The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Jack didn’t say anything for a moment, his lips thin. “Well,” he said finally. “It is pretty bad. But he’ll have two months to heal before the winter sets in. If this had happened in the winter it would have been all over for him. Winters are hard.” He leaned back and looked at the wolf. “Of course, we would never have attacked an elk like that in the winter.”

He pulled a capsule out of his rucksack and broke it under the wolf’s nose. The wolf lay down and closed his eyes. “I have about twenty minutes now.”

“Is that long enough?” I said. I checked and made sure Goldie was getting this.

“Sure,” he said as he pulled out his instruments. He cleaned out the wound expertly and splashed it with disinfectant and then sprinkled what I assumed was antibiotics over it. Then, with one practiced move after another, he sewed the wound shut. Once he had finished that, he plastered a bandage over it. The wolf was stirring as Jack measured out something from a vial and injected him. The wolf didn’t even flinch.

“He’ll walk back with me. There are enough voles for all of us back with Raksha. For now, we’ll just let him sleep for a while.”

“He’ll make it back?”

“Oh, yeah. It’ll take us most of tomorrow to walk back with him. Akela will probably run on back to Raksha. But me and him will take our time.”

A good portion of the fallen elk was gone when we returned. The four wolves were lying near the carcass looking very pleased with themselves.

I squatted next to it. There was nothing remaining of the bull’s haunting grandeur; he had become just another meal on the prairie. The air was thick with the smell of meat, bone and blood.

“I didn’t think wolves attacked anything this big.” I said.

“You didn’t like the show?”

“I was surprised.”

“Yeah, well, it was a little risky,” he conceded. I thought for a moment he was embarrassed. “But it’s still summer and we’re all in good health. Not like the winter.”

“So you said.” I stood up. “So you said.”

I pulled out my phone. I wondered how long I would have to wait for Sam to pick me up.

After three weeks in Montana, my apartment felt very warm and small, a friendly sheltered spot in the middle of Manhattan. I took a long, hot shower, an even longer bath, and then another shower. I sat in my big stuffed chair and had Chinese food and drank Italian beer for dinner. New York was still hot but the air conditioning was quite cool. I slept under a light sheet for twelve hours dreaming of elk. After that, I was ready to start.

The trick was to figure out the right tack for the story. There are a million events and tales but only a limited number of points of view. That’s how you manage a story. Every human experience is unique but the uniqueness prevents it from being usable. Like great art, the experience has to be brought down to a common theme that can be universally embraced: good versus evil, coming of age, man against nature, man for nature, conflict, resolution, corruption, purity. Once you connect one of these points of view to something that happened, you have a story. The closer the connection is to something with universal appeal determines the attractiveness and durability of the story, its legs.

I checked and made sure Goldie had been fully downloaded and went over what I had. It was even better than I had expected. First, I knocked together a story just using some of the footage I had from Sam and Jack and some pictures of the puppies. A long shot of the hunt gave the sense of reality I was looking for. Then, I did the intro, the voiceover and the outtro. That would be for the human interest section for the news feeds. That took me a couple of days. I held off submitting it for the moment.

Then, I contacted some anthropologists and psychologists and put together a nice half hour segment about Jack and the wolves. Something public broadcasting would like. Suitable for a segment of a larger show on something like human adaptation, for example. I reformulated some of the outtakes and made a second segment for the wildlife sites. That took a couple of weeks. Then, I submitted the news segment at a rock-bottom price as a teaser.

Using the public broadcasting segment as a base, I built a stand-alone show on Jack himself. This was on spec. I wasn’t sure if Jack had the legs for that. I worked on that while I submitted the news segment.

Two of the big feeds bought the same segment-unusual but not rare and the it took off. In an hour, Jack had a four percent share on the major discussion groups and seventy smaller feeds had asked for the segment and breaking rights-rights to cut the segment to fit around other segments. This was starting to be serious money. I put together a dozen or so tabloid articles and put them up for automatic purchase. Several hundred sales came from that alone.