“Hi Tarzan,” she says, which appears to be both a joke as well as your name. And like the connotations, you have mixed feelings about it. You also aren’t sure what to do about how nervous she is. She smells anxious, and you’re glad you still know what that smells like even with a pathetic human nose.
“Hi Christine.” You accept the fluffy white robe- at least it’s the same color as your fur- and wrap your sad pathetic hairless body in it before sitting back in the tree hollow where you changed. “I missed you. I’m glad you’re back.” You got worried a few times since meeting Christine a season ago, but she’d never been missing for more than a few days. She was never gone this long before. You’re relieved she’s okay. You’re relieved you waited.
“Yeah, I’m glad to be back. I took a mental health… week. I missed you too… Your English is better.” She sits across from you on a stump and picks up the little stuffed bear you brought her. “Is this for me?”
“You liked it when I brought you the other one.” You shrug. It’s something she taught you. Wolves don’t shrug, but sometimes-humans do apparently. She understands it better than a sneeze, so you’re adapting. You’re adaptable.
“Yes, thank you. I did appreciate that. The little girl was glad to have her lamb back, even if there were some tears.” She turns the bear over in her hands and smiles, “this one looks less like the dogs got to it, thank goodness.”
“I didn’t chew on it,” you explain helpfully and she laughs like she believes you but also like you made a joke. You only had the lamb for a day before Christine told you about the human puppy missing her toy. But you’d enjoyed shaking it around before she’d told you she hoped it wasn’t damaged or the girl puppy would be sad. You restrained yourself this time.
“Well thank you for that.” She shifts nervously, mood changing abruptly. Typical for a human. “I was. Um. Wondering.”
You wait patiently. Humans have bad patience, but you are a wolf in man’s skin and a fluffy robe. You have nothing better to do until your claws and teeth return at dawn.
And you don’t mind Christine, even when she’s hesitating and acting like you might bite her.
“You’re, um, you live in the woods right? You’re a wild man right?” She talks so fast it takes you a couple breaths to figure out what she said.
“I’m wild,” you confirm since she’s half right but also not wrong. She laughs like you were kidding, but she’s anxious about it. Humans are ridiculous.
“Right. Good.” She shifts her weight and holds the stuffed toy close to her body. She doesn’t look at you. She doesn’t speak.
“Butts?” You say, because she taught you that one.
She jolts, then looks searchingly at you. Her laugh is