2013/02/11 12:48
Then there was a knock on the door. The Guards were here already. I pulled back the curtains and peered around to the front door, my mind racing with thoughts such as just how, exactly, does one conduct oneself in a siege situation when one doesn’t have a gun? Or, for that matter, a hostage? However, I needn’t have worried. It was the woman who lived next door. It emerged that the man Brenin and I had assaulted was her estranged husband. She told me that he would showed up every now and then usually after he’d had skinful to beat her up. Even better, at least from the perspective of my wolf and me, was that there was a restraining order in effect and he wasn’t supposed to be within 100-feet of her house not that this, apparently, had done much good. So, I figured, the chances of Rosslare on hold.
Even now, I can’t believe how lucky I was that night. Admittedly, anyone in my garden at midnight wasn’t going to be up to much good. But even so, would you really want us as neighbors'? What if it had been a child in your garden? That is what the shopkeeper would have said. I’m inclined to think everything would have been fine. Brenin didn’t get to meet that many children in his life, but the ones he did meet he always treated with a gentleness and consideration that impressed me. Certainly, after this night, he got know the little boy next door quite well and both the boy and his mother became very fond of Brenin.
Nonetheless, the episode did make me aware of something that, in hindsight, had probably been sloshing around in my precautious mind for some time. Brenin and I were just a little to volatile. And because of this, we were just a little too dangerous. If we were cowboys, people would have described us as having itchy trigger fingers. That’s what pops into my mind when I think of my actions on that night. I was just a little too quick to jump in, my flying feet just a little too eager to support Brenin’s flashing teeth. Our sense of loyalty to each other now far outstripped our sense of justice to other. We had become a pack; a nation of two. And those outside our nation didn’t matter to us as much as they should have mattered.
After this incident, many of you might say that Brenin had no place in a civilized society. You might be right, but if so I would add the caveat neither did I. that night marked beginning of our gradual withdrawal from the world of humans. This world and I have to be honest about this had begun to disgust me. It disgusted me that there was, in effect, a shoot-to-kill policy on Brenin. It disgusted me that I had to be a running man constantly ready to pack my bags and take flight. These thoughts were, of course melodramatic to do something I wanted to do anyway. The real change was not in the world but in me. From the gregarious party animal of my Alabama days, I had become something quite different: a loner, a misfit, a misanthrope. I was someone who didn’t belong. I was sick of humans. I needed to get their stench out of my nostrils.
