“Come on!” ordered Sam Hart as the hunters seemed to be lagging too far behind.

“Don’t worry, we won’t lose him,” assured Kim Monroe.   He flashed the beam of one of the powerful floodlights onto the fleeing wolf.

“Got him!” cried Sam with satisfaction, after firing off a round with his Winchester, certain that he had hit the black wolf.

But when the hunters raced forward where they expected to find the wolf carcase, there was no sign of it.

“Got him, like Hell!” sneered Don Blythe.

“There he goes,” cried Kim.   He pointed to where the black wolf was fleeing, with a definite limp in his left leg, about sixty metres ahead of them.

“Ha!   Told you I got him!” shouted Sam charging forward after the limping wolf.

*      *      *

Although the black wolf managed to stay safely ahead of the pursuing hunters, the ache in his left foot where Sam’s rifle had nicked him had started to slow him up.   He realised that they would soon overtake him unless he reached safety quickly.

He had almost given up hope, when his superior werewolf vision allowed him to discern the brown form of his Range Rover fifty metres or so ahead of him.

‘Now comes the hard part!’ he thought, knowing that he could never drive the Rover in wolf form.   Although he had managed to shape shift from man to wolf by choice on a handful of occasions, in more than three years as the black wolf, he had never yet managed to change back to human form by choosing to do so.

Trying to ignore the pain in his left foot for fear of whimpering and giving his location away to the hunters, the black wolf limped toward the brown Range Rover furiously trying to will himself to transform back to Ernie Singleton.   ‘Come on!’ pleaded Ernie.   ‘Either I change back out here, or I’m dead!’

He had almost given up hope, when, still five metres from the vehicle, he suddenly transformed back to human form and was unable to stifle a cry of pain as his now human left foot throbbed from agony.

*      *      *

“What was that?” demanded Sam Hart hearing Ernie’s cry from sixty metres away.

“Sounded like a man crying out,” said Hettie McGillivray.

“Don’t be bloody stupid!” protested Sam, “who else besides us would be out in the forest this late at night?”

“One of those bloody yowie things?” suggested Kim Monroe.

“Don’t be so…” started Sam, before deciding that Kim might be right.   “Yes!   That would explain why I’ve never been able to shoot the black wolf!   If the bugger is in cahoots with the yowies!”

“Either that, or you’re just a lousy shot!” suggested Kim, drawing snickers from some of the hunters.

“Don’t be such a bloody idiot!” hissed Sam Hart.

“You’re the bloody idiot,” said Hettie, “if you really believe the yowies and your black wolf could have teamed up somehow!”

“Yes, Sam, get serious!” cried Mel.

*      *      *

Hobbling the last few metres naked in human form, Ernie slumped into the driver’s seat of his Range Rover, wincing as a bolt of pain rocketed through his left foot.   Knowing that he had no time for modesty, without stopping to dress, he threw the car into gear and drove away into the forest, heading back toward the safety of his sheep station on the outskirts of Merridale.

*      *      *

“What was that?” demanded Sam Hart hearing the sound of Ernie’s Range Rover.

“Sounded like a car driving away,” pointed out Bear Ross.

“Who would be driving a car in the forest in the dark?” demanded Mel Forbes.

They continued to follow the spoors of the black wolf even after losing sight of the wolf itself.   But after awhile, the wolf prints suddenly vanished…

To be replaced by the imprints of naked human feet!

“So, I’m an idiot am I?” demanded Sam, his hard weasel-like face sneering with satisfaction as he pointed toward the footprints.

“Well,” said Kim Monroe, “we didn’t want to have to be the ones to tell you…but since you asked…!”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Sam said, “This proves the black wolf is in cahoots with the yowies!   See how the wolf tracks vanish as soon as the ape ones appear.   Obviously seeing the wolf was hurt one of the monsters picked him up and carried him from here.”

Noticing the tyre tracks from Ernie’s Range Rover a few metres further on, Mel asked, “Then how do you explain these?   Surely the yowies don’t own or drive cars?”

Stumped for only a moment, Sam quickly recovered to say, “Those have nothing to do with it.   They’re obviously the tracks of Ernie’s Range Rover.   Obviously he drove past this way when he went to get help an hour or so back!”

“How do you know they’re not the tracks of the car we just beard?” asked Mel.

“Don’t be stupid,” hissed Sam, “as you just said, who’d be driving a car out in the forest this late at night?   No, this is where Ernie drove past ages ago.   Obviously a yowie carried the black wolf away from here.”

“But where to?” demanded Kim Monroe, looking round in vain for some further sign of the naked human footprints.

Having spent the last half hour wondering what could have happened to Ernie, Bear Ross now found himself thinking something that was almost too preposterous for words.   He recalled his own first encounter with the black wolf in February 1983, at the time of the Ash Wednesday fires that had ravaged South Australia and Victoria.   While taking a break from fire fighting Bear and a few others had been startled to see a large black wolf race into the clearing fleeing the onrushing fire.   Holding out a large slice of Jaffa cake to attract the wolf, Bear had advanced on the wolf whistling at it as though it were an ordinary dog.   Wagging its tail, showing itself to be friendly, the wolf had almost allowed Bear to approach close enough to pat it — Almost!   Before turning tail to flee out through the other side of the clearing.   Thinking at the time that the wolf had seemed too friendly to be really wild, more like someone’s pet; Bear now thought, ‘My God, Ernie you sly, old fox, have you somehow befriended the black wolf and kept it as a pet for the last three years!’

“Could a man be with the black wolf?” asked Des Hutchinson articulating Bear’s thoughts.   “Could someone in the area have become friendly with it somehow and…?”

“Don’t be bloody stupid!” snarled Sam Hart not liking to be contradicted.   “Why would a man go bare foot through the forest at night?   No, it has to be a bloody yowie!   Obviously the yowies and the black wolf are in it together!”

“In what together?” asked Hettie McGillivray trying to bring Sam back to earth before his theories got any wilder or woollier.

“But how could they have teamed up?” asked Des Hutchinson.   Like Sam Hart, Des was no friend of the black wolf, but unlike Sam, he was not given to fanciful theories.

“Well, the black wolf is a psychotic killer, right?” asked Sam.   He glared toward Bear Ross, who wisely decided not to risk the wrath of Hart by standing up for the wolf as he had done on previous occasions.

“If you say so,” replied Des.

“Well, so are the yowies, right?”

“What?” cried Hettie McGillivray from rage and frustration.   “You haven’t got a shred of evidence to support that…!”

“What about the attack on Don and Kim’s hunting party a few nights back?”

“It didn’t attack…it was your hunters who opened fire on it!”

“Well, strictly speaking she’s right,” agreed Kim Monroe sheepishly.   “When we saw that great thing lit up in the spotlight beam we started firing and it took off at top speed.”

“All right!” shouted Sam, not used to being contradicted.   “But one of them did attack our hunting party last night and abducted Bear.   Not to mention a pair of them totalling Clem Horne’s Jeep.   Or the kidnapping of Ernie for that matter….”

He stopped long enough to scan the circle of faces to be certain that he had successfully covered any possible further argument, before continuing.

“Despite what Mrs. McGillivray might think, we have ample proof that the yowies are psychotic killers, and we’ve already agreed that about the black wolf!   So what could be more natural than for them to pair up?”   He thought for a moment before adding, “Like Bonnie and Clyde, Burke and Hare, or Jekyll and Hyde?   Psychotic killers naturally tend to team up together!”

‘Now that’s what I call a logical comparison!’ thought Bear, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.   ‘The poor black wolf and those harmless creatures being compared to two of the greatest tyrants of this century!’

*      *      *

Trying to ignore the bolts of agony shooting through his left foot, Ernie continued to drive through the forest until reaching the Singleton sheep station.

He parked the Rover near the woodpile outside the wire-mesh fence around the farmhouse yard.   Then tentatively stepping out of the car, trying not to place too much weight on his throbbing left foot, he gathered up his clothes and hobbled naked across the yard toward the farmhouse.

On the back porch he searched through his trouser pockets for the keys to his house, then limped inside and headed for the bathroom to examine his injury.   Due to the agony wracking his foot, he had assumed that a bullet had lodged in his foot.   But after washing and examining the injury he saw that there was a long bloody groove down the flesh where it had been grazed by a bullet from Sam Hart’s Winchester.

He liberally doused the wound in Dettol and iodine, before bandaging his foot.   Then after taking a couple of Panadols to kill the pain plus two Mogadons to help him sleep, he headed to the bedroom.

The next few days Ernie was unable to do much more than hobble around the house.   When at last he felt up to driving back to Mount Wanderei to see what had happened to the yowies, he found that the entrance to the underground city had collapsed inward, filling the tunnel with rock and earth, making it impassable.   Although it was quite possibly a natural cave-in, Ernie realised that it was more likely that the yowies had used a concentrated burst of psychic energy to collapse the tunnel to protect the city from discovery by the likes of Sam Hart.

“It seems a shame,” said Bear Ross when the two men talked about it a few days later in the police station in Mitchell Street, Glen Hartwell, “but maybe it was all for the best.   The yowies are too peace loving still to be able to survive contact with our breed of humanity for too long.”

“I guess so,” agreed Ernie.   Although like Bear he was disappointed at the lost opportunity for mankind to learn from its forebears that communication with the yowies might have offered.

Although both men had expected the yowie hysteria to continue with Sam Hart and the news media, they found to their delight that with the loss of the yowie corpse and autopsy photographs taken from the morgue in Baltimore Drive, the media’s interest in Glen Hartwell died out virtually overnight.   Sam Hart concentrated on hunting his pet enemy the black wolf, and without his manic leadership, the other hunters quickly lost interest in the yowies and returned to spot-shooting rabbits and foxes.

THE END

(c) Copyright 2011

Philip Roberts, Melbourne, Australia