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It is extraordinary that a system hoary with age, extravagant and wasteful to the highest degree, should not be supplanted by some method of getting at facts directly, and having them passed on by men who understand the controversies that they seek to solve.
CLARENCE DARROW, The Story of My Life
I
The wolves sat on their haunches, or stood, or crouched belly to earth with snouts on forepaws, while others maneuvered in the shadow beyond the tree-border of the clearing. On the other side of that border spread such a blackness as the mind imagines for the sea a mile down, yet here and there it was relieved by the gray of stone; everywhere, also, a coldness. Grayness in the clearing too; no flowers, nothing of the sun, but phallic-bodied toadstools and a ground-vine twisting a serpentine life among scattered rocks. Callista remembered being told that someone had died in there, in the blackness where no one could see it happen. The wolves would have eaten the body.
The wolves were old, possibly several thousand years old. "A geeolawgical malformation," said the child in her lap, speaking with precocious insight.
Callista moved her hand with its dangling bracelet over the fine black hair, tiny ear, bony shoulder, indistinct body. Her intention was a caress; likely the child knew it. She grew interested, not urgently, in learning the child's sex. What was the difficulty?—not a diaper. Apparently the little thing possessed only a negative pink blank between skinny thighs, like the crotch of a plastic doll. "The Merican Ideal," said the brat, rolling china-white eyes. "See?"
"Well, shut up, darlin'," Callista said. The wolves had crept closer during her preoccupation. Such was their habit (she had been told) if you neglected to look them straight in the eye. She watched them in contemplative pain resembling fear, and they continued moving, slowly, a stirring and gliding that seemed aimless until Callista understood one of them was being pursued, a thin bitch wolf, scar-faced, nearly black, with a crooked leg, devil-eyed but in her demoniac way pathetic. Callista was moved to remark: "Hasn't a chance."
And yet, poor beast, her own wickedness was plain. You could see the drip of poisonous saliva from her mouth, and the fetuslike thing impaled on a lower tooth—it couldn't be her own, so she must have stolen it somewhere. No wonder they were after her. Serve her right! (Or if the fetus was her own she ought to have taken better care of it)—therefore one could understand the primitive justice of it as the gray jaw of a pursuer hooked over her narrow rump. His hind legs massively firmed themselves. Callista could observe the sudden scarlet erection, sense the weight of the one lifted gray indifferent paw; but he did not swing about to rear up and clamp her loins, he merely held her in the angle of his jawbone and under that paw while others closed in to slit her throat—she womanly now lying on her back as a clean white fang thrust out of a surgical mask to run deftly down from the throat along the mid-line of the body, opening up the internal apparatus not for eating but for a better clinical view.
"Like a theater Oh-doctor," said the child's intelligent profile in Callista's arms. Someone said: "Gentlemen, this is the pancreas—a remarkably pancreative bitch to be sure, aware of nature and consequences. Notice the inadequate uterus, a primipara yes yes, but evidence of miscarriage early in term—and by the way, Potter's Field is bungfull of that type."