had the effect of dragging him away from Grace.  I could feel the heavy weight of his back pressing into my back.

            I stagger-stepped a couple more steps away from Grace, bent my knees and dragged Jake’s exhausted body downward.  Off balance now, he collapsed entirely on top of me, just the way it’s supposed to happen.  My chest was on the ground with both my arms up near my right shoulder, both hands clenched around the garrote handles in a never-let-go grip of death.  I pulled downward on each handle as Jake lay with his back on top of my back and the back of his neck on the back of my head.  I could feel the tremendous pressure of his bulk as it pressed into my back.  My body was also rocking back and forth due to the thrashing, flailing motion of Jake’s arms and feet as he desperately tried to release himself from the chocking, flesh-severing force of the garrote.  His thrashing movements drove my face into the nearly frozen ground as I pulled more tightly on the garrote handles.  I felt Jake reaching over his shoulders to grab at the back of my head.  He pulled my hair.  That was all he could do.  The advantage of this garroting technique is that the victim cannot reach your eyes, nose and mouth.  He can only pull your hair, and that doesn’t last long as he weakens rapidly.

            Of course, part of the thrashing came from the garrote cutting off his air supply.  Jake’s fingers were now desperately, but hopelessly, digging into his own neck flesh to try to get a grip on the very strong, thinly braided strands of dental floss that were buried deeply into the flesh of his neck. Another cause of his thrashing was the tremendous pain of the throwing knife being driven deeper into his back, since we were positioned back to back─I felt the pain of the handle poking into my back as well, but, luckily, there was no point on the handle end of it.  I strained against his body, again, and I could feel the garrote handles moving slightly down my chest an inch or two, as the strong, braided strands of dental floss cut more deeply into his throat.  He made gagging and gurgling sounds as I continued to pull downward even harder, using every ounce of available strength.  My arm, neck, chest and shoulder muscles literally burned with searing pain.

            Jake’s thrashing movements slowed as more blood flowed from the deep cut of the garrote and because he was out of air.  His slick, hot blood flowed onto me.  It felt like hot water as it poured from his neck, in a steady stream, onto the back of my neck and down the back and front of my shirt, then onto my hands and forearms.  The blood warmed my chilled, exhausted body and, ironically, it felt good.

            As I lay there, tightly pulling on the garrote handles, I thought, “When Jake’s struggling completely stopped, I wouldn’t let go of the garrote, for two reasons: first, although not likely, he could be feigning death─I saw this happen in Nam, with almost tragic results.  Secondly, it’s a certain sign of death to wait for the blood to stop flowing.  A body that stops bleeding is a dead body because in order for blood to flow, the heart has to pump it.  If the blood stops flowing, that means the heart has stopped pumping.  When the heart stops, so does life.  Dead bodies hold no lethal surprises, nor, unfortunately, do they hold their feces and urine.

            I felt no movement from Jake, but didn’t release the garrote.

            A garrote, if something thin and strong is used, will sever the jugular vein and/or one or both of the carotid arteries.  I kept the pressure taut on the garrote and expected the initial steady, heavy flow of blood.  It was a good sign that the garrote was doing its job, I thought, though the thought seemed cold-blooded.  Soon, after a few pints of blood spilled, the flow slackened.  I loosened my grip then rolled on my left shoulder, thrusting my right shoulder upward, which forced Jake’s body to roll away from Grace, chest down onto the ground.  I twisted my body, got my feet under me, not letting go of the garrote, as a precaution, then sat on Jake’s back.  I placed the left garrote handle in my right hand, then reached around Jake’s neck with my left hand fingers to feel for a pulse in his neck.  No pulse.

            My cramped right hand let go of the garrote and it fell to the ground.

            I turned Jake onto his back, stood over him and stared at him as my lungs burned from exertion.  I breathed quickly and deeply trying to catch my breath and slow my heart rate.

            I studied Jake’s face.  His tongue had thickened, turned grayish and protruded from his mouth like a mouse halfway out of its hole.  Jake’s bulging eyes had the look of severe desperation and uncontrollable panic trapped within them.  The whites of his eyes contained red spots and thin, red lines where the capillaries had broken and made the eyeball bleed.  His anal sphincter muscles and urinary bladder muscles had relaxed and released so that his bowels and bladder emptied their foul contents.  The air was redolent with the smell of shit mixed with urine, which was almost overpowering and nearly activated my gag reflex.  I stepped over the pool of blood and urine (luckily the crap was trapped in his pants).

            I kneeled in front of the trembling body and closed eyes of my shocked eight year old child who was, literally, nearly scared to death.  Her knees where pulled tightly to her chest with her eyes buried into her thighs.  She had her hands and arms covering her head and ears.  She seemed frozen in that position and looked catatonic, though her body was shivering from the cold and paralyzing fear.

            I must have looked like a maniac to her.  Fortunately, she didn’t notice me next to her.  I slowly, carefully turned her head towards me.  Her eyes opened but she wasn’t exactly looking at me as much as she appeared to be looking through me, as if I was a window.  She was off in some protective, psychological dreamland, where horrors, like she had just experienced, didn’t exit and a blissful, amnesiac happiness dominated her thoughts.  Maybe her mind took her to Neverland to be with Peter Pan.  At this moment, that was a good thing.

            I wiped my bloody hand on my pants, then gently picked up Grace.  A grimace formed on my lips from the pain of my cracked or broken ribs. I carried Grace to the fire, set her down, then placed wood onto the still hot coals.  When the fire flared up, I held Grace in my lap.  She rested with her head against my chest.  I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open any longer or not.  We sat quietly before the flames, feeling and absorbing the comfortable, soothing warmth.

            I gently stroked Grace’s hair and talked to her lovingly, each word being a gentle reminder that we were safe now and that we would be back to Mommy very soon.  I whispered softly, my lips near her ear, telling her that the best thing that her Mommy and Daddy ever did was to have her; that she was our supreme accomplishment, which nothing else that we would do could ever surpass.  I hugged her closely and kissed her cheek and forehead.  I gently stroked her hair, then I sang her a song that I made-up when she was only three years old:

                                                            I love my little girl.

                                                            She has a little curl,

                                                            On top of her head,

                                                            She wears it to bed.

                                                            I love my little girl.

                                                            She is my special friend,

                                                            And that will never end.

            I repeatedly whispered the song to her.  I couldn’t tell, at first, if she heard me singing, or even if she remembered the song.  It sounded kind of silly, now.  Certainly not something you’d sing to an eight year old girl.  But when she was three and four years old, she’d frequently asked me to sing it to her.  She seemed to find a strange and mysterious fascination with it, and the feeling of love that created it for her.

            Slowly, I felt her bunched, taut muscles relax and knew then that she did remember the song and that the song was having a desirable, soothing and comforting effect on her.

            I sat in a yoga position, with her on my lap, for almost an hour before her eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.  I laid her down on the ground, a little further away from the fire, for safety, then got the wool blankets and one sleeping bag.  I moved her to the top of the sleeping bag, rolling the top portion of the bag down toward her head to serve as a pillow, then covered her with the two woolen blankets.

            It was now a couple of hours before dawn.  I didn’t figure she would sleep too long, but I knew I wouldn’t wake her no matter how long she slept.  We would find the canoes and leave as soon as she awoke, but no sooner.  She desperately needed the rest.  Her body and mind had had too much to deal with, a brutal, merciless invasion of the mind that no child should have to experience.  Who would’ve ever thought that I’d encounter Nam, once again, in the gorgeous Adirondacks of northeastern New York State, or that my child would also be dragged through this ordeal?

            As Grace slept I unraveled the floss holding the coyote-skin moccasins and discarded both of them.  I put my boots back on, after holding the openings upside-down over the fire to warm the insides.  Then I searched for and found my combat knife, cleaned it, and placed it into its sheath─my father-in-law used to say; “If you take good care of your tools, they’ll take good care of you, and last as long as you do.”

            I had a difficult time pulling the throwing blade out of Jake’s back.  The suction created by the wound, around the smooth steel, resisted my original attempts to pull it out of Jake, especially since only an inch of the handle was now protruding from his back and all I could grasp it with was bloody, slippery fingers.  Finally, I had to use my Ka-Bar, Marine combat blade to enlarge the hole and pry it out.  I wiped both blades off with dead grass and leaves, then placed them in their sheaths.

            I dragged both bodies behind a nearby blow-down so Grace wouldn’t see them when she awoke.  It wasn’t easy work with damaged ribs, especially now that the pain was much worse than in the midst of combat.  The distracting ache had changed to severe pain now that the adrenalin had worn off.  Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop and pout about it.  I had work to do before Grace woke up.  I hoped that she wouldn’t smell the bodies in the morning.

            I prepared everything so we could leave quickly, shortly after Grace woke up.  I sat near her, staring at her dirty, tear-stained face, wanting to comfort her and make her pain go away.  I realized that she may need professional help to mentally heal.  I hoped that time would also assist in healing her trauma.

            I’d been lucky not to have gotten my forearms cut.  It had never happened before.  It worried and humbled me.  The memory of my past advanced skill was sharper than my present skill.  Sort of humiliating, in a way.  I’d slowed down and while I did so, Jake was working with his knife skills regularly, I’d bet, and learning to perform newer, more modern knife fighting techniques.  I was behind the times and almost paid dearly for it.  Luckily for me I had the foresight to anticipate my being rusty and slower after being away from knife fighting for so long.  Jake was much better than I thought he’d be, or I wasn’t as good as all my bragging.  I raised my right forearm in front of me to chest level.  I looked at the long cut in my sleeve and as I did so, the cut cloth separated and my arm looked very rough and was as deep brown as tree bark.  It was tree bark.  Earlier I’d found two thick, curved pieces of bark and decided to use them to protect my forearms.  I wrapped them with dental floss around each forearm and that’s what had protected me from Jake’s slashes onto both my forearms.  Seldom does anyone leave a knife fight without being cut.  I wasn’t cut, but I was very lucky.

            I took a restful break and ate gorp as I sat.  In my thoughts I thanked Wolf for his part in getting us safely through this ominous ordeal.  Then, with sadness, I ordered Wolf to hibernate within me and not surface unless another life-or-death, kill-or-be-killed situation arose.  I had a peaceful feeling about this and spoke to Wolf, in my silent thoughts, of my deep appreciation.  Wolf, then receded into the background of my mind, into a cave-like crevice of my brain, deeply inside that remote wilderness of gray matter.

            Like an Indian spirit-wolf, I heard the howl of Wolf that said: “I will never knowingly do anything to harm you mentally or physically.  I accept your decisions, my brother, for I am a protector.  I will remain quiet, peaceful and dormant, like a volcano, but if there comes a time when you need me, you only need to call my name.  I’ll come and you’ll have all my power and fury within you.  Goodbye, my brother, my friend . . . until we meet again.”

            Now my own voice turned inward, to the core of me and replied, “Thank you, my protector, my brother, my friend, for you have helped save my life again, just as in Nam.  I also thank you for saving the life of my daughter, our daughter.  I shall be forever grateful to you and I am thankful that you realize that I can’t lead a normal, healthy and peaceful family-life with you roaming freely and actively within me.  You are indeed a warrior of great strength and cunning.  The best warrior I have known and though you have learned some compassion, you have no place in a peaceful, civilized life.  You are very wise to recognize this.  To co-exist within me has created much rage, fury, hatred, bitterness and violence.  By lying dormant within me, until your warrior abilities are again needed, you have shown yourself to have great honor and loyalty.  I shall always honor and respect you.  Goodbye, my brother, my friend, my protector . . . until we meet again.”

            Amidst the silence and darkness a white cloud floated in front of me, drifting slowly and, somehow, calling attention to the black writing written across its cottony white background.  There were two lines of writing on the cloud.  They said: I Am the Master of My Fate; I Am the Captain of My Soul.  I recognized those lines from a poem by William Henley.  The title of his poem is Invictus, which is Latin for “unconquered.”  I smiled inwardly with great satisfaction.

            So, reluctantly, I, Roman Wolfe, have commanded my inner friend, Roamin’ Wolf, to become dormant within me.  I felt a great peacefulness within me.  As the sun rose in the early morning of November 20th, I watched its rays reaching out into these Adirondack forests, much as the first Native Americans must have witnessed hundreds of years ago.  And then, again, I thought about the final dialogue between Wolf and myself.  I thought how much it sounded like two Indian brothers saying their final “goodbyes” to each other.  I felt sadness at first, but then I felt even more at peace with myself.

            I looked all around me and felt contented knowing that I received great comfort, in spite of our ordeal, in these forests, this “forever wild” Adirondack wilderness.

                        /.-../- - -/.-./../.-./.-/-./-../-.- -/-.-./- - -/..-/.-./-/-././-.- -/.-/.-.././-..-/../…/

                                                            Chapter  18

                                                                 ****

                                                       Homeward Bound

            Grace slept an hour past dawn.  She missed the blossoming beauty of the gradually brightening eastern sky.  As the sun rose above the horizon, it was a painter’s brush, coloring the sky pink, then a reddish-orange that chased the darkness away from the earth, just as a campfire chases the darkness away from a campsite.  The brilliant orb continued to rise slowly, like an arm rising in slow-motion; the arm saluting the world and welcoming the new day.

