THE HIGH RIDGE
by
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THE KISS She didn’t believe in taking life, so when the wolf stuck its head through the torn screen door -- the only door in that flimsy summer cottage -- and I reached for my rifle, she went into the other room and opened the Bhagavad Gita. That’s the way she was. She tried to be consistent; however, I could remember her spraying ants once because of something that happened in the bathroom. If it hadn’t been for me, she’d have been a vegetarian, but not a very healthy one. The doctor advised her to eat a certain amount of meat in order to keep her latent anemia under control. Those neat, frozen, plastic-wrapped cubes we bought at the market didn’t much remind her of living creatures. I stopped hunting because of her. But she didn’t go in for health foods, she liked a martini before dinner, and she never complained about my tobacco addition, although I typically gave off clouds of smoke from my pipe after dinner. (I chose a particularly aromatic blend of tobacco partially with the thought of pleasing her.) The wolf appeared several times that night. It paused in the ragged aperture long enough for me to put down my pipe, pick up my rifle and fire. Ordinarily it would hardly have been possible for me to miss, but the conditions weren’t ordinary. I’ve been afraid before and it hasn’t caused my marksmanship to be so bad. Of course, we had seen a couple of pro-wolf documentaries. I didn’t know wolves came so large. The head -- which was about all I saw -- looked as big and broad as the head of a grizzly; but I suppose it was magnified by my alarm. It simply appeared there and studied me with wide, slanting, yellow eyes. It wasn’t snarling. I couldn’t read its intentions from the expression on its face, but the fact that it was there at all made me react defensively. The materials and tools I would need for repairing the door were in the shed some twenty feet from the cottage. It was dark. The flashlight was feeble. I thought it best not to risk going out until morning. In between its visitations, she and I discussed the matter briefly while I smoked and we sipped white wine to steady our nerves. She thought there was a good chance of establishing rapport with the animal, if only I wouldn’t shoot at it. Something in the way it gazed at me reminded her of a cat she had once had. There had been a strong bond between them. Naturally she thought about him a good deal, and she believed that she occupied his mind even more than he did hers. Observing him as frequently as she did, she became aware of a behavior pattern which gave her an insight into his view of reality: Having established, through habit, the fact of her being in a certain place at a certain time, he would gaze at that spot whether or not she was really there, and he would purr contentedly. If she actually appeared elsewhere, his hair would stand on end and he would flee as if from a ghost. He would remain disoriented until she was in her regular place at the usual time. It seemed to her that the wolf wanted to be my friend, if only I would make some sort of encouraging gesture. It didn’t look dangerous to her, she said -- it looked tolerant, and tolerance could be the beginning of affection, perhaps of a strong, lasting relationship. I had to admit that its jaws weren’t open, but I thought they would open once it got inside the cottage. To say it looked tolerant was to personify it, to project human attributes to a wild beast -- whose friendship, incidentally, I did not covet. Tameness was another matter, but who would have tamed it? A hermit, possibly? If it belonged to a hermit, what was it doing here where the woods were quite thin, although there were no other cottages that we knew of for several miles? Perhaps the hermit needed help, or perhaps he had died and now the wolf was sad and wanted human company. Also, if its master was dead, the wolf must be hungry because there was no one to feed it. This brought up the subject of meat once more. I mentioned that we had eaten the little can of deviled ham earlier in the day. She and I were the only meat in the house, so to speak. Her reply was that the Desert Fathers used to persuade wolves and lions to live on things like bread and grass and the sort of gruel that ascetic monks lived on. St. Francis of Assisi was said to have turned a savage wolf into a friendly animal who used to go from village to village, begging. I must have dozed off. When I woke up, she had retired into the other room. The wolf was staring at me again, in a way that was too intense and too personal for my liking. I reached for the rifle. My hand closed on air. Snatching an Indian blanket, I opened it out and shook it menacingly, at the same time advancing. To my relief, the creature backed away. I hung the blanket over the door, stepped into the other room and looked for the rifle. There was also a shotgun, which I kept loaded in the closet. Both guns were missing. She had taken her sleeping pills. I didn’t want to wake her. There would be a useless and distressing scene. I knew what she had done. While I was dozing, she had carried off both guns and had hidden them in the shed -- a risky business, going out in the pitch dark, but she had the courage of innocence. There was nothing for it but to go to the shed, to retrieve one of the guns, preferably the rifle, as I did not think I would be able to prevail with my bare hands. Many things were missing in the cottage, and the thing I missed most at the time, after the gun, was a