Dion has offered the colonists a name for the island — Neonarcheos. I think I like it. It is from Greek, a language already ancient and unspoken in the Golden Age. Dion is one of the few among the Heretics who studied that, and Latin. (The Church forbids to the public anything at all in a language not English — it could be sorcery.) He introduced me to the Greek and Latin authors in translation; I note that they also looked backward toward a Golden Age preceding what they called the Age of Iron…

Dion’s name for this place says something I wanted said — new-old. It connects us somehow with the age when this island — and the others that must lie close over the horizon, all of different shape and smaller than they were before the ocean rose — was a Portuguese possession, whatever that may have meant to it; yes, and with a time far more remote, when civilization capable of recording itself was a new thing on earth, and this island was a speck of green in the blue inhabited, as when we found it, only by the birds and other shy things who live their entire lifetimes without either wisdom or malice.

When I climbed North Mountain again to return the horn I did not see true sunrise, for by the time it arrived I was in that big-tree region where the day before I might so easily have killed my monster. I was not hurrying; reluctance made me feel as though the air itself had thickened to a barrier. I did not feel much afraid of the mue, though when I entered the tangle where his grapevine pathways ran I was looking upward too much, until certain timorous fancies were flooded out of me by a wrong smell — wolf smell.

I drew my knife, exasperated — must I be halted, distracted by a danger not connected with my errand? The scent was coming from dead ahead, where I had to go in order not to lose the marks of my passage of the day before. I was not far from the tulip tree. Knife ready, I made no effort to be quiet — if the wolf was lurking anywhere within a hundred yards he knew exactly where I was.

You can’t look quite straight at black wolf even from the rail above the baiting-pit. Something about him pushes your gaze off true. I spoke of that once to Dion, who remarked that maybe we glimpse a fraction of our selves in him. My dear friend Sam Loomis, a gentle heart if ever there was one, used to claim he was sired by an irritated black wolf onto the cunt of a hurricane; in such nonsense talk he may have been saying something not entirely nonsense.

When a man hears black wolf’s cold long cry in the dark, his heart does strain at its human boundaries. You, I, anyone. You know you won’t go out there to hunt with him, quarrel with him over the bleeding meat, run down the glades of midnight with him and his diamond-eyed female, be a thing like him. But we are deep enough to contain the desire; it does not altogether sleep. All nights are resonant with the unspoken. Latent in our brains, our muscles, our sex, are all the harsh lusts that ever blazed. We are lightning and the avalanche, fire and the crushing storm.

That morning I found my black wolf quickly. She was below the grapevine that hung down outside the catbriers, and she was dead. An old bitch wolf — my knife prodded the huge scrawny carcass, six feet long from her snout to the base of her mangy tail. Scarred, foul, hair once black gone rusty with festered spots. When alive, for all her decay she could still have hamstrung a wild boar. But her neck was broken.

Lifting, poking with my knife — I could not have touched her with my hand and not puked — I proved to myself that her neck was broken. Doubt it if you like — you never saw my North Mountain mue and his arms. Her body was already losing stiffness, and a line of the midget yellow carrion ants had laid out their mysterious highway to her, so she must have been dead for several hours. The cover was too dense to admit the wings of crows or vultures, and it is said the small scavenger dogs of the wilderness will not touch black wolf’s body. I rubbed away a bit of the ants’ path and watched stupidly as they fiddled about restoring it. The dry blood on the rocks, the ground, the grape-stem, was not from the dead wolf, who had no wound but a broken neck.

I read the signs. She had ambushed the mue when he was near the vine. Bushes were flattened and torn; a heavy boulder had been jerked out of its earth-pocket. It would have happened the day before, perhaps when he came back from the pooi. He could have been careless from distress, wondering why he had not changed to man-beautiful.

Or he might have lifted the rose-colored rock to find his treasure gone, and come storming out ready to attack the first thing that moved.

Either way, I was guilty.

Her mouth was agape, the teeth dry. I noticed one of the great stabbers in the lower jaw had broken off long before, leaving a blackened stump in a pus-pocket that must have caused her agony. I believe it had never occurred to me before that a black wolf like any other sentient thing could suffer. The other long tooth of the lower jaw was brown with dry blood.

I climbed the tulip tree. There were blood-smears all the way. I did not think the mue could have lost so much and still be living, but I called to him: “I’ve come back. I’m bringing it back to you. I took it but I’m bringing it back.” I mounted a thick branch above his nest and compelled myself to look down. The yellow ants must have formed their column on the opposite side of the trunk, or surely I would have seen them sooner.

He was human. Knowing that, I was wondering for a while how much of my schooling had been lies on top of lies.

I alone remember him. You may remember what I’ve written, a book-thing for leisure talk. But as I wnte this now I am the only one who even knows of him except Nickie and Dion, for I’ve never told any others, except one person who is dead, how it was that I won my golden horn.

8

I returned to my cliffside cave, and the day passed over me. Right or wrong, for good or evil, the golden horn was mine.

I recall a half-hour blazing with the knowledge that I, myself, redhead Davy, was alive. I had to throw off my clothes, pinch, slap, stare at every astonishing part of my hundred and fifteen pounds of sensitive beef. I slapped my palm on a sun-hot rock for the mere joy of being able to. I rolled on the grass, I ran up the ledge into the woods so that I might make love to a tree-trunk and cry a little. I flung a stone high, and laughed to hear it tumble far in the leaves.

I would not be going to Levannon on a spirited roan, with three attendants, and serving-maids spreading their knees for me at every inn. But I would go.

With my horn, I dared that day to learn a little. Humility came later: when I play nowadays I know I can only touch the fringes of an Old-Time art beside which the best music of our day is the chirping of sparrows. But before my lips grew sore that first day I did learn by trial and error how to find a melody I’d known since I was a child. I think “Londonderry Air” was the first music I knew, sung to me by dear fat Sister Carnation. Curiosity drove me on past ordinary fatigue. I found the notes; my ear told me I was playing them true.

Thanks to the great dictionary, I know that my horn is what was known in Old Time as a “French horn.” The valve mechanism can be kept in repair by modern workmen — I had a little work done on it at Old City; the horn itself we could never duplicate in this age. I have been playing it now for about fourteen years, and I sometimes wonder if a horn-player of Old Time would consider me a promising beginner.

When I quit my studies that day in the woods, the afternoon was nearly spent. I made a belated meal from the left-over bacon and half-loaf of oat bread. Then I scooped a pocket in the earth rather far from my cave, and buried the sack there with my horn wrapped in the gray moss. Only memory marked the spot, for I knew I would be returning very soon. I was going away from Skoar; that, I felt now, was certain as sunrise. But this one night I must return to the city.