            When Grace woke up, she was like the sun that made my day bright and warm.  I smiled at her, then walked to the fire and put a few sticks on it.  When I turned around, Grace rose into a sitting position, feet pulled back to her butt, knees close to her chest and both arms tightly wrapped around her knees.  Then she released her knees and rubbed her eyes.  She acted mentally sluggish, but that was normal immediately after awaking.  She looked around the campsite suspiciously and I saw that suspicion suddenly turn to wide-eyed fear.

            Rapidly, I exclaimed, “We are safe, Sweetheart.  There’s no more danger.”

            She didn’t respond verbally, her forehead wrinkling in serious thought as she searched the area, again, her body immobile, just her head turning.

            I was kneeling by the hot fire with my coat off.  I rose from the fire and walked to her, then sat next to her.  I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to me.  I still felt that primal urge to be alert, be cautious and to protect my child.  I tried to relax as I stretched my legs towards the campfire.  It took awhile for the warmth of the fire to penetrate my insulated boots and conquer the slight chill.  Grace sat quietly, leaning her head against my ribs─her gentle contact caused only mild pain.  Her breathing was normal, with streams of white mist forming as her warm breath came into contact with the cold air.  The white mist rose a few inches then slowly disappeared, until her next exhalation, when the cycle started over again.

            The sky was a chilly-gray, the kind of sky that normally brought snow.  That worried me.  I hoped that we’d only see flurries, at the worst.  We still weren’t safely at civilization’s doorstep and snow, combined with strong winds and a drop in temperature, would make our last few miles extremely difficult.  I thought about how lucky we were not to have had snow already, especially a blustery snow storm.  That might have been fatal for Grace and I.  I looked down at Grace’s sleepy face, again, and smiled.  I thought about how happy I was to have her safe and close to me.  I gently kissed the top of her head and whispered, “Daddy loves you.”

            Grace looked up at me, smiled, then surprised me with a question that I didn’t expect.

            “Papa?  Do you believe in heaven?” Grace said, startling me.

            I paused, thinking whether or not I should postpone this conversation with her, like a parent wanting to postpone a serious talk about the birds and the bees.  “No.” I answered, laconically, but honestly.

            “Is it because you don’t believe in God?”

            “Yes.  You see, if there’s no God, like I believe, then there’s no heaven, since God is said to have created heaven.  Also, I don’t believe in Jesus, Satan, angels, miracles and things like that.”  I paused and thought of the famous quote by Stephen King, the author of many horror novels.  He said, “The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything.  Once God is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance and logic can be happily tossed out the window.”  I didn’t tell the quote to Grace.  It would raise more questions than answers and she wasn’t intellectually mature enough.  Actually, I didn’t believe Grace was intellectually mature enough for any of this God/atheist discussion.  I wondered why she was asking religious questions.

            “Why don’t you believe in God or heaven?  I think angels are a nice thing.” she said.

            I’d rather talk to her about the birds and the bees.  It would be easier.  “Our world, all of existence can be proved with our senses and our brains, but our senses can’t detect anything supernatural.  As a matter of fact, all human knowledge is of the natural world that we all live in.  We can’t know about anything beyond our natural world.  We can’t even prove if there is anything more than a natural world.  If it existed, it would be beyond our power to know about it.  That’s what super-natural means, knowledge or events that are beyond the natural world, beyond our everyday natural experiences, beyond our ability to know, examine and prove.  If God exists and lives in the supernatural world, then he, she, or it is beyond our knowledge.  Our innate intelligence─the intelligence that we are born with and that grows with a good education─also rebels against belief in Gods.  Unfortunately, most of us are all thoroughly brainwashed into believing something that is entirely ridiculous and based on centuries of fantasy, exaggerated story-telling, and a huge number of personal interpretations.  To me, belief in God simply makes no sense; it’s as illogical as wasting all your life trying to fill a pot that has no bottom.  To believe in God a person must constantly reject his own common sense behind a thick blanket of blind-faith and self-deception.  Self-deception means that a person has to fool himself, Grace.  A person like that must desperately want and need to believe in those unreasonable, unprovable ideas, stories, and concepts. That desperation or need allows them to forget about logic when dealing with anything religious.  They need it so badly that they are willing to accept nonsense.”

            Grace ignored me, saying, “I understand a little.  When you said ‘God’ you said ‘he or she or it.’  That’s cool.  Do you think that God could be a girl, if there was a God?”

            “Why not.  It’s women that create life, right?  Makes more sense that God would be a woman since women are the creators of human life.”

            “You also said ‘it.’  What’s that mean?”

            “Grace.  It just means that, if there is a God, it doesn’t necessarily have to be male of female, you know, a man or a woman.  Perhaps God is just energy, a cloud of energy or, since the Earth could not survive without the sun, then maybe God is the sun.”

            “That’s weird Papa.  Isn’t the bible proof that there’s a God?”

            “Is a comic-book about Spider-Man proof that a real, flesh and blood Spider-Man actually exists, and can perform his seemingly miraculous actions, in our real and natural world?  Of course not.  The bible is a book written by men who tell their fanciful stories of things they can’t prove, things that they desire, things that they wish were true, but are not.  It’s their personal interpretation of events in history.  Unfortunately, it’s a history of self-deception, passed from grandfathers, to fathers to sons and daughters who then pass the mythical tales onto their own families.  Do you think that loving, respectful sons and daughters are going to reject and rebel against something that their own parents strongly believe in?  Of course not.  Only a few very independent, very thoughtful people have the strength of character to do that.  Today’s modern bible had to be re-written because the God in the old bible was very mean, cruel, vengeful and, actually, to my mind, much worse than the humans that he is said to have created.  That God tortured people and killed them unmercifully.  When you get older and have had a chance to study some history of the world and the history of religions you’ll learn, if you are a thinker, that no belief system, in the history of the world, has caused more unnecessary death than the belief in a God or Gods.  America is said to have formed so that people could have religious freedom.  Many famous people, back then were atheists, but the history books will never point that out.”  Those atheists weren’t looking for ‘freedom of religion,’ they were looking for ‘freedom from religion.’  They wanted the freedom not to believe in a God, and not have to participate in religious fantasies because the idea of a God was unreasonable, illogical to them.”

            “So, if there was proof, then you would believe in God?” Grace asked.

            “If there was convincing proof, that includes valid, proven facts and scientific evidence, I would believe, sure.  A famous scientist named Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Blind-faith, bibles and churches are not proof that there’s a God any more than the claim that since horses, horse-care books and horse stables exit, there must be an all-powerful Horse-God who also exists.  A Horse-God that provides food and shelter for horses.  A Horse-God that demands certain good behaviors from all horses and if the Horse-God’s demands aren’t met, the bad horses will all go to the ‘big corral, in the hottest dessert to spend eternity.  Of course, the good horses would go to a pasture with plentiful food and water that has wonderful weather and be happy for all eternity.  Eternity means for the rest of time, which may be billions of years, or never ending time.

            “Papa?  You’re being funny.”

            “And that’s exactly my point, Grace.  What I just said sounds ridiculous, it sounds funny and unreasonable and, as you said before, weird.  That’s the way belief in God sounds to me.  You know, Grace, I really think you should wait until you’re older to explore these difficult ideas and concepts.  You shouldn’t just accept my beliefs without serious study, serious thinking and searching.  Too many otherwise very rational parents pass on their illogical, blind-faith  to their impressionable kids and after years of being saturated with false beliefs, the kids accept those false beliefs without much thought.  I don’t want you to feel that you have to believe like I do.  You need to wait and make up your own mind, when you are an adult.”

            “I wish there was a heaven and angels.  It’s nice to think about.”

            “Yes, it is,” I responded.  “But bibles, especially the Christian bible, have been unquestionably and thoroughly wrong about so many things that can now be proven or disproven by science.  The scientific theory of evolution offers overwhelming proof of how mankind and animals evolved on Earth over many millions of years.  I think the Christian bible implies that humans have only been on earth between six and eight thousand years.  The bible makes one heck of a big mistake there.  There is overwhelmingly convincing proof that the earth has existed for millions of years and that our universe is billions of years old, and that humans have been on earth for about one hundred thousand years.  So why would any logical, reasonable, astute person ever accept the bibles fairy-tales about going to heaven or hell when they die?”  If religious beliefs can be so absolutely dead wrong about the beginnings of the universe, earth and man, then why can’t those same religious beliefs be just as wrong about where we go after we die? or perhaps all those religious beliefs, themselves, especially unreasonable belief in a God, are wrong.  Perhaps the Bible is simply a fairy tale that future generations took seriously?”─two thousand years from now, will Dr. Seuss’s Grinch be an unquestioned, unquestionable God or Devil?  Will the divine Dr. Seuss books be the Bibles of the future?  Silently, I thought, “Gods certainly are fragile, falling like dominoes in the winds of reason.”

            “Have you always not believed in God, Daddy?”

            “No.  I was forced to go to church when I was a kid, but I didn’t think seriously about God then.  Back then God was like Santa Claus to me, only Santa came to our house, but we had to go to God’s house, a church, Grace.  After I reached adulthood, somewhere in my twenties or thirties, I studied, researched, thought many hours about it, over a period of many years, and finally decided that I couldn’t believe in the existence of an extraordinary, supernatural power, like God, without extraordinary proof, and there was no extraordinary proof.  I have never seen, heard of, or read about any extraordinary, objective proof, so I don’t believe in God because I can’t believe in non-sense.  I really think that people, now-a-days, find religion less and less meaningful as those people become more and more educated and understand the truths of science and logical thought.  The more they become thinkers, the less blind-faith appeals to them and they stop being unquestioning followers of myth and superstition.  Science is one of educations sparkling gems and, in many ways, science is also the enemy of religion.  Science teaches about the real world, the one that we all live in and can prove.  So the more educated people are, the less need they have for preachers and the more need they have for teachers.  Actually, knowledge is the enemy of religion’s strongest tool, which is a blind, unreasoned faith in something super extraordinary, while offering no extraordinary, objective, and logical evidence.”

            “I think Mommy and Grandma and Grandpa believe in God, don’t they?  Everybody we know believes in God, I think.”

            “Yeah, I’m sure they do.  It’s something that they want to believe and they feel no need to question it or to have convincing, objective proof for it.  It makes them feel good to believe and that’s not entirely a bad thing . . . for them.  Many people don’t want to think about these very complex and frustrating ideas about religion.  For those people it’s just easier to believe in God, to accept what they inherit from their parents.  There’s something you should remember, though.  Just because people believe and other people don’t believe in God, that doesn’t mean that they are good or bad because of it.  Very religious people can be very good or very bad people, just as atheists can be very good or very bad people.  Grace, normally I don’t talk much about religion.  It causes a lot of arguments and bad feelings.  But if someone asks me about my religious beliefs, I tell them about my religious disbeliefs.”

            “What’s that ‘object’ word mean?”

            “You mean the word ‘objective?’”

            “Yeah, ob-jec-tive.”

            “Are you sure you want me to explain all this?  It’s kind of hard to understand most of what I’m telling you, isn’t it?”

            “Well . . . yeah, but I understand some of it and it’s interesting.  Tell me more.”

            “OK.  The word ‘objective’ means that someone’s thoughts are not biased or prejudiced and that those thoughts are based on provable facts and on evidence of those facts.  An objective thought can be proved, it’s not simply a ‘blind faith,’ opinion which is called ‘subjective’ because subjective thoughts are someone’s personal and biased opinions or feelings that are not based on facts or evidence so that they can be proved.”

            “Papa?  Is what you’re saying objective or subjective?”

            Wow! ..Surprised me.  The kid’s smart.  “Well, Grace, those words have definitions that give those words meaning.  By definition ‘blind faith’ is subjective because it’s based on unproved, personal opinions.  Since religious beliefs are all subjective, then the opinions of all religions and all religious people can not be proved.  So those religious opinions have to be accepted on faith alone.  But if no objective proof can be given or shown, then why should anyone waste time believing blind-faith opinions.  In other words, no matter how much blind-faith your friends or relatives or teachers have, believing in something that can’t be proved doesn’t make sense.  For me to believe something, it has to make sense to me.  So to me, religion and blind-faith, religious beliefs are non-sense and that’s why I’m an atheist.”

            “So an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God, right?”

            “Well, more accurately, an atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in the existence of a God.”

            “Oh.  I’m kind of confused now.  Can I ask you more questions, sometime?”

            “Sure.  Anytime, unless your mom gets mad about me talking to you about it.  I thought, mischievously, “If Grace talks to her mom about our discussion, I’ll certainly catch hell─so to speak─from Sam.  I’ll just tell Sam that the devil made me do it.

