Paul Halter
The Night of the Wolf
“Daddy, Daddy, tell us a story.”
The chieftain looked at the little group that was devouring with gusto the deer that had been killed a few hours before. He pricked up his ears and glanced in exasperation at his son.
“Yes, Daddy, please,” insisted another of his children.
“Another one?” he growled. “You’d do better to occupy yourselves with more important things! You’re old enough to hunt now. The winter’s been hard and spring is still a long way off. How many times do I have to tell you that to live you have to eat, and to eat you have—”
“Yes, we know, but please, Daddy, please tell—”
“Now you’re bothering me! I don’t know what else to tell!”
His companion trotted through the snow to rub herself against him: “You can tell them the story of Wolf.”
“The story of Wolf!” he bristled. “But they’re much too young.”
“Yes, tell us the story,” his turbulent offspring clamoured in unison.
He bared his teeth in anger, but he soon relented; he knew that, one way or another, he would not be able to escape the daily chore. And after all, if they were old enough to hunt, they were old enough to know.
He gazed for a long time at the plain covered in snow and, in the distance, the dark line of the pine trees bowing to the wind. With his red eyes fixed on his sons, he began:
“It’s a very sad story. Most among us claim that ‘those things’ only exist in the minds of a few crazy creatures. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Wolf was a friend…”
The snow was falling in large flakes on Malmort, a small town in the Lorraine, nestled in lonely isolation in the foothills of the Vosges. The sad gray houses that clustered around the church seemed gradually to become engulfed by the thick white blanket, as if seeking to be forgotten: to blend into a landscape more desolate here than in the rest of the Lorraine. Even the mountain range itself, a twisted rock barrier dotted with firs, appeared to loom more ominously in this part of the region than anywhere else. It was only eight o’clock at night, yet already the inhabitants had locked and bolted their doors. Terror, rather than the rigors of winter, was what chilled their hearts. Only two days had gone by since the murder of old Pierre Wolf. A particularly grisly murder, yet — curiously — it was not so much the ferocity of the crime that worried the villagers, but what it implied. “He is back,” they could be heard whispering. “Mon Dieu, what will — become of us? Our women? Our children?”
Commissaire Jean Roux, in charge of the investigation, had hardly slept since the tragedy. That evening, he was pacing up and down in front of the fireplace, racking his brains for any glimmer of a solution to the extraordinary puzzle, when someone knocked on the door.
He went to open it. An old man of smallish stature stood there, covered in snow and obviously numb with cold, claiming to be lost and looking for an inn in which to spend the night. A short while later, sitting in front of the fire with a stiff grog, he explained to his host the circumstances that had led him to lose his way. Totally preoccupied, the policeman only listened with one ear. One phrase, however, caught his attention:
“…There’s always an explanation for everything.”
Jean Roux studied the visitor carefully. His gnarled and twisted hands and his face like parchment spoke of a great number of years on this earth. His eyes, by contrast, were striking for their sparkling vitality, youth, and intelligence. Roux was unsure what to make of him. Where had this old man come from anyway? Why had he been wandering out in the open at this time of night, in the swirling snow? His clothes appeared to be of good quality; there was nothing of the tramp about him. The detective began to regret not having paid enough attention to what he had been saying. But good manners prevented him from asking his companion to repeat his words.
“For everything? Do you really believe that?” he remarked with a disillusioned smile. “Monsieur… Monsieur…?”
“Dieudonne. Noel Dieudonne. Yes, I believe there is always an explanation for everything.”
Jean Roux shook his head disapprovingly as he stared at the wolfhound sleeping on one corner of the carpet. M. Dieudonne frowned.
“Would there be a connection between that animal and your reluctance to believe?”
“Yes, in a way. I took in this hound because his master was murdered nearly two days ago. And there isn’t an explanation for the death of that man. No ‘rational’ one, at least. It has been proven that only this beast could have been responsible, but it’s beyond the bounds of credibility that it could have administered the fatal dagger wound.”
“The animal looks harmless enough to me, in spite of its size,” M. Dieudonne observed calmly.
“I think so, too, even though the body of his master, M. Wolf, was lacerated by claw and fang marks.”
The old man looked at him, wide-eyed.
“Stabbed, bitten, and slashed? What kind of a monster…”
“Have you ever heard tell of the werewolf, my dear sir?” asked the policeman.
The visitor looked at him incredulously.
“There’s always an explanation for everything, you say,” Jean Roux continued bitterly, and with a note of sarcasm. “I think you’ll change your mind after I’ve told you what happened the night before last, as well as certain events which occurred about twenty years ago. One of the two people who discovered the victim is none other than my predecessor, ex-Commissaire Maurice Mercier. A level-headed witness, in other words, with a trained eye.
“It had snowed the night Wolf was killed, between nine o’clock and midnight. It was a little after that when Mercier was awakened by shrieks and growls. Then, around one o’clock, there was a knock at the door. It was his old friend and neighbour Dr. Loiseau, standing there with a torch in one hand and his walking stick in the other, come to ask him whether he had heard screams coming from the forest. Anxiously, and for good reason, they went straightaway to Pierre Wolf’s house.
“Mercier and Loiseau both lived practically at the edge of the forest. They only had to follow a path through the woods to reach Wolf’s house, which was situated in the middle of a clearing. A house made entirely of wood, with a carpenter’s workshop adjoining, although Wolf had not set foot in the shop for several years, having given up his hobby.
“It was not long after one o’clock that Dr. Loiseau and Mercier reached the clearing. A thin coat of fresh snow covered the frozen ground all around. The beam of Dr. Loiseau’s lamp picked out a strange set of prints which appeared to originate in the Wolf house, standing about fifty yards ahead of them. They were not the footprints of a human, but of a large dog — or a wolf!
“Almost indistinguishable under the trees and bushes, the prints finally petered out quite close to them, not far from the path. In the light of the lamp they traced the prints back, which led them to the front entrance of Wolf’s house, open in that weather and at that late hour! They found Wolf slumped in front of the fireplace, swimming in his own blood, a dagger planted in his back and his face and limbs lacerated with slashes. The body was still warm. Dr. Loiseau estimated that death had occurred within the half-hour, forty minutes at most, which placed it at about twelve-thirty. An assessment confirmed later by the medical examiner. Do you see the problem? The crime occurred after the snow stopped. Now, apart from their own and those of the ‘beast,’ no other footprints were found anywhere around the house — which they searched from top to bottom, only to prove that nobody was there, other than themselves and the victim. Even the victim’s wretched dog had disappeared. They were probably its prints that they had noticed outside, and while it may have been responsible for the vicious attack on its master, under no circumstances could it have stabbed him with a dagger. How, then, had the murderer escaped without leaving a mark in the snow?”