THE WOLFGOAT

THE WOLFGOAT

THE WOLFGOAT


“Aaah…” the old man croaked and gave the finger to Maruša and the rest of us. “Go fuck yourselves and the one who brought you here!”
“Just a crazy old man, you know…” Lela twirled her finger around her temple, which is an internationally recognized sign that someone is just not all there.
The foreigners understandingly nodded as if trying to say – ah, what can you do, we have those too, they’re crazy but you just have to let them live. As the old man, mumbling angrily under his breath, slowly continued down the path toward the village, restlessness of some kind snuck into my bones. I interpreted the man with the bundle of sticks as a warning, as a sign to simply say goodbye to everything and coldly turn around and go where I had come from – back to the civilization. Ah, screw it, I thought, there’s no point in bailing out now. No one pressed the gun against my forehead, I could have easily said: Thanks, but no thanks. Dear Tanja, you and your hiking-writing association may have a nice stay on Velebit, but I’ll stay here, that’s just not for me.
It’s too late to change your mind, I concluded. With the whole mountain that had been sitting here for a million years preventing us in Zagreb from having a Mediterranean climate, I could no longer go back, only forward – up, way up high, to meet the skies. If only someone, but not for real, just a little, got poisoned from that whey, I’d volunteer in a second to accompany him to the nearest hospital and I wouldn’t have to come back here again.

The finger that the branch carrier gave us so rudely drilled into my already fragile self-confidence. The old man cursed us – something would go bad.
Something will go bad, I kept repeating, something will surely take the wrong turn.

***

And it did, but not right away.
“With such loads in your stomach you won’t get far. You didn’t think about it, right? Tanja, you hold all the blame. If someone starts falling behind on me, you’ll carry him on your back, are we clear?”
“We took a little bite and had a glass of wine, that’s nothing, it’s just a little something so that they don’t get dizzy from the mountain air.”
Blaž, a man who’d exchanged the safety of a city for an untamable wilderness, appeared before us as a ghost. No one saw where he came from.
“Let’s skip the formalities, we’ll get to know each other along the way, and now listen: cell phones, laptops, iPhones, iPods, and all those gadgets, you’re leaving all that here! Capisci?! Is there someone among you who cannot separate from their ‘precious’ for a few days?”
That was the moment. I could’ve stepped out or raised my arm and said – I, I’m the one, I can’t separate from my cell phone. The opportunity offered itself, but I kept quiet like everyone else.
“Ok, Lela and Jan will look after your valuables. You’ll collect them on your way back, let’s go, chop-chop,” he said and clapped his hands to make us hurry.
Some forty minutes later, I had no idea where we were. Wells wondered how would he write in case he got an inspiration – and he would, for sure.
“We’ll get you some paper and a pen,” Blaž replied without turning back.
Wells glanced at Keret as if wanting to say: Paper and pen, what the fuck?
“You don’t have to write every day, think about things,” the Israeli said and patted the American’s shoulder.
“What things?” Wells asked.
“Think about your super-laptop you had to leave with the hippies, think about the rotisserie chicken, how can you be so whiny in the middle of all this beauty? Look at this!” Maruša said and spread her arms showing the Velebit landscape.
“I’m not whining.”
“Waahhh-waahhh,” Keret teased and grinned.
“Waahhh-waahhh, you fuckin’ crybaby,” Maruša joined it.
“I’m not a fuckin’ crybaby!”
Tanja hugged Wells around his waist. “Leave them alone, they’re just fuckin’ around with you. We’ll go pick flowers together later, huh? Just the two of us?”
“Wait, what? Why?”

Climbing up the hill, walking along a flat path through the sharp blue-grey rocks among which, here or there, grew plants I knew nothing about, we reached a plateau under a steep cliff.
“We’ll rest here, for twenty minutes, not longer. We have a climb to make, this one in front of you. It’s not difficult, but you’ve got to be careful,” Perković informed us briefly and then stretched out on the ground.
“I have to pee,” Maruša said. “But where?”
“Wherever you want, there, you can go there behind those rocks,” Tanja said and pointed at a couple of rocks at the end of this plateau, pasture, whatever is the expert name for a place such as this one.
The Slovenian took something from her backpack and headed to the other side in a leisured pace as if walking along a fashion runway. Keret, Wells and I watched as she went. Tanja and Blaž didn’t. He was watching the sky, and Tanja was entertaining herself by throwing her hunting knife into the ground – every time it hit the ground only a fraction of an inch from her left or right foot.
Just as she disappeared behind those rocks, Maruša screamed and ran towards us pulling her pants up along the way.
“What the fuck…” Wells shouted.
The distance the poetess had to run was slightly shorter than a football field, but she never made it. Like in a child’s nightmare, a monster some nine or twelve feet tall jumped out from behind the rocks, leaped upward and in two swift jumps caught up with our companion cutting her off.
“The wolfgoat!” I heard Blaž scream.
“Shoo, shoo, shoo!” Tanja shouted.
Wells and Keret said nothing or if they did, I didn’t hear them. I had my own problems, big problems.
It seemed, well, that I had lost my mind. So, that’s how it happens – monsters break into reality and you go see how you are going to deal with it. The creature called wolfgoat never once wondered what and how. Before our very eyes it grabbed the poetess Klemen, pressed her under its arm as if she were a baby or a loaf of bread and, with speed and agility you seldom see, disappeared behind those rocks and away wherever that ‘away’ of its may be.

AuthorZoran Pilić
2018-12-13T12:09:33+00:00 November 10th, 2016|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 110|0 Comments