            There is something very special between fathers and their daughters.  I knew for sure there was a special closeness between Grace and I as soon as she was placed in my arms immediately after she was born.  I hope it will last until my death of old-age makes me leave her.

            I felt Grace’s head snuggle closer to my chest.  I bent forward and reached toward the fire with my open hands, fingers spread apart and palms toward the fire, to soak up the warmth.  I brought my warm hands to Grace’s face, rubbing the warmth on her cheeks and neck like a healing salve.  She gave a sigh of contentment, after which I did the same thing for myself.  The warmth felt good as it penetrated the stubble of my beard and settled into my skin like a heated lotion.  It was only then that I was aware that I hadn’t shaved since the kidnapping.  I must look like a wild man, I thought, as I ran my hand across the sandpaper stubble of hair.

            I heard blue jays and chickadees greeting the morning, then the rat-a-tat tapping of a woodpecker somewhere in the distance.  I thought I also heard a crow, or a raven, cawing.  It was a faint sound, but it created a vision of a black feathered bird, with the sun’s rays dancing on the blackness and then being absorbed by those charcoal black feathers.  I imagined an ebony bird perched on top of a tall pine, swaying in the breeze as it surveyed the territory, like a king, from the top of his castle.

            I felt the frozen ground under me and realized that in these last few days I hadn’t really been too conscious of the weather, except for being thankful for no large accumulations of snow.  The first inch of ground felt frozen.  I guessed that the temperature was in the low twenties, or high teens, and as I exhaled, billows of white condensation, as if I were smoking, exited my mouth, rising a few inches into the air, then disappearing like a shy phantom.

            I could imagine the lakes starting to freeze very soon; the ice crystals starting to spread out thinly from the shoreline, working their way towards the center of the lake, each day getting thicker and thicker.

            That thought sent a shard of panic up my spine.  Canoes are useless on an iced-over lake.  The panic subsided when I realized that Long Lake probably didn’t totally freeze over until mid-winter.  We were out of danger from the Gibsons and could, if we had to, simply follow the shore of Long Lake southwestward, on foot.  It would take us a few days longer to get back, but that was acceptable . . . if no snow storms arrived.  The thought of a snowstorm or freezing rain still worried me, but, with concentrated effort, I kept my anxiety in check.  There’s always that little bit of doubt that keeps a person alert to alternatives.  The Adirondacks certainly weren’t famous for their lack of snow and below freezing weather.  Somehow Grace and I would make it safely back to Sam.

            My daydreams ended when Grace stirred against my ribs, and pain circled me as if I was wearing a hot belt around my chest.  Grace had fallen asleep from days of being exhausted─one good night’s sleep wouldn’t make up for several days without much sleep.  I held my hands toward the fire, again, getting them nice and toasty.  Then I stoked her cheeks, again, with both warm hands and a contented smile spread across her face as she stretched her arms up around my neck.  Suddenly, as if waking from a bad dream, she jerked herself up to her knees and looked directly in my eyes.  She stared at me with frightened, wide-open eyes, then rapidly twisted her neck back and forth, looking nervously around the campsite area, again.

            “Papa?  I had a bad dream about you and that big guy fighting.  It was scary.”

            I pulled her close to me and reassured her, again, saying, “Everything’s all right, Sweetheart.  There’s nothing to worry about now.  We’re alone and safe.  There’s no more danger”─except, perhaps, for the weather, but I didn’t want to mention that to her.  “We’ll be home soon,” I added as I gently hugged her, and dealt with the rib pain with a concealed grimace and a silenced grunt.

            She didn’t speak.  She hugged me back with the longest hug that I’ve ever had from her.  For a few seconds I was afraid that she wouldn’t let go, or even if I wanted her to let go.  When she did let go, we stood up.  She said, “Can we go home, now, Papa?”  She didn’t mention the Gibsons, but she did use the word “Papa.”  I was aware that she’d been using the word “Papa” more frequently than usual.  Tears clouded my eyes and I felt chocked-up with happy emotion because I knew that she would be okay; that she would recover from this terrible ordeal.

            “Sure,” I said, clearing my throat, as I rose from the ground.  I gave her some gorp to eat while I packed our sleeping bags and blankets and other supplies into and onto my backpack.  She looked at the gorp with disinterest, wrinkling her nose and upper lip at it.  She was bored with it, but she ate some anyway.  I wish I could cook something hearty for her.  Sam or Grandma would take care of that soon.

            We sat by the fire until she ate her fill of gorp.  The fire burned down to coals where the red colors changed in intensity, in a mesmerizing display, as the colors faded in and out, flickered, brightened, then faded again.

            I had to put the fire out, but couldn’t cover it with dirt since the upper ground was frozen.  I grabbed my Ka-Bar knife and searched for some ground moss.  I cut off thick slabs of it about the size of pot-holders.  I carried them to the fire and placed them over the hot coals until they were entirely covered with a sizzling blanket of moss.  The moisture hissed and steam rose from the hot, blanketed tomb.  The steam disappeared into nothingness a few feet over the fire.

            I checked my watch.  It was 9:14 A.M., November 20th.  I thought of Sam as I looked at the watch that she had bought for me the previous Christmas.  I really missed her.  I couldn’t wait to see her, to touch her, and to see the look in her eyes when I brought our daughter back to her, physically safe and sound─I wasn’t sure about the “mental” part yet.

            I gazed back into the fading steam from the fire.  I knew that Sam must be worried sick, even though, on the surface, she’d be telling everyone that I’d bring Grace back, safely, no matter what.  I knew she’d never give up hope without seeing our bodies.  I knew she’d have an unshakeable faith in me.  She was a wonderfully smart woman who had a great knack for accurate hunches, instinct or intuition─whatever it was called.  I thought, perhaps Rudyard Kipling was right when he said: “A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.”

            But I also knew that Sam would be riddled with concealed doubt and anxiety, just as I had been, several times during this ordeal.  But she wouldn’t show that to the world, she’d only show a positive attitude of courage and hope.  In private, however, she probably lived in a chamber of horrors, imagining all sorts of terrible conclusions.  So we’d have to get home as soon as possible to end her private terror.

            “Daddy? . . . Daddy?” Grace called as she tugged on my arm.  I snapped out of my trance and smiled at her, then replied, “Yes, Sweetheart?  What is it?”

            “You were staring.  You were just staring at the steam from the fire and you scared me.”

            “Sorry.  It’s okay, Grace,” I stated, broadening my smile to calm her.  “I was just daydreaming about how nice it’ll be to get back home to Mommy and Grandma and Grandpa.  Everything is okay now.  Are you all set to go?”

            She nodded her head affirmatively, put her left hand into my right hand and we walked unhurriedly toward the lake without looking back.  I picked-up Jake’s Bowie knife and stuck it into a tree so it could be easily seen by anyone who wanted to return for their bodies.  The two bodies were lying out of sight behind a blow-down tree.  I had pulled-out the punji stakes earlier so no one could get injured.  We didn’t look back, not even once.  Nor did I feel the slightest stir from Wolf, although when I thought of him, my thoughts sobered and all daydreaming stopped.

            It only took us about an hour to find the aluminum canoes.  We had to search the low underbrush for the ropes that secured the canoes to the shore.  Jake didn’t mention the exact location, but I knew that they couldn’t be too far from where we had camped, when we were all heading towards the cabin at Preston Ponds.  Jake and Tom wouldn’t have traveled far at night, and the short amount of time that they were gone from camp verified my assumption.

            Actually, to be accurate, Grace is the one who found the ropes by getting on her hands and knees and crawling under bushes to locate them.  And when she did locate them, she excitedly yelled, “Papa!  Papa! Come here quick.  I found them for you.”

            Sure enough, when I looked, she was pointing to the ropes that were tied to the bottom of a bush.  You couldn’t see the ropes if you were standing up, as I was, because the branches of the bush spread out at the top like a mushroom and, even bare of foliage, the ropes were difficult to spot, the dirty, tan-colored ropes blended in with the earth and the dead, brown-colored vegetation.  I followed one of the ropes from the sunken canoes and pulled on it.  That caused my ribs to feel like they were on fire as the pain traveled like a circle of intense electricity around my rib cage.  The sunken canoe was, of course, extremely heavy and I had to pull the rope with all my strength.  Grace saw me grimace, showed concern, then grabbed the rope and helped me pull.  When I heard her cheery voice upon finding the ropes and when I saw her try to help me pull the rope, I was pleased to see that her attitude had turned positive, hopeful and excited.

            We had to be extremely careful not to fall into the ice-cold water.  I decided that the thing to do was to drag the canoe along the bottom, away from the large bush that concealed it, and which was in my way, as I tried to pull the canoe.  There was a small clearing about ten feet to the left of the bush so Grace and I took a couple of steps to the left and pulled the rope, turning the canoe so it angled toward the clearing.  Then we dragged it slowly, not trying to lift it, along the muddy, slippery bottom until the level of water inside the canoe was about level with the lake, and the front of the canoe, that the rope was attached to, was only in about a foot of water.  Then we left it there, temporarily.

            A person with the size and strength of Jake, using his knees as fulcrums and his powerful arms and back muscles as levers, would have been able to easily pull the canoe out of the lake, but I didn’t have that kind of musculature.  I also realized that I wouldn’t have the strength, even without the painful rib injury, to pull the canoe out while standing on the uphill bank.  I’d have to get into the shallow water to gain the leverage that I needed to get the canoe up the slightly inclined bank near the shore.

            Grace asked, “Why are we stopping, Daddy?”

            “Well, we need to build a fire, Sweetheart.  Can you help me look for dry twigs and larger branches?”

            “OK, but why do we need to build a fire?  I’m not very cold, are you?”

            “You see, Sweetheart, I don’t have the strength to just yank the canoe out of the lake when it’s full of water.  So I have to wade into the cold water to push and pull at it so I can tip it to get as much water out of it as I can.  That’ll make it light enough for you and me to pull it the rest of the way out of the water.  That means that my boots, pants and hands will get wet, and when they do, the cold air will make the water freeze.  My skin will freeze and that’ll be terribly dangerous because I won’t be able to work or walk or get us out of this place.  So the smart thing to do is to prepare for it.  When I’m wet I can use the fire to get dry and warm quickly.  Once my hands get cold and frozen, I probably wouldn’t be able to build a fire.  See what I mean?”

            “That’s smart, Daddy.”

            Grace certainly appeared to be rebounding much better, from this ordeal, than I’d expected.  Perhaps she would even rebound better than I would.  Only time would tell

            After the fire was started and burning well I gave Grace the important job of tending to it, making it bigger by collecting and adding more wood and keeping a good supply of wood handy.  She immediately searched the area for dry firewood.

            While Grace tended to the fire, I went to the canoe, which was now only a couple feet from shore, where the ice-cold water was about a foot deep.

            I was glad that I thought of giving Grace the job of tending to the fire because I didn’t want her to help with the canoe for fear that she’d get wet and get severely frost bitten.  I glanced over my shoulder at her and saw that she was tending to the fire responsibly and humming cheerfully.  She was being very helpful.  She was a really good kid.

            I stepped into the water, hoping all the while that my boots were still weatherproof and not punctured or cracked.  I paused but didn’t feel any water seepage.  So far, luck was on my side because my boots went up my calf far enough that no water went over the tops of them.

            I grabbed the wet rope with gloved hands and pulled mightily.  The strain racked my ribs with pain.  I bent over in near agony, resting my hands on my thighs and breathed shallowly to ease the pain.  When I stood and looked, I saw that the canoe had slid toward shore about a foot more.  That almost made it worth the pain.  Now the canoe was close enough to me so that I could grab the bow.  I was thankful for the gloves because I certainly didn’t want to touch the frigid aluminum with my bare flesh.  I bent at the waist, then bent my knees and leaned back towards shore, pulling with all my strength, enduring the pain.  I slipped and almost sat down in the water, but I twisted my body to my right and stuck my right arm out to brace my falling body─it must have looked like I was doing a one-arm push-up, like Stallone in the movie, Rocky.  It worked and only my right hand, wrist and lower coat sleeve got wet.  However, I had to immediately go to the fire and pull off my right glove to dry and warm both the glove and my hand and wrist, as well as to dry the lower part of my coat sleeve.

            Grace held the wet glove high over the fire to dry, with a long stick poked into the middle finger to let it dry.  The other fingers hung down limply as the middle finger stuck out.  Grace had no idea how silly and obscene the glove looked, with that middle finger sticking up and all the other fingers bent down.  It looked as if she was giving her final and parting obscene gesture to the Gibson clan and this remote wilderness.