knife with a point on it. The knives all had round or semi-round ends. I chose a two-pronged fork with tines about two and a half inches long, which some one had probably used for picking up steaks from a barbecue. It wasn’t made to go into a wolf’s eye -- the tines were too far apart for that -- but I thought that under stress I might be able to thrust it into the beast’s abdomen. The fangs would almost certainly be too much for me, but for years I had had a piece of theoretical knowledge which had once caught my fancy, although I had never tested it. This could be the unique occasion which would justify my having retained it. I had once read of a man who, when attacked by a tiger in an Indian jungle, thrust his arm down the animal’s throat and held it there until the ferocious predator choked to death. It had been unable to close its jaws or even to use its claws effectively. Timing, resolution, strength, the ability to follow through would be essential to the success of this solution. The flashlight ws too dim to be of any use. Abandoning, it, I started to grope my way to the shed, the fork in my right hand, my left hand ready to strike. I must have been almost there, when it leaped on me from behind, bearing me to the ground. The fork flew out of my hand. Grappling blindly, I managed to roll over on my back, but I couldn’t get my arms up high enough to protect my throat. Its legs were in the way. Tucking my chin into my chest, I caught the beast around the middle, clasped my hands, and sought desperately to break its back with a sudden, violent bear hug. It failed. I tried again, with no luck. The embrace told me that it was a female. I couldn’t break her back or even her ribs, but I was afraid to let go. I suppose I thought that if I squeezed her hard enough, it would shut off her wind. I could feel the hot, fetid
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About the Book
Unlike John Berry's earlier book of stories FLIGHT OF WHITE CROWS, in which most of the stories were set in India, the present collection of sixteen stories is varied in locale and in treatment of subject matter. Some are surreal, some futuristic and nearly all have an element of the fantastic. The only "true" story in the sense of being fact-based is The Swan Poet, the story of a woman living in the Depression era (the thirties). The art student in the story is fictional, but the "Swan Poet" herself is not. In The Hot Homage, Damon Guster, a successful British poet and textbook publisher, unreflectingly takes on the identity but not the name of a poet who had been the idol of his youth, but who is now long forgotten and presumed dead. When the latter surfaces in a London Hospital reportedly dying, Guster, in a state of genuine grief, has a hallucinatory experience. An Angel with a Flaming Pen descends before him and forces him to write or rather to collaborate on an elegy commemorating the death of the old poet. After the Angel departs, Guster knows that this elegy is by far his best work, the one he will be remembered for. But a problem arises. The "dying" poet gradually recovers and Guster is left to decide what to do about his now publishable masterpiece. In a futuristic journey over the mountains of the High Ridge, which had been much altered by late climatic and Geotectonic events, the protagonist, who is taking a small boy to the lamasery at Tarak Dzong, stumbles over the tip of the long lost Mount Everest. It had been one of the first peaks to subside in the cataclysmic retraction of the Himalayas. Loved By A Malevolent Force is the story of a young man in Brazil who falls under the spell of a witch. This ill-omened relationship results in an unusual misadventure in the Brazilian jungle. In The Kiss a young man and his wife are visited in their forest cottage by a wolf, who appears enigmatically at their screen door. They discuss the pros and cons of the reason for the wolf's visit. The wife is certain the wolf has a benign expression, but her husband is skeptical. In a sense they are both right.
About the Author
John Berry's first collection of stories, FLIGHT OF
WHITE CROWS (published by Macmillan in the U.S., Gollancz in
England) was enthusiastically reviewed in literary journals. Santha Rama Rau
wrote in the New York Times "Wildly original, funny and profound... Any
reviewer must bless a writer for exploring new frontiers in a new way . .
.crammed with entertainment, satire, excitement and reflection." Stories
from this collection were reprinted in a number of anthologies including Martha
Foley's THE
BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES.
The five years that followed its publication
John Berry devoted to his long poem TRAVELS OF THE PRINCE, a work he revised
over several decades.
During the seventies and eighties he wrote
several novels and most of the stories in the present collection. Eight of
these stories appeared in Literary Quarterlies including Prairie Schooner, The
Massachusetts Review, Chelsea and Denver Quarterly.
Like many writers, John Berry always preferred mornings as the best time to write. Afternoons he frequently worked on sculpture, using designs and drawings by his wife, Ynez, and transforming them into wood. Some were then cast in bronze and some were painted. So it is no coincidence that one of the characters in his novel NAMES OF THE EYE HUNTER is a sculptor, or that in the series of sketches in THE HIGH RIDGE called "Tight Spots" there is a painter who tries to perform a daring-feat that only one artist before him has successfully attempted.