THE WOLFGOAT

THE WOLFGOAT

THE WOLFGOAT


God, if you do exist, now is the right time to convince the miserable me into your existence. Demonstrate your immense might and save this pitiful infidel. It doesn’t matter if I don’t deserve it – save me just for the sake of it, just for kicks. Out of spite. I don’t want to perish in this godforsaken land. Lord, you allowed the death of two writers in one day. There’s no need for my demise too. If we count Maruša into it – that’s already three. That’s a lot, dear God, so many writers have not perished in a single day ever since that war. The Second World War. Who knows if there ever was such a plague among the literati. Oh, great Yahve, who art in heaven where you sit in a white suit like Morgan Freeman and watch our misery and our earthly woe, let me reach civilization, and then you don’t have to do anything for me ever again. Or you may – as you please. But make this that I ask happen now, because now I need it. I beg you!
Climbing down blindly among those rock, at one moment I stepped into something that wasn’t a stone. I turned around and saw Keret covered in bruises and blood lying on some bush.
“Move your foot,” he cried.
I moved my foot from his knee.
“You’re alive?”
“Better if I weren’t…”
“Listen, I don’t know how to get you down, kill me – but I don’t know.”
“How far is it?”
“Some forty-five, sixty feet.”
“Leave me, go, run away…”
Wise words, my friend, I thought. Both my mind and my heart were absolutely for leaving him here, because anything else was simply impossible, but then from somewhere conscience called: it would be an asshole move to leave the wretched bastard lying here like a towel left on the beach to dry in the sun. I looked up. Of course, the wolfgoat was elegantly coming toward us.
“There it is, the wolfgoat, go,” Keret wheezed.
“Ah, let it come.”
I could care less. My strength drained away anyhow.
The wolfgoat came towards us and bellowed: “Roaaaar!!” It was as if it wanted to say: “You motherfuckers! Now you’re fucked!”
I thought I was getting dizzy and about to faint, but there really was something beating behind us. The sound grew mightier.

***

The soldiers in the Mountain Rescue Service helicopter fired their machine guns. The wolfgoat screamed. Seeing that things were about to get serious, in one swift leap the wolfgoat scrambled up to the ledge and disappeared somewhere in the gorges of Velebit.
Three large search operations for Maruša Klemen were undertaken but none of them bore any fruit. Above that ledge there truly was a cave and the wolfgoat, no doubt at all, dwelled in it. However, no proof was found that it ever dragged the poetess there. The only clue was that piece of orange shirt. Nothing more.
Blaž Perković’s remains were laid to rest in his family tomb at Mirogoj Cemetery. It rained during the ceremony. Fittingly. Tanja, Wells and I said goodbye to the man who spent his last earthly hours with us. The Israeli ambassador and his wife came to the funeral too. Keret, of course, couldn’t. At that time, and for the next six months, he was confined to a bed in an army hospital in Tel Aviv, where he was recovering for multiple bone fractures.
From time to time, there were unreliable testimonies of sightings of the Velebit wolfgoat. We saw it here. We saw it there. People want to see miraculous creatures and phenomena, at least once in their lifetime they want to see something beyond imagination: UFOs, Loch Ness monster, Yeti and its cousin Bigfoot, fairies and elves, or the wolfgoat – that lonely monster.
We who really saw it do not crave for a new encounter. Wolfgoat, let your home in the mountains stay far and clear from us.

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