            I returned to the canoe when everything was dry.  I was being very careful not to let water splash inside my boots, but as I rocked the canoe back and forth, splashing the water against the sides and over the top of the canoe, a large ripple of water sent a little water inside my left boot.  It wasn’t much water and probably was nothing dangerous, I hoped.  It felt like only a trickle of water that would be very cold until my own body heat warmed it.  As I emptied the canoe of water, I kept pulling it up the incline, a foot at a time, with Grace’s help, toward the fire.  It was 11:33 A.M. when the canoe was entirely out of the water.  I had been wondering where the paddles were.  I thought I was going to have to make a crude paddle from a tree branch, but knew that that wouldn’t be necessary when I saw that both paddles had been lashed to the inside bottom of the canoe before it had been sunk.  The same must be true of the other canoe, which I would leave in its watery grave─I thought about hauling Jake’s and Tom’s bodies back to civilization in the second canoe, to save them from the ravages of scavenger animals.  I couldn’t bury them in the frozen ground, so the second canoe confronted me with a matter of ethics.  I guess I lacked strong ethics because I said to myself, “Screw them.”  I wasn’t going to haul two dead and bloody bodies for Grace to see.  Plus, carrying their bodies would exhaust me and further delay our return to Sam.  Plus, with my injured ribs, it would be agonizing torture to try to carry them to the canoe.  Right now it was better, I thought, to have them out of sight and out of mind.  If anybody in civilization has any problems with my decision, screw them too.  They can come back and retrieve the bodies themselves─a search and rescue party probably would do exactly that and Jake’s Bowie knife would be a marker for them to find the bodies.  Let them have the pleasure of that particular, gruesome job.

            When the canoe was emptied of water, Grace and I dragged it to the fire.  We tipped the canoe so that the inside was facing the fire so it could thoroughly dry.  I moved the canoe every five minutes until the full length of it was dried.  As we waited, Grace and I munched on some gorp─thank goodness for the gorp because it made it so that I didn’t have to worry about food during our escape, though it had become very boring.  I noticed that we had only one bag left and I was, again, grateful that I had taken all the bags instead of just a couple, as I had originally intended.  The gorp provided all the extra calories we needed, and it stopped us from being weak from hunger.  Even with the gorp, we were still a little weak and sore, of course, but it was mostly from exhaustion, not from lack of nourishment.  We both were, however, getting quite bored and tired of the same tastes and textures of the gorp.  We needed some meat and vegetables.  Ahh, I thought, I could really go for Sam’s hearty, meat and vegetable soup.

            My mind started to wander.  I recalled that when I had located Jake’s and Tom’s backpacks, on the fringe of our camp ground, I hadn’t found any food in them.  I wondered if, in their hurry to start after us, they either forgot to bring food, or they hadn‘t brought enough and ran out before they caught up to us.  Perhaps they never expected it would take so long to catch up with us.  They may have gone hungry for a couple of meals, not wanting to shoot any game because the sounds of their shotguns would give me a clue to their direction and an idea of about how far away they were.  Nor would they want to take the time to stop and collect edible roots, or try to catch fish.  So, I thought, they might have been weakened mentally and physically by the lack of food, when they finally caught up to us.  If that was true, then I had more of an advantage, and more luck, than I thought I had.

            So many things worked in our advantage.  I knew that a lot of relatives and friends were probably praying for us, especially Sam and her parents.  I didn’t share their religious views but it was comforting thinking of them being concerned and know that we had intrinsic value to them.  I concluded, as I almost always did, that our good luck was just that, “luck,” which is the random occurrence of events and the positive results of those events.  Luck wasn’t a religious commodity, with a religious meaning.  Luck was very personal and secular.  In many cases, a person makes their own luck using goals and the persistence, motivation and perseverance to accomplish those goals, and along the way some unexpected, chance events occur that help him accomplish those goals.  Sometimes luck is simply gratuitous and/or serendipitous.

            Grace brought me back to reality.  “The boat looks and feels dry, Daddy,” Grace stated.

            I snapped out of my trance and smiled as I saw Grace’s bare hands pressed comfortably against the warm aluminum.

            I checked the canoe, felt the inside in various places and replied, “Yep.  It sure is, so let’s get going, kiddo.”

            I used our cup to get us both drinking water from the lake, then filled the canteen, extinguished the fire with canteen water, then refilled it.

            I unlashed the paddles from the bottom of the canoe, letting them lay there, put Grace into the canoe, with her sitting on top of one wool blanket, and the other blanket wrapped around her for warmth─I was chilled, but tried to put it out of my mind.  I pushed the canoe into the water and climbed in it without getting wet.  My weight made the bottom of the canoe drag a little on the shallow shore bottom, so I used one of the paddles like a pole to push us away from the shore.  A couple of pushes later we were floating freely and headed southwest on Long Lake.

            I sat in silence, amazed by the beauty of the Adirondacks in the late fall.  I could feel their uniqueness and splendor.  It made me feel comfortable and secure, like being under a warm, electric blanket on a chilly night.  Then, I wondered if I’d ever return to see more of this Adirondack beauty.  I felt that I would, but I also felt that it wouldn’t be soon because deep wounds heal slowly and mental scars usually heal even more slowly than physical scars.

            Aristotle said, “The physician heals, Nature makes well.”  So maybe in order to be fully well, Grace and I would have to return.  And the truth is that that wasn’t an unpleasant thought for me.  Perhaps I would even become a 46’er, an Adirondack mountain climber who climbs all forty-six Adirondack mountain peaks that are over four-thousand feet high.  I chuckled inwardly, thinking that I didn’t know if I loved this place quite that much.  Grace certainly didn’t have any pleasant feelings about the Adirondacks, but maybe, with time, she’d change her mind.

            Another quote, this one by Disraeli, came to mind.  “There is no education like adversity,” he said.  It made me laugh inwardly, again, as I thought, “If Disraeli’s quote is true, then Grace and I must have earned our doctorate degrees with our ordeal into and escape from this Adirondack wilderness.”

            I felt a surge of delight encompass my body.  It seemed inappropriate, but still it was there.  This venture had, indeed, strengthened me.  Out of tragic adversity, there had grown, in me, and, hopefully in Grace, a self-confident strength that had drained from me after Nam.  I felt as if I had been born again,─not in any religious sense─as if I had risen from the ashes of near destruction, like the Phoenix of Egyptian legends, a bird said to have lived five or six centuries, a bird who was consumed in a fire of its own making, and then rose in youthful splendor from its own ashes.

            I felt a new outlook gaining a strong foothold in my mind.  This new outlook was more hopeful, positive, forgiving and loving.  I knew that, in time, Grace would also be better.  I don’t think the full extend of what we went through has hit her yet, the most brutal part being covered by a thin layer of amnesia, perhaps.  I would be there to help Grace and Sam would be there for the both of us.  I felt a spiritual warmth growing and glowing inside of me, not a religious spiritualism, but a spiritualism that seemed to emanate from nature itself.  A spiritualism that Thoreau must have felt while living on Walden Pond, as if nature was a medicinal salve and was healing my mental torments about Vietnam.

            Yes, I knew I would still need to visit my psychiatrist to iron out the last remaining wrinkles in my personal record of mental health, but at least I could now be hopeful, even certain, that all would be well for me and my family.  Some day, I thought hopefully, we’d all return to this, or some similar Adirondack setting─maybe the Catskills Mountain area─and once again give thanks to whatever it was in nature and in this ordeal that helped me to heal.  And for all this, I am thankful.  However, it did seem to be ironic that having to kill in war brought on my problems, yet killing in self-defense, in the Adirondack Mountains, began the healing process much more so than a doctor’s sometimes insipid talk, and a daily regimen of pills.

            Being thankful reminded me of Thanksgiving and I was like a child at Christmas time thinking how wonderful it would be to spend time with my family and some relatives.  I could envision the dinner table at my mother’s-in-law and father’s-in-law house.  I could even smell the juicy turkey, taste the corn, cranberries, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes with gravy and stuffing.  I could smell the warm, freshly made rolls with golden butter melting on their doughy interior.  I could see other relatives enjoying themselves with food and friendship and hear the friendly, warm, often humorous chatter at the dinner table.  At this moment, all the world seemed wonderful and right to me.

            I had to paddle to shore about an hour before nightfall and make camp.  It was difficult getting to sleep.  Grace and I talked excitedly about how nice it would be to get home and what we would do when we got there.  We were like two children who couldn’t get to sleep on Christmas Eve.  Then there was silence.  I noticed that Grace was staring up at the stars, in a contemplative mood.  I wondered what she was thinking as I also stared into the starry, black dome.  Then out of the darkness came a voice, Grace’s very serious voice.  She inquired, “Daddy.  What if you are wrong about God?”

            I was totally surprised, of course, and not really anxious to talk “religion” with her.  I thought Grace might be too impressionable and I didn’t want to corrupt her independent thought with my own opinions, which took years to form and solidify.  Despite a fear of brainwashing my own daughter, I ventured into an uncomfortable and apprehensive answer.  “Well, Grace, you know …Ah…that everyone of us is technically an atheist.  We don’t believe in all the past Gods from much older civilizations, which existed many thousands of years before the beginnings of Christianity, which started about two thousand years ago.  Few people, if any at all, still believe in the ancient Greek and Roman Gods.  The Greeks and Romans had a different God for almost everything in their lives.  Earlier civilizations had many Gods, too, not just one God as in the Christian religion.  Extremely few people, if any at all, still believe in these numerous and ancient Gods, so they are atheists concerning those Gods.  A great majority of the world’s population does not believe in the Christian God.  They have their own God or Gods, which they also can not provide proof for, and they are atheists concerning the more modern Christian God.  They don’t appear to be harmed by their disbelief in the Christian God.  I imagine that almost all of them would say that they are very happy with the lives that “their” God has given them.  Furthermore, they would probably make a point of saying that “their” God is the true God, not “your” Christian God.  I certainly don’t believe that I’ve been harmed by being an atheist.  I think my life has improved since I decided that I was an atheist.  I definitely see the world, civilization and people a lot more honestly because valid and verifiable truth means a lot to me.  And even if there really was some sort of God, I doubt that He/She/It would have such a rice-paper, brittle ego as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.  After all, if there really is a God, then its His fault that He doesn’t present Himself to the world.  He doesn’t have to work “in mysterious ways,”  He can prove Himself very easily, if He really exists.  If God created everyone, and He gave all of us a free-will, that means that we truly make our own decisions and our actions are not determined by God, then how pitiful that God must be to allow people the freedom to deny His existence without proof, then punish those people for using their brains.  Also, if God determines our actions, our destiny, then He has made each of us act as we do and that means that He made people deny His existence.  Shit.  This is becoming way too involved and complex.  I wish she hadn’t asked me that question.  Um…you see, Grace, if there is a God and He already knows what we will do in the future, then we have no choice but to do what God already knows we will do.  He can’t be wrong about what He knows, right?  I can’t change my mind and not do what God knows I’m going to do, can I?  So, dear daughter, if I’m wrong about the non-existence of the Christian God, or any existent Gods at all, then I owe God a sincere apology and I will readily give it to Him if He will only present Himself to me and to the world, and simply quit acting like a childish magician who “works in mysterious ways.”  If I’m wrong, then I’ll take the consequences, but I’ve played “Hide and Go Seek” with the idea of a God for too many years.  Now when I say, “Ready or not, here I come,” I come as an atheist.  I have always found nothing, so now I’m convinced that when I say, “Ollie, Ollie in Free,” the God, who supposedly hides himself from mankind, will not show up simply because He does not exist.  Imagine, Grace, that perhaps one hundred or more years from now, people may view their modern Gods the same way that we view the ancient Gods, as ignorant creations of simple-minded people who were not as smart as us and who didn’t know any better way to view and explain and understand the world they lived in.

            “I’m sorry, Grace.  I’ve probably said too much and didn’t bring it down to an eight year old’s level, right?”

            “Right?” I repeated.

            I looked at Grace.  She was sound asleep.  I guess that my explanation was so boring that it put her to sleep.  I should write that speech on lemon-wet toilet paper, then squeeze the juice out of it, distill it to purify it, put it in very small bottles, call it “Heaven Scent,” then get rich selling it as a “sleeping aid” and make millions of dollars from all the gullible God believers.

            I yawned.  Damn!  I thought.  I’m boring myself also.  I closed my eyes.

            I woke before daybreak, November 21st.  I built up the fire, letting Grace catch a few more minutes of sleep.  When I woke her up, we ate more gorp and to warm our inner bodies, I heated cold water in a cup, then sprinkled pine needles into the hot water to make pine tea.  A cup of pine tea has about five times more vitamin C in it than a cup of orange juice, but it doesn’t taste as good.  We both drank half a cup.  Then, I dowsed the fire with the remainder of the canteen of water and refilled it.  We packed what little we had and dragged the canoe a few feet to the lake─my ribs hurt even more from all the paddling I did the day before, but I concealed it from Grace.  I figured we’d arrive in civilization today, around noon, or at least early afternoon.

            It seemed like a couple of months instead of a week since this ordeal started.  Grace and I were both quiet, now, in spite of the fact that we were filled with excitement and anticipation.  Grace’s lips were constantly stretched into a smile, while her eyes sparkled with the joy that she was feeling.  She didn’t look tired, even though her face looked slightly emaciated.

            She almost always looked forward, southwest, toward the end of Long Lake, toward civilization, toward her mom, relatives and friends.  I found myself paddling faster for her sake, as tears of joy and pain trickled down my cheeks.  I thought, “There will only be one moment that can match the joy of this particular moment, and that would be when Grace and I stood before Sam and we all cried joyfully together as we hugged each other tightly in a triple embrace.”  After that thought, I found myself paddling faster and faster, looking in the same direction as Grace and forcing myself to ignore the pain in my ribs.

            The sun rose above the horizon’s dark wall, but looked blurry from being distorted by my tears.  The morning was warmer than I had expected it to be.  I guessed the temperature was in the mid to high 20F range.  I could feel the warmth under my coat created by my vigorous paddling.  I removed my coat and hat and, to my surprise, I stayed very comfortable, as long as I paddled constantly.  The fresh air, the happiness of being safe, and the anticipation of seeing Sam assuaged my rib pain.

            “It’s a nice day, Papa,” Grace said, as she looked back at me with a broad smile; the sun reflecting off her pearly white teeth.

            “Yes,” I replied with a return smile, “it’s a wonderfully clear, sunny day.  Almost like Indian summer.”

            Then something stirred inside of me as if triggered by the word “Indian.”  Deep inside my brain, as if from a long lost cave, deep in some unknown, remote wilderness, Wolf growled and my interpretation of the meaning of the growl was, “You have done well, my brother and friend, for you are not only a master warrior, but you are becoming the master of your future.  You should be very proud of your courage and strength.”  Then silence prevailed.

            That was one of the few times that I was to hear Wolf’s growl, in a peaceful situation.  He was right though.  I was proud of myself and Grace, too.  I paddled through the water as it sparkled in the brilliant sunlight, content with myself, and very thankful for my good fortune.

            As my arms strained against the oar to keep up a moderately fast pace, my mind drifted to the three dead bodies that I left behind.  I didn’t enjoy taking their lives.  I was saddened by the fact that I had killed and that I could kill so quickly, so efficiently, so coldly and easily.  But, I also thought, I really had no other safe choice . . . not a logical or sane choice anyway.  The Gibsons left me no alternative, just like the VC.  It was kill-or-be-killed, and I wouldn’t allow Grace to be killed, at any cost, so long as I remained alive.  I knew that I could never live with myself if I couldn’t bring Grace home safely, at least physically safe.  I thought I might as well be dead, myself, if I had allowed the Gibsons to injure, maim, or kill her.

            So, in my eyes, it was all-or-nothing, kill-or-be-killed, probably the same conclusion that Jake came to, only for different reasons.  Either I killed all of them or they killed us, and no laws of society, civilization, or religion could change that for me or them.  Our survival depended on me being smarter, quicker, luckier and deadlier than the Gibsons.  No mythical, mysterious hand from the sky would reach down to help.  Way out here, the police couldn’t assist me either.  I killed the Gibsons because, by my standards, I had no other choice, and that conclusion rested easily and peacefully with me─though I’m certain it will not rest easily and peacefully with many others, especially the ones who can’t or won’t defend themselves and will whine and complain that it’s someone else’s duty to protect them.

            But the sadness of killing in Vietnam and having to kill again here in the Adirondack Mountains in no way made me unable to kill again.  I knew for certain that I could, and I would, if I knew that I had to.  That declaration didn’t rest well with me, though I accepted it as an unfortunate or fortunate fact of my life, depending on the situation and circumstances.  I hoped, however, that I would never have to kill again.  There’s no glory in it; that’s for sure.  The glory of killing comes from movies, plus comic books, novels and other literature by the writers of fanciful hyperbole.  If justifiable, killing may bring rewards, such as medals, but they’re never worth the hours of lost sleep that comes from killing.  It’s important to remember that when you kill someone, you’ve changed the history of the world.  That person may have done something exceptionally good that is now prevented by his death.  Also, that person may have done things that are exceptionally bad, and now society is rewarded by his death.  But one way or the other that person affects the world he/she lives in, and also affects everyone he/she comes into contact with and their actions within their society.  If Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated prior to becoming president of the United States, would the history of America have been different?  Of course it would have.  One person’s death can change history.  That’s one reason that makes life so precious and the taking-of-life sad and regrettable.

            There is great evil in this world.  I have witnessed some of it.  Some men will automatically reject it, while others will welcome it and even embrace it, though most men are trapped in the middle.  The men trapped in the middle are the ones who feel the most pain and regret for evil deeds that they have committed or evil deeds that they have witnessed.  Their consciences are pulled, like a rubber band, between two great forces, sometimes pulled towards the light and sometimes pulled towards the darkness.  They become skeptical and suspicious of their peers, political groups and governments.  They become like me.

            When I was in Nam, during private, solitary moments, prior to my night stalking, I came to the conclusion that every conscientious adult must have a Pandora’s Box of guilt and shame, and every now and then those ghosts of guilt and shame escape to haunt them and bring abundant tears to their eyes.  I have felt those tears and, if other adults are like me, those tears run down their cheeks like scalding lava down the side of a volcano.  I think, however, that I’m worse than the average person because I’ve had to kill too often.  So, out of necessity, I’ve mentally built a needed addition to my own personal Pandora’s Box.  It’s a cellar for my deepest, darkest shame and guilt.  I’m mostly a good person, I think, but there are some dark shadows lurking in some of the folds and crevices of my brain.

            I brought myself back to reality.  It was approaching mid-day and we hadn’t come as far as I thought we could have come by this time.  Apparently I made the mistake of thinking how long it took us when we traveled in the opposite direction with the Gibsons.  But then, two people in each canoe were paddling and could make better time compared to a single person, weakened by the rigors of a life-and-death struggle and by painful ribs.  Furthermore, and more significantly, I was paddling against the flow of the lake and not with it like the Gibsons had done on the way to their cabin.

            Thinking of the Gibsons made me think of the worst things about life, the cruel, perverted child predators and the misfit, demented criminals prowling amongst us.  I wondered if the Gibsons, and all the other misfits in our society turned to crime and ugly deeds because of the hand they were dealt, or because of the way they played the hand that they were dealt.

            I relaxed.  No real hurry, if the weather stayed like it is now.  And though my arms, ribs and back ached, my lips smiled happily as the sun’s golden rays pleasingly washed over my face like the feel of a wet, warm washcloth.

            I gazed at Grace and felt a proud and very pleasant warmth which encompassed my entire body, like a very personal aura that was even more pleasing and comforting than the warmth of the sun’s golden rays upon my face.

                        /--/../-.-/./.-../-.- -/-./-../.-/-.-./…./.-./../…/-.-/./.-../.-../-.- -/

                                                            Chapter  19

                                                                 ****

                                                       Red Squirrel Days

            I kept the canoe about thirty feet from the western shore of Long Lake in order to avoid shallow spots and protruding rocks.  I would have liked to have been out in the middle of the lake, but, I reasoned, if something happened and the canoe overturned, Grace and I would both die of hypothermia.  This way Grace and I would only have to swim a short distance in the frigid water to reach shore, then quickly build a fire.  Also, being close to shore, near the tall trees, protected us from most of the cold wind that swept unimpeded across the middle of the lake.

            However, even being as far from shore as we were could be extremely dangerous if the canoe overturned.  Grace and I would be wet from head to toe and we would need a fire desperately.  If the wax-head matches didn’t work, we might even freeze to death, or develop sever frostbite, especially if it happened near a remote shoreline, as we were now..

            I looked toward the eastern shore of the lake and saw two red squirrels chasing each other on the ground and then up the trunk of a tree.  They leaped like acrobats jumping from limb to limb.  Grace heard their chatter, too, and delighted in watching them play tag.  I could imagine Grace thinking about her cat while watching the squirrels.  She must miss her black cat, Shadow, a lot, I thought.  I detected no sadness on her face, just joy, that spread across her face like butter over warm toast.  And as we both observed the squirrel’s frolicsome and often hilarious movements, I thought, How wonderful it was for them to be so cheerful and full of play that they could so easily be victorious over the cold, dark gloom and danger within the nearby, almost impenetrable, evergreen and hard wood forest.  They seemed to have the right attitude, so cheerful, so positive and energetic.  I thought, “That’s what I wanted to do, return to the “red squirrel days” of my youth when all seemed well because of my positive, cheerful, energetic and youthful attitudes about the world and the people in it, especially those who were close to me.

            We had to strain to see them now, as we moved into the distance.  I paddled a few more strokes and when I looked back, I couldn’t see them any more, just as I had paddled through my life and couldn’t see my own youth any more.  All I could hear was the paddle dipping and splashing quietly in the water as I used a “J”-stroke so that I didn’t have to paddle on both side of the canoe to keep it going parallel to the shore line.

            Then another sound penetrated my senses deeply and pleasantly.  Grace started singing a children’s song, very softly, as she stared into the depth of the frigid, clear water, the canoe gliding, almost silently over it, like a glider on a current of air.  I didn’t know what the song was, but it had a very soothing effect on me, like that of peaceful meditation.

            The canoe rocked as Grace leaned sideways to look into the water.  I felt the canoe lean slightly and I reminded Grace not to lean too far or we’d tip over.  She smiled and said, “OK.”

            She sang, then would hum, sometimes, indicating that she didn’t remember all the words.  But even her humming was like a chorus of angels singing to me.  Grace’s voice reminded me of Sam, who had a lovely singing voice.  The sound of Grace’s voice flooded me with pleasure, just as the memory of Sam’s voice surrounded me with delight.  It was an experience of auditory ecstasy.  I stopped paddling and closed my eyes for a minute in order to soak-up the pure joy of the moment, soaking it up like a sponge, letting the sounds engulf, embrace and penetrate me.

            Then I heard her mellifluous voice saying, “I think I can.  I think I can.”  I knew that she was thinking of one of her favorite bedtime books, when she was younger, a book entitled, The Little Engine That Could.  That reminded me of all the rhyming Dr. Seuss books that she loved so much, and that, in turn, made me thankful for those books that helped give her a very happy childhood, where fun, thrills and excitement were plentiful.

            When I opened my eyes, Grace was smiling at me, as if she knew how good her voice made me feel.  I studied her smile and wondered if it was more like mine or her mom’s, or was it simply a pleasing combination?  No words were spoken, they weren’t needed.  Our eyes talked to each other with perfect understanding.  I returned her smile then puckered my lips, kissed my open palm, then blew across that palm, sending her an “air kiss.”  She mimicked my “air kiss” movements and sent me a kiss.  We smiled at each other, again, then she turned toward the western shore of the lake to look into the nude, hibernating wilderness.

            I saw her face reflected in the wavy water caused by the wake of the canoe.  She was such a beautiful girl.  I knew I was very lucky to be her “Papa.”  She was average height, slender, and athletic looking.  Her reflection on the water reminded me of Snow White’s appearance in the evil queen’s mirror.  It had a shine all its own, so full of character and warmth and sensitivity.  Of course a face like that would make an evil queen jealous, but it made me very lucky, appreciative and proud.  I contributed to her creation.  She was my crowning life’s achievement and my most valuable gift to the world.  She made me happy.

            She turned toward me, face suddenly serious, the smile gone.  I looked back at her, concerned.  A question lingered on her lips.

            “Papa?  You had to kill those bad men, didn’t you?  Or they would have killed you and me, right?  Will you be in trouble now with the police?”

            “Yes, Sweetheart, I did have to kill them to save our lives.  And, no, I don’t think I’ll be in trouble with the police, although it’s possible.  The law says that I can kill a person if I believe he is trying to kill me or my family.  But, Grace, many people won’t like me because I killed those men, especially when they find out that I had to kill other men when I was in the war in Vietnam.  It’s not a good thing to kill, but sometimes there’s a good reason for it.  Protecting your life and the life of your child is a very good reason.”

            “I still love you Papa.  You stopped them from killing me.  I’m not mad at you and Momma won’t be mad either,” Grace said, thoughtfully.

            The only words I could think of were, “Out of the mouths of babes.”  I didn’t vocalize those words because Grace wouldn’t understand them.  Sometimes children speak very wisely, at a level much beyond their years.

            I didn’t know what to say to her or, more accurately, I didn’t respond because I was chocked up with emotion.

            I was staring at her; seeing her as if I was wearing blinders.  I saw her smile brighten and her eyebrows and eyelids raise in a sign of joy.  Then, in a suddenly, surprising tone of voice she said, “Daddy . . . Daddy, there’s somebody coming toward us in a canoe.”  She pointed towards the oncoming canoe.

            Though I heard her, my reaction was sluggish.  I could see her excitement.  She looked as if she wanted to jump for joy and start yelling and screaming, but she restrained herself when the canoe started rocking.  She looked at me to give her the indication that she could yell and scream and wave her hands at our rescuers . . . if they were rescuers.  She could hardly control herself as she stared at me with open-mouthed joy.  I stared, used my open hands, over my eyes, to block the sun’s glare off the water, then squinted my eyes to get a better look at the occupants of the rapidly approaching canoe.  It contained two, adult male paddlers.

            A distant and vague thought burned a path across my brain.  I recalled a brief conversation between Jake, Tom and Lester while we were traveling from Chemung to the Adirondack mountains.  They thought I was asleep.  The focus of their conversation, if I remember correctly, was that they had some cousins in the Adirondack mountains that Tom and Lester hadn’t seen in a few years and that, if time and circumstances permitted, Tom and Lester might get a chance to see them.  I can imagine how “saintly” those relatives must be─the thorough study of all the religious saints must be a required course for all mental health professionals.

            Out of my mouth came a yell that startled Grace enough to rock the canoe, again.  “Get down in the bottom of the canoe, quickly!”  I paddled vigorously on the right hand side of the canoe, turning it sharply to the left, to the shore.  Then I paddled, on both sides of the canoe, to get maximum power and speed to get us to shore as quickly as possible.

            “But, Daddy” . . . Grace began, hesitantly, as she knelt down in the bottom of the canoe.  “What’s the matter?” she asked, her face distorted in an expression of confusion.

            I yelled, in a very severe voice, so she understood that I wanted immediate obedience to my command, “Lie down in the bottom of the canoe, now!”  Then I said, “The two men in that canoe look like they might be cousins of the Gibsons, especially the big, bearded guy that’s holding a rifle.  Stay down low.  We’ve got to get to shore.  I think we’re in danger!”

            As I was yelling this explanation, I was desperately putting every ounce of remaining energy into the oar.  I wondered how Jake’s cousins knew where to find us.  Did Jake have a radio transmitter hidden somewhere?  He couldn’t have.  I saw no indication of a radio receiver/transmitter inside the cabin and no antenna outside the cabin.  And if they were the Gibson’s cousins, why wasn’t that bearded son-of-a-bitch shooting at us from his canoe?  Perhaps their canoe was rocking too much.  He could still have us in his sights, especially if he was an excellent shot.  But he didn’t shoot.  Why?  Did they want us alive?  We must reach shore and run, I thought, with a panicked and addled brain.  I paddled furiously, picking up speed.

            My mind was caught totally off guard.  My mind was racing with unanswerable questions.  My heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer.  Full-fledged panic erupted within me as I heard myself say the words, “Wolf!  Come!”  Immediately I heard the growl of Roamin’ Wolf and felt the almost immediate surge of additional adrenaline.

            As I calmed down a bit, I asked myself, “How could I have been so stupid not to have picked up Jake’s and Tom’s shotguns and brought them with us.”  If we made it to shore, we’d have to try to lose them in the forest.  I thought, “We’re both tired and won’t be able to travel fast or cunningly.”  I felt discouraged, but dismissed the feeling immediately.  If they’re good trackers, they’ll be able to hunt us down easily.  We won’t have a head start, nor any of the other advantages that we used against Jake and Tom.

            Jake’s or Tom’s shotgun would be a hell-of-a-lot better than two knives.  A shotgun, even with slugs in it, would be a piss-poor match for a big caliber rifle, though.  I thought, “Bring a knife to a gun fight and have a ring-side seat to watch yourself get killed.”  I really wasn’t sure if it was a rifle, could be shotgun.  If it was a shotgun, then that’s why the bearded guy didn’t shoot yet.  He’d be out of range.

            “Damn!” I shouted at myself as I continued to paddle powerfully.  Those men were yelling, but I couldn’t understand them.  I didn’t need to understand them.  We needed to get into the woods where there was some protection.  But still no shots were fired, which made me more convinced that the bearded guy had a shotgun, not a rifle.  They’re probably sadistic brutes, like Jake, I thought.  “Son-of-a-bitch!” I screamed at myself, ignoring Grace.  I thought, “They want to capture us alive.  Or, perhaps, they wanted to get closer before they killed us.  But why?  It didn’t make sense.  No time for logic, E & E─escape and evade─was needed, immediately, just like I had to do so many times in Nam.

            I glanced over my shoulder at their canoe and saw that the bearded man was waving his left arm as he held onto his long-gun with his right hand.  The motion was rocking his canoe and his partner was holding tightly onto the sides.  His partner didn’t appear to have a weapon.  Perhaps he had a concealed pistol.  Then that man, too, started waving at us, with both arms.  Are those bastards taunting me?  I swore silently, gritting my teeth.  They knew that our escape was almost hopeless and they were taunting with ultimate, sadistic pleasure.  “Those rotten bastards,” I thought with extreme anger.

            Escalating panic bubbled up inside of me as the bow of our canoe dug into the sand and lacy looking ice that crept out of the shallow shoreline.  I had been paddling so powerfully and was going so fast that the bow of the canoe cut through the ice and plowed a narrow furrow into the sand, depositing us well into the shore line so that when I jumped out, only the lower half of my boots got wet.  I pulled the canoe ashore with one great heave that resulted in a tremendous circle of pain in my rib cage.  I grabbed Grace, who was once again terrified, and ran to the tree line.  Still no shots.  They must be trackers, I thought, and not worried about us escaping.  Jake had underestimated us like that, too.  Maybe, just maybe, there was a shred of hope.  I heard Wolf howl and clung to that fragile hope.

            My mind flashed with an image of my white wolf and I was reassured by his presence.  I couldn’t give up; I wouldn’t give up.  My hopeful thoughts bolstered my confidence and made me realize that I had all the skills that I needed to defend Grace and me, and that panic was my enemy.  So I shunned the panic, and the rib pain, that threatened to engulf me, mentally wrapping it into a shroud loaded with rocks and, in a vivid mental image, I sent it to the bottom of the lake.

            As I stepped into the tree line and ducked down for cover, I heard it.  It was the strangest damn thing to hear out in the wilderness.  The shock of it almost bowled me over.  Grace and I looked at each other, mystified by it.  I felt haunted by the very sound of it.  It made me dizzy, disoriented and unsure of just what the hell was going on here.

            As I felt Wolf’s strengths and fierceness swell within me, I took Grace deeper into the woods as the strangers’ canoe landed.  They got out and I looked at them over my shoulder.  “Goddamnit!” I mumbled when I saw that the bearded guy did have a rifle.  No doubt about that now.  Mr. Beard was yelling a word over and over, like a loud, but slow, mantra from a praying Buddhist monk.  The words echoed through the forest and into my confused head.  Grace was tapping my leg, trying to tell me something, but the echo of Mr. Beard’s words had me inescapably in their grip as the two men stood on the shore looking at me.  Grace and I stared at them from just inside the forest’s edge.

            Grace was still tapping on my leg, trying to talk to me, insistently, but I didn’t understand her.  Then, again, I heard those strange words spoken by the strangers, but now, as my panic and anger subsided gradually, I started to understand those words.

            “Roman? . . . Roman? . . . Roman!  We want to help!” they repeated over and over.  But they stretched out my name so it sounded like “Ro . . . man?”

            I felt as if I was struck by lightening when I realized that my name was being called.

            Grace hit me harder and got my attention.  She was yelling, “Daddy!  Daddy!  I think they came to help us!”  My mouth opened, my jaw dropped and the fog of confusion started to clear.  Then, I picked up Grace and hugged her tightly.  She put her arms around my neck and hugged me so tightly that I thought she’d break my neck.  But the ultimate joy of being rescued numbed the neck pain, as well as the rib pain.

            Then I turned suspicious again.  Sure, they know my name, I thought.  Was this a devious trick.  “Be cautious,” Wolf warned me.  In a few seconds, Wolf spoke again, saying, “Be prepared, don’t get caught off guard by a ruse.”  I saw the image of Wolf, which reinforced the notion that I needed to be cautious until I was absolutely sure about who these guys were.

            My mind was clear and alert.  I was thankful for Wolf’s reminder, but caution was a survival instinct with me and Wolf since being exposed to the dangers of combat in Vietnam for thirteen very long months.  I appreciated it, but didn’t really need a reminder.

            I got down on my knees, still hugging Grace, and whispered in her ear, “Let’s be careful.  I don’t want to be tricked, OK?  Stand behind me.  I love you.”  Grace stood behind me and I turned my head to check.  That’s when I saw Wolf standing beside me.

            As I stared at the strangers, I could feel the cold, deadly steel of both my throwing knife and my combat knife pressing against my body.  A low growl from Wolf rumbled in my head, then, suddenly and instinctively, both knives were in my hands.

            My hands had moved instinctively.  I stared cautiously at the men with a heightened sense of smell, hearing and sight.  My teeth felt tingly, as if they were elongating.  The hairs on my arms felt as if they were growing, thickening and turning white.  My fingernails seemed to lengthen into claws and I felt as if my body was being covered with fur.  I blinked my eyes and held the eyelids closed for a second.  When I opened them I was clear-headed and alert.  I also saw Wolf, standing beside me, growling viciously─only I could hear it─at the two strangers.  Then I looked at my body and there was no change.  The feelings of wolfish-change had been inside my head, not external.

            Though they were standing about fifty feet away, I could vividly see every button on their coats, one having been re-sewed with mismatched thread.  The bearded man had three gray hairs in his beard, both men had brown eyes and one, or both of them were smokers, I could smell burned tobacco.  Looking at Mr. No-Beard, I could see that he was the smoker.  He had yellowish-brown stains on his right hand thumb, index and middle fingers  The thread on both their coats stood out clearly as if under a microscope.  Mr. No-Beard was nervously rubbing his right hand index finger against his thumb, making a loud friction noise.  One of them had bad breath.  I figured that it came from the smoker, but I wasn’t sure because they were about fifty feet away from me.  Those were the heightened senses of Wolf.

            I felt as if a giant, powerful claw grabbed my pants leg and pulled me.  I glared down at the menacing power, but it was just Grace pulling on my pants, my heightened senses tricking me.  I saw that Grace wanted to say something to me.

            “Papa,” Grace whispered with mature concern, “I think you’re scaring those men with your knives.  Can you put them away now, Papa?  Please.”

            I looked down at my hands, vaguely aware that I was holding the knives, threateningly, with the throwing knife raised to my ear.  I stared at the men.  They looked friendly, non-threatening.  Even the bearded guy’s rifle was held in a non-threatening position.

            Still, I gave them an intentional, menacing stare, for the sake of caution only, but they didn’t know that.  Mr. Beard seemed to know what I was thinking, so he placed his rifle on the ground.  I then stared a Mr. No-Beard.  Mr. Beard turned slightly and whispered to Mr. No-Beard, then Mr. No-Beard raised the bottom of his winter coat and removed a Colt, model 1911, .45 caliber pistol from his waist holster.  He set it on the ground next to the rifle.  Both men showed me their empty hands.  Each had something shiny attached to their coats.  The sun’s glare flashed off the metal so it was blurred.  Badges?

            We stood a moment staring at each other.  I hoped that I looked less menacing to them, especially now that I realized that the shiny things were probably badges . . . police badges.  Actually, they were New York State Troopers.

            Their peaceful actions and their badges convinced me that Grace and I were safe, so I returned each knife to its sheath.

            Grace and I looked like wild animals.  Our clothes were torn and filthy, our exposed flesh was dirty, my face and hands were covered with black charcoal as well as mud, and our cheeks looked like they had been scraped with a wire-brush.  Cuts, scrapes, gashes and other minor wounds were plentiful.  But we smiled as best we could and approached the two troopers.

            As I approached them, my persona changed and Wolf retreated.  “Holy shit!  Finally.  It’s sure good to see you guys,” I said excitedly, flashing them a big smile.  “Thanks for coming, even if you are too late.”  I kept smiling to let them know that I felt no animosity toward them.  Then I said, “I was trying to get away from you because I thought you were relatives of the Gibsons and that we were in danger, again.

            I introduced Grace and myself─I was so relieved and wanting to talk that I didn’t give the men a chance to give their names.  Grace received admiring smiles from both men.  We shook hands.  We sat on a patch of dry ground and I gave them a quick summary of what had happened.  Mr. Beard was an official Adirondack guide who had been deputized to assist Mr. No-Beard, the N.Y.S. Trooper.  They informed me that they were part of many teams of guides and police officers that were searching for us.

            My senses were still keen, but the hyper-sensitivity and the feeling of wolfish growth on my body was fading, now that the threat was gone.  However, the muscles of my arms and legs still felt as if they were taut, steel cables that could hold up a ton of weight with little strain.

            When I finished talking, they patted me and Grace on the back, the Trooper saying, “You sure you’re both all right?  I may be able to radio for a helicopter.”

            I looked at Grace and said, “Wha’daya think, Grace?  Are we all right?”

            “We are now, Papa,” she said with a sly grin.

            “Besides,” I said, smiling at the Trooper, “where would the helicopter land?”

            The Trooper looked all around the area, laughed, then said, “Point well taken.  Our helicopter isn’t able to land in water, that’s for sure.”

            We all walked to our canoes as the Trooper, used a walkie-talkie to report that he and his guide had found us and were returning to base.  It took him a few tries to convey the message through the static─transmitting and receiving was not good in the Adirondacks due to the thick growth of trees, hill, and mountains.

            When this whole ordeal started, I wondered if the police would ever be able to rescue us.  Actually, I didn’t think they would be able to do it.  I gave up on them.  I guess it must have been as confusing for them as it was for us, kind of difficult to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.  But, although they didn’t rescue us─they found us, they didn’t really rescue us─at least they were trying to find us.

            We followed them in our canoe until we reached their destination on shore.

            In another hour or so we were at the intersection of routes 30 and 28N, where the State Trooper took us to the local barracks to fill out an incident report.  But first I called Sam at our home near Rochester.  She wasn’t there, so I called my in-law’s home in Chemung.  Sam answered the phone.  Her voice was hesitant as if dreading bad news, but I savored the sound of her voice, which I had longed to hear for so long.  “Hello,” she said.

            Very quickly, I said, “Hi Babe.  Grace and I are safe and sound.  We love you.”  I said it so quickly so that I could relieve the terrible anxiety that she must have been feeling..

            There was a pause, a lingering silence, as if no one was there.

            “Sam?” I said, questioningly, wondering if I had lost my connection with her.

            Then there was screaming.  She was happily screaming at the top of her lungs─and, as I remember, she had a very nice set of lungs.  I heard her yelling, “I knew he’d so it!” to her mom an dad.  Then, to me, “I knew you’d do it!  I just knew you would!  I just knew you would!  I knew it! . . . I knew it!”  Pause.  The tone of her voice changed and became serious.  “Where are you and Grace?” she asked, followed by more questions.

            I blurted out the information quickly to answer her gush of questions.  Her voice trembled as she asked those questions.  I paused a couple times, when she started crying, to give her a chance to compose herself.

            Then, “Let me talk to Grace.  Let me talk to Grace, please,” she said with a sniffle.

            Grace talked to her mom as tears flowed down her cheeks.

            When I took the phone back, I told Sam that we’d be home as soon as possible.

            After I hung up the phone, I gave the information needed to fill out the Trooper’s incident report.

            While I was involved with the details of the incident report, a female Trooper occupied Grace’s attention.  I had to grin as I heard Grace talking to the Trooper because Grace was joking, saying things like, “Do you know that your bra is a booby trap?” and “You do know that Australian farts come from way-down-under, right?” and “You know why Chicago is called the Windy City?  ‘cause that’s where the most windy farters live.”  The female Trooper had her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh too hard and attract embarrassing attention from her fellow officers, but I could see that her eyes flashed like Fourth of July sparklers.

            An even funnier thing was Grace telling the Trooper about a Pooka that she saw in the forest─Grace was teasing the Trooper now─and the trooper seemed fascinated with Grace’s imaginative storytelling.  I informed the Trooper that Grace and I had watched a James Stewart movie called Harvey a couple nights before the kidnapping.  In the movie, Stewart’s character, Elwood P. Dowd, is friends with an invisible Pooka─a six feet tall, friendly rabbit that follows Elwood P. Dowd around, keeping him company.  This got Stewart’s character in all kinds of comedic trouble that made the movie greatly entertaining.

            When the reports were finally completed, Grace and I were driven by that same female State Trooper─at Grace’s insistence, and my support of her insistence─on the six hour journey to my in-law’s house in Chemung.  On the way there, the Trooper told me about the tremendous confusion that caused long delays in tracking us down.

            She told me that the local police and State Troopers searched the Elmira, Waverly and Chemung areas for a couple days before they found the “Annie button” in the Chemung hunting lodge because the button had fallen into a crack in the floor boards and just the tip of it could be seen when the police went back to check the hunting lodge more thoroughly.  The roadblocks were between Elmira and Rochester, while we really drove off toward Binghamton on route 17 and then headed directly north on route 81.

            No record of Jake Gibson’s current whereabouts was found in the police computer files, so it took a couple days to scrape up that information from other sources.  And once the police did find that Jake was an Adirondack guide, they had no idea where they should search in such a huge area.  The Adirondack region encompasses millions of acres.  Rescue teams were out everywhere, but it was like trying to find two particular fish in a huge lake.

            “Then a big break came when one of Jake’s drinking buddies, who was in a local police “holding cell” for being drunk and disorderly, told the police that while drunk one night, Jake mentioned a secret cabin that he and one of his sons had built way off in the Preston Ponds area of the Adirondacks.  So, to make a long story short, the Trooper said, that that’s why that Trooper and his guide were paddling along Long Lake, looking for any sign of us.

            She also informed me that the two men in the canoe were just one scouting team and that they were to be followed by a dozen or more armed and specially trained troopers who would be assigned Adirondack guides.  Another day, she said, and they probably would have rescued us from the Gibsons.  “Another day,” I thought, “and we’d have been dead.”  I didn’t tell her that, though.  I was too grateful to be safe and heading back to Sam.

            The Trooper looked sideways at me as she drove.  She had a curious grin, so I asked her what was on her mind.  She said, “Trooper Dobbs is the name of the trooper that found you.  I overheard him giving the other troopers a dangerous warning.  I saw the warning’s effect in their eyes, in their facial expressions and in their body language.  Dobbs told the other Troopers that you scared the hell out of him, and the guide, named Gus, even though he was the one holding the rifle and you only had the two knives.  Dobb’s said that, from experience, he could tell from your posture and your eyes that you could be extremely dangerous.  Damn!  Ain’t that funny.  Dobbs’ll really get teased about that.  You look like a gentle soul to me.  Wha’daya think about that, Mr. Wolfe?”

            “Well . . . he must have gotten the wrong impression.  When he found me I must have looked kind of wild and half crazy.  I’m really just a pussy cat.  But there’s no need to tease Dobb’s.  You or the other Troopers probably would have felt the same way if you were the ones that found me looking wild, half crazy, filthy-looking and prepared to fling a throwing knife into you and/or cut your throat with a combat knife.”

            She stared at me and an uncomfortable silence filled the car, so I changed the subject and asked about the trooper that the Gibsons had wounded.  I was told that he was out of danger; that he’d be fine in a few months.  I didn’t really want to know any more details.  Maybe later I would.  Right now, all I wanted was to get Grace and me back to Sam.  I took a deep, refreshing breath, but still felt more tired than I have ever felt before, even in Nam.

            Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought, “How wonderful it will be to be back in my classroom, as a teacher, to spend Thanksgiving with relatives and friends and, also, what an interesting tale I could tell my psychiatrist at our next appointment─maybe I’d make the story even more interesting with a spicy dash of hyperbole.

            I wished that I had let Trooper Dobbs and Gus, the guide, introduce themselves.  It was rude of me not to give them a chance to do so, but I was quite sure they’d forgive me, under the circumstances.

            Total exhaustion hit me suddenly and I drifted off to sleep with the mesmerizing sound of the car’s wheels humming in my ears.  Grace was already asleep in the back seat.  Peace at last.

            A bump in the road jarred me awake near Syracuse.  The car radio was on and the weatherman was talking excitedly about a big snowstorm that will be sweeping over northeastern New York State by morning.  A couple of feet of snow was expected, along with very frigid winds.  And an official snow warning was given for northern New York, especially south of the Great Lakes, and eastward to the Adirondack area which was liable to get hit the hardest.  I took a deep breath and let the air out slowly through pursed lips.  We had missed the storm by only a few hours.  Luck had been on our side, very good luck.

            I checked Grace.  She was still sleeping soundly.  My drowsy, heavy eyelids fluttered up and down, so I surrendered to the urge and drifted off to sleep, again.  It was a deep sleep, filled with dreams of Sam and Grace, seeing relatives and friends and celebrating the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.  Peace and relaxation for Grace and me, finally.

                        /-/- - -/-./-.- -/.-././-./././-…/.-./.-/-./-../- - -/-./-.- -/./.-/…./

                                                            Epilogue

            For the following few months my feelings vacillated between mild regret and sadness, to hopeful, optimistic joy, but I experienced no more severe depression.

            My alter ego, Roamin’ Wolf, remained dormant, as I had commanded, while I, Roman Wolfe, was physically healed and mentally improving.  My doctor said that I was coming along extremely well, despite my stressful flashbacks of killing and visions of carnage in Vietnam, and in the Adirondack mountains.  He felt that I was on my way to a good recovery which would enable me to lead a normal life.  I thought I could feel those mental wounds healing and it was a good feeling, a hopeful feeling.  Also, I could hear the optimism in the doctor’s voice and see it in his facial expressions.  Soon, he told me, I would be through with pills and doctor appointments.  Needless to say, I was thrilled that my “shrink” had such a good mental prognosis for me.  Physically, I was doing well, also.  With the help of X-rays and my family doctor, my two cracked ribs healed in six weeks.

            At one session the Doc and I talked about good versus evil, nature versus nurture and their effects on the human behaviors.  But one thing that he said particularly became indelibly etched in my mind.  He said, “We are all prisoners to our own identities, standing behind the metal bars of our own innate characteristics, surrounded by the concrete and steel walls of our limited knowledge, and at the mercy of our life’s experiences.  We are, in a sense, our own jailers.”  It made my stop and seriously think about how we all get to be who we are.  Do unpredictable situations, circumstances, events and wise or unwise choices decide our fate?  If there is a God, and everything happens in accordance with God’s will (because He/She/It is all-powerful), then God causes both the good and bad that exists in this world.  And if God is also said to be “all-good,” then events that are bad, from a human point of view, must be good events, to God’s way of thinking.  Or, perhaps, God is not all-powerful and all-good, or our God delusion is just that, a delusion.  Oh, well, I thought.  What the hell do I know?  I’m just a simple “born-again atheist” with a Rationalist and Empiricist frame of mind.

            Much more importantly, Grace was doing well.  Sam and I had been taking her to a child psychologist who helped her greatly.  She no longer has to go to that psychologist because she has accepted and dealt with the ordeal very well, and in a remarkably short period of time.  She rarely mentions the experience, and when she does mention it, she usually smiles and says, “We beat those bad guys, didn’t we Papa?”  I usually respond with, “We sure did, Sweetheart.  They didn’t stand a chance against us because we’re an unbeatable team.  You’re the brains and I’m the muscle.”  She’d always laugh at that comment, usually while I was hugging her.  And during the hug, when her head was adjacent to mine, I’d be silently thankful for my intense combat training and combat experiences, as well as thankful for the pale wolf, the Native American spirit wolf, who resided in the unexplored, psychological wilderness that lay in the crevices, indentations, folds, synapses and neurons of my brain.

            During these times of thankfulness, I didn’t feel Wolf stir within me, not even weakly; not even in whispers of subtle mental contact.  Wolf agreed to remain dormant until I beckoned him, in an emergency.  I realize that my relationship with this spirit wolf is anthropomorphic, but that’s how I think of him: as a warrior in a wolf’s body.  Native Americans believed that spirit animals resided within some of them and the wolf was one of the most powerful and revered.  If an Indian possessed a wolf spirit, it meant that he had “strong medicine,” much power and courage.  That may sound silly, but that’s the way it is for me; that’s how Wolf makes me feel.  Luckily, I don’t have to try to explain Wolf to anyone.  I seriously thought of telling my psychiatrist, once, but I didn’t feel like being committed to a mental hospital that day─I didn’t have a “Get Out of the Crazy House Free coupon”─so I figured it would be very wise of me not to mention Wolf.

            I returned to my teaching job, after the Christmas break, with mixed feelings.  My students were excited.  To them I had been on an incredibly exciting and amazing adventure.  They wanted to know every detail─the boys, especially─and they wanted to know every terrible, scary and gory tidbit of information, in spite of all the radio, TV and newspaper accounts.  They were disappointed when I wouldn’t talk at length about some parts of the ordeal─I would’ve had parents asking for my immediate resignation because it may have scared their children.  They’d be correct, of course, so I said as little as possible.  However, I did find many of the parents’ reactions toward me to be disturbing.  Most of the parents were appalled when they found out that I had to kill to survive, and some were terrified to leave their children with someone who killed in Vietnam─my Vietnam war record had been exposed and glorified needlessly.  But the kids?  Hell they saw me as a hero and didn’t feel threatened by me at all─and they had absolutely no need to fear me.  But you can see how the controversy could affect my peace of mind and distract me from my job and family life.  I thought that I dealt with it fairly well, but I must admit that many parents’ behaviors towards me were very irritating and unnecessarily disrespectful and even irrational.  But after the Adirondack ordeal, handling their doltish arrogance wasn’t too difficult, just very disappointing.

            I avoided hero worship and bragging.  I wanted it all behind me.  I simply wanted to move on with my family life and my teaching career.  So, after the first week back to school, I stopped talking about the Adirondack ordeal with anyone at school: students, teachers, parents and other staff members.  If questions were asked, I ignored them.  If someone persisted questioning me, I said, “Excuse me,” then walked away from them.  Nor did I write about it or seek publicity.  I wanted my family life and my career, not pretentious hero worship, gory glory and a constant invasion of my privacy.  I didn’t give radio or TV interviews, nor did I provide information for newspaper and magazine articles.

            I’d been called a hero in Nam.  It proved to be no great or satisfying honor.  Heroes aren’t supposed to be scared, yet I was.  And look what I had to do to be called a hero, kill three men in the Adirondack mountains and kill many more in Vietnam.  I knew what some parents and colleagues were thinking: “I don’t want a ‘killer’ to be my child’s teacher?” and “I don’t want to work with a ‘killer?’”  I killed for my country.  I killed to protect my family.  I was satisfied with myself and tried to move on with my life, but it wasn’t easy.

            I hoped that my students’ adult experiences with war and killing would always be contained in and limited to the fantasy world of toy soldiers, toy weapons, imaginary bullets and bombs and video games, as well as falsely glorified and entertainingly exaggerated accounts that are seen in pretentious movies and read about in books of ostentatious fiction.  I hoped, for their sake, that they never had to experience the stark and brutal horrors of real war, the feel and smell of slick, red blood, the tremendous and unbearable pain of actual, serious combat wounds, to see or experience torn flesh, shattered bones and blown off limbs, or to stare into the abyss of death that is taking a friend’s life, or to have to experience the ultimate horror, which is to plummet into that abyss themselves, as if pulled into that darkness by the fading light and life in a dying friend’s eyes.

            The smell of feces mixed with urine, when a dead body releases its contents, is another repulsive event.  But much worse is the smell of a dead body left to putrefy and dissolve for a few days. That’s the very worst sinus invading, eye watering, throat gagging, stomach churning, foul smell that there is on earth.  There is absolutely nothing like it.  No dead animal, no sort of decaying vegetation, no chemical, nothing natural or artificial can come close to the terribly shocking and sickeningly, foul smell of a neglected, dead, human body that’s liquefying and engulfed in its own maggot-infested putrefaction and juices.  Once you’ve smelled it, you’ll never, ever forget it.  It’s the kind of experience that’ll make you desperate to shower and wash your hair three times, then throw away the clothes that you were wearing, including your socks and shoes because that awful, horrendous smell seems permanently glued to you and all your clothing.  I hoped that none of my students would ever have to experience, first hand, any of those terrible, life-altering and haunting experiences.

            But, getting back to the topic of school, I have to admit that I was greatly surprised and saddened by the many condemning reactions of so many parents and teachers after they learned about my Adirondack ordeal and, also, to their unreasonable hostility and fear when they found out about my experiences in Nam.  Luckily my principal was wonderful─her husband was a Vietnam combat veteran.  She understood my situation, thank goodness, and helped me with the disheartening parental requests to immediately remove their children from my classroom.  Apparently, some parents felt that killing in a war still made me a murderer, and killing in the Adirondacks, to survive, proved that I was still a murderer and unfit to be around children.

            Did they really feel that their children were in mortal moral or physical danger being around a soldier who, during war time, killed the enemy in order to save the lives of himself and his friends and to fulfill his duty to his country?  Did they really think that I had a logical choice not to kill Lester, Tom and Jake?  For them, it was all too easy to judge, to criticize and condemn me when they’d never had a single experience that even remotely approximated my combat experiences, yet they were so quickly willing to condemn me with such stern vehemence and vigor.  Perhaps they were the descendants of the original disgraceful, radical and fanatical Vietnam War protestors of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Well, I thought, at least they didn’t attempt to spit on me or call me a baby killer.

            Most parents didn’t understand the inner torment that I had experienced, that I only killed because I had no other reasonable choice, that in Nam I only killed in defense of my fellow soldiers and myself and, in the Adirondacks, I killed in defense of my daughter and myself.  Given the same circumstances, wouldn’t they also kill to save their own children, to save their own lives?  Furthermore, many parents didn’t understand how I hurt emotionally and that the hurt cut deeply into me whenever I had to kill someone, even an enemy who was trying to kill me.  Hell, I wouldn’t hurt at all if I were a cold-blooded killer because I wouldn’t have a conscience to make me feel guilty.  I could see their condemnation of me in their eyes, their expressions and observe it in their behaviors.  To some parents and teachers, I was still an unwelcomed murderer who would irrevocably taint their children and bring disgrace upon their school system.

            They didn’t, or wouldn’t, try to understand that I wasn’t a cold-blooded, maniacal, killing machine.  I’m as human as anyone else.  I have feelings like anyone else, I have regrets, I have doubts, insecurities, a conscience and other normal human characteristics and frailties.  I was just a lot better trained and equipped to survive brutal, killing situations than most people are, just as a police officer is better equipped and trained to protect the public, himself and his family than the average citizen is.  I won’t roll over and die easily, not without a colossal struggle.  Would any of them?.  And if that struggle involves killing those who are trying to kill me or my loved ones, then so be it, it would be a kill-or-be-killed situation.  That’s not being cold-blooded or maniacal, or heartless, not in my book, anyway.  It’s simply the basic application of common sense, a very “human,” and instinctive drive to survive, to stay alive, to preserve your life.

            Then there were some of my colleagues, who previously had known nothing of my past until the newspapers informed them of my military, honorary medals and decorations, as well as the deeds that I had performed to earn them.  The newspapers glorified my ability to kill with knives and martial arts skills, commando-style, and even let it be known that I probably killed many more VC (Viet Cong) and NVA (North Vietnam Army) in South Vietnam, compared to the Adirondacks killings, via silent stalking, at night, with a knife.  I remember one unauthorized newspaper headline that stated:  HERO SOLDIER KILLS MORE WITH KNIVES THAN WITH BULLETS.  Thankfully, the various medias didn’t find out about the garrote that I sometimes used.

            During daylight hours, the Marine snipers were considered the deadliest beings on earth, by the VC.  The VC had their own snipers, of course, but they didn’t have the same high caliber excellent training, or superior weaponry─unless they had the superior Russian AK-47 rifle─so they usually weren’t nearly as good as the Marine snipers.  They had skills that were inferior to Marine snipers.  That’s not to say that the VC weren’t feared.  They certainly were feared, but not with the intensity that the VC feared the Marine snipers whose motto was “One shot.  One kill,” which the Marine snipers proved daily.  It was a highly accurate motto that the VC couldn’t match and it terrorized them.

            But, as some newspapers went on to elaborate, only the American forces had such a man, sometimes known as “The Wolf,” who stalked and silently killed the enemy at night with such stealth and deadly cunning that the VC and NVA offered an exorbitantly high bounty to anyone who could kill him and bring his severed head to the authorities.  Supposedly, there were stories and rumors of VC and NVA soldiers seeing a white wolf when there were no native wolves in Vietnam.  These sightings very often occurred the same night as many of the silent killing of their comrades  The rumored sightings and tales of this white wolf absolutely terrified the VC, many of whom couldn’t and wouldn’t sleep all night─which was very good for American soldiers because without sleep the VC and NVA were tired and often careless.  Being tired and careless got many of them killed before they could kill Americans.  At night, with a combat blade and martial arts techniques, including the sometimes use of a garrote, I horrified and haunted the minds of the enemy.  Wolf and I owned the night.  We kept the enemy on edge, literally speaking.

            Interestingly enough, some newspapers even dug up the fact that, in 1973, a murderer named Robert Garrow hid from the law in the Adirondack mountains area after killing two people with a knife.  Needless to say, the comparisons that were made were tantamount to yellow journalism at its very worst.  It was mostly shoddy journalism and sensationalism, but millions of Americans love that kind of crap.  It’s usually exhibited next to the check-out clerks in grocery stores, and sells quickly to the persistently naïve, thoroughly bored and extremely gullible type of person.  Sometimes this kind of journalistic dung even gets into the regular city newspapers, but with much less detail and space.

            I chuckled when I thought of the irony of the phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”  The newspapers certainly were killing me with ink, though, I suppose, they thought they were making me a “hero.”  Perhaps they mistakenly thought that I’d be forever grateful with their self-serving, hyperbolic tales.  I refused their offers to interview me, so I guess they had to make up some of the manure that they were printing, making the stories much more interesting, for the hopelessly credulous and also making their newspapers sell quickly and in large amounts.  Of course, we should all know that it’s the dollar not the truth that’s of utmost importance.  And the issues of privacy, accuracy and fairness are, for the most part, non-issues.

            Anyway, that’s how the newspapers portrayed me, as an unstoppable killing machine, like a robot or android, minus any feelings, except those needed to kill and kill again.  Next, I half expected them to make a “paper coffin” for me, then bury me in their files when they’d finished glorifying some of my more accurate deeds.  But, I guess it could have been worse.  That was no satisfaction, however, because with further thought I realized that almost any situation could be worse than it was.  No comfort for me there.

            With all that hyperbole and lies, no wonder some of my colleagues, as well as some parents, grew cold and scared in my presence.  I felt like a leper each time I walked into the teachers’ lunch room and saw heads turn to look at me, then suddenly turn downward to stare at their food in total silence.  That reaction was, of course, the exact opposite of the hurried and friendly chatter that had been going on as I entered the room.

            Then, after I sat down, I could feel the heat of staring eyes on my neck.  The heat of those stares, I imagined, were like alien laser-beams probing me.  Sometimes the stares felt like worms crawling up my back and neck.  I hoped, of course, that time would repair any distrust or fear that parents and colleagues had of me.  But, in all fairness, I should mention that there were many who didn’t treat me like that.  There were some understanding colleagues.  They were a great comfort to me during those somewhat sad months of mental discomfort and rejection.

            My principal’s Vietnam veteran husband called me.  It was great to talk to someone who had something in common with some of my experiences.  We talked often and became good friends.  Actually, if something was bothering me, I preferred to talk to him, rather that my “shrink” because of our common Vietnam experiences and shared memories of places and things that we had both seen, though we were unaware of each other when we were both in Vietnam.

            In the last few months I had also become very interested in the Adirondack Forest Preserve.  I voraciously read books, booklets, manuals, maps and magazine articles about he Adirondack mountain area, all its mountains, rivers, forests, lakes, ponds, bogs, marshes, animals and even some tourist attractions.  I plan to vacation there a week or two during the summer break from school, and this time I’m sure that I’ll enjoy every day that I’m there.  I may have to go alone, if Grace and Sam choose not to go.  I’ll do some mountain climbing, hiking the trails, fishing and canoeing.  I think I’ll stay away from Long Lake and the Preston Ponds area.  No use dredging-up bad memories that should stay buried.

            The beauty of the Adirondack mountains doesn’t make a person their willing prisoner so much as it makes them not want to request amnesty or to seek parole.  The Adirondack mountains area makes a person want to be its prisoner, voluntarily trapped in beauty that comes in many forms.  The area is like a friendly jailer whom few want to run from.

                                                                                          *

            Christmas was coming, a time for peace, friendship and good deeds, though I didn’t believe in that holiday in any religious sense.

            One night when Sam and Grace were asleep, I got out of bed quietly so as not to wake up Sam.  Silently I walked into the living room and sat in the darkness with only the moon shining through the picture window to provide light.  Big flakes of snow floated out of the dark sky like miniature parachutes that were landing silently on the ground.  There was no breeze and a quietness prevailed that I found comforting.

            I sat down and wondered what had awakened me.  Must have been a dream.  I tend not to remember my dreams.  Perhaps they are disturbing dreams and forgetting was a defensive mechanism.  I didn’t know what it was, but I did know that I felt uncomfortable about something.

            I sat in my recliner chair, tipped back slightly and watched the floating snow flakes build up, layer after layer until the grass was covered with a white, fluffy blanket.

            Then, for some unknown reason, thoughts of a Native American story burst into my mind, like someone suddenly jumping out of a closet to scare me.  My thoughts were of an elder Indian who was teaching a boy who was approaching manhood.  The elder Indian told the boy that there are two wolves living in every man, one good and one bad.  These wolves, the elder said, are constantly fighting as a child grows towards manhood.  Eventually one wolf will win the struggle and be dominant.  That victorious wolf will determine the primary character and behaviors of the young Indian throughout the remainder of his life.  The boy is puzzled by the words of the wise elder of his tribe, so the boy only pauses briefly before he asks the elder, “Grandfather?  How do you know which wolf wins?”  The wise elder looks deeply into the boys eyes and gives a simple answer: “The wolf that always wins is the one that you decide to give the most food,” he tells the boy.  The boy asks for an explanation, but the elder stands and walks away from the boy.

            Inside my mind there’s only one Wolf, but, like a coin, there are two sides to him.  It’s my job to feed him much more than bad.  It’s not an easy job.  I hope I don’t falter.

            I watched the snow get deeper.  I looked at the moon and it reminded me of a cut fingernail or a cuticle.  The wind picked up and the snow started drifting, just as I was drifting off to sleep.

            My last thought was of the time that Grace and I arrived home from our ordeal in the Adirondacks.  I stripped off my clothes and took a shower immediately.  I asked Sam to throw away everything that I had been wearing in the Adirondacks.  She picked up my clothes off the bathroom floor and stared at the insides of my shirt and pants, then said, “Roman?  What’s all this white hair that’s inside your pants and shirt?”

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