It was Roberta Dempsey who first saw the black wolf.   It came out of nowhere and stopped in the middle of the road, fifty metres or so in front of the rattly old station wagon.   The wolf seemed, transfixed by the glare of the car’s headlights; its eyes shining almost supernaturally as the car rattled toward it.

“Look out Garrick!” Roberta called to her husband.

“Don’t hit it dad!” pleaded young Stanlee from the back seat, leaning forward to peer out at the enormous black shape through the car’s front windscreen.

Garrick Dempsey strained to see what his eleven-year-old son was pointing at.   However, the black wolf blended into the dark of the moonless night, so that it was almost invisible against the black bitumen road.   The car was nearly on top of the wolf before Garrick finally spotted the animal and began frantically tugging upon the steering wheel, using all of his strength to force the car to veer to the left.

Held spellbound by the glare of the headlights, the wolf began to move in the same direction, as though intent upon diving straight under the wheels of the car.   At the last second, however, the black wolf put on an extra burst of speed, zoomed past the grill of the car, and began loping toward the thick forest a hundred metres away from the verge of the road.

By the time that Garrick had brought the sliding car back under control, the large wolf had disappeared from sight.

*        *        *

After his close encounter with death the black wolf ran through the forest, weaving his way between the trees, seemingly miraculously avoiding high-speed collisions with the wattles, pines, and grey-white ghost gums, until his heart pounded from the exertion and the pads of his feet ached.   Spurred on by his fear of the car, fear of the boom-boom-boom that rang out from his own chest, fear of the crunching of the pine needles beneath his feet, which made him imagine that the Dempseys were running along behind him, the wolf tore through the forest for more than an hour.

He might have kept running until collapsing from fatigue, if he hadn’t suddenly found himself at the edge of a clearing, looking out at a small weatherboard farmhouse.   Although the small, white house offered little real protection against attack, the building seemed like a fortress to the wolf, offering shelter from the terrors of the forest by night.   Although his memory of the time before he had come to this country was vague, he could dimly recall living in a small house not unlike this one with a man named Jim, his master and friend.   He could recall being smuggled into Australia by Jim, who had a year later been killed in a hunting accident, leaving the black wolf to fend for himself in this strange, new land.   But most of all he remembered the comfort and safety that he had shared with Jim in their small, log house.