The Legend of Black Wolf - Sully's Journey Home

Chapter Twenty Six

         No amount of calling or finger snapping or even whistling would bring Wolf from his hiding place. Sully, exhausted and worried, sat at the base of the tree where he had encounter Hank Lawson an hour before. He tried to think of what possibly could have happened to Wolf. There had been a time when he had thought he would have had to of returned Wolf to the wild and gone on alone. Now that he was alone, he had a sick feeling inside of him that this was not something Wolf had chosen on his own.        

        In a moment of desperation, Sully reverted to his sniper tactics he’d learned in the army and climbed the tree to get a bird’s eye view of the situation. He thought that, perhaps if he could see more of the area, he would be able to spot a track or something that Wolf might have gone to investigate. The tree was quite tall and the first branch was about twenty feet in the air. Once Sully reached this height, he sat himself on the arm of the mighty tree and laid against it to lower his line of sight to just below the leaves. Then, he thought of his medicine man friend, and cleared his mind of everything that couldn’t be a clue, so he might better be able to see what a clue could be.      

        On the fourth careful scan of the area, Sully began to pick out a dark line in the leaf litter below the tree. It seemed to head off to his left, but was very slight. He couldn’t even be sure of what it was until he came down out of the tree to see some of the leaves up close. It could be just the way a shadow was falling as the mid morning sun was coming through the trees now. But, other than that, there was absolutely no sign of anything out of the ordinary that could possibly have lured Wolf away from camp on such a damp, foggy morning. He had to climb down and check the leaves closely.      

        Once Sully was back on the ground, it became clear soon enough that the discoloration that created a line was not merely a shadow but tiny drops of blood. The drops were dark and dried, no longer sticky, and Sully feared that perhaps Wolf had injured himself and had gone off to nurse his wounds somewhere he felt was safe. But upon looking at the track, he could see that the drops were quite close together and not spaced out as if Wolf had been walking. And at the beginning of the line, there was no other sign of blood anywhere near where he had camped the night before. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere, either.

      ‘If Wolf had caught something, or tangled with another animal this close, surely I’d have heard some kind of noise in the night.’ Sully thought to himself. The trail of blood seemed deliberate. ‘What on Earth would bleed on purpose to lure a dangerous creature like a wolf, of all animals?’

      Sully stood there in the clearing, one of the bloody leaves twirling between his fingers. He looked off in the direction where the drops seemed to go. There was no such creature more cunning and dangerous than a wolf. Nothing hunted wolves. This couldn’t have been another animal. If a wounded animal had come from that direction into his camp, Wolf would’ve finished it off right there and ate it by the fire, next to Sully. Surely, Sully would have woken to the sounds of Wolf killing and eating the animal. And no animal could’ve walked through camp without waking Wolf, then spontaneously started bleeding, and walked off to make Wolf go hunt in that direction, that didn’t make any sense either. Could it have been a bird?

      Sully looked up, but the branches overhead were such that he couldn’t imagine any large bird of prey flying so low, especially on such a foggy night as last night. Even if it had been a hawk with a meal in its claws, the drops of blood wouldn’t be so close together. Any bird would’ve flown too fast, and the drops would be more spread out. The only answer to the blood was a man. Only men feared and hated animals like the wolf to care enough to lure it away. He couldn’t imagine a guy like Hank would be quiet enough to tromp through the woods to set up such an elaborate plan. Any white man would’ve simply shot Wolf from the road as soon as they had a clear shot. No, it had to be an Indian. The Cheyenne were the only Indians he knew, but all of them could cross the woods without causing a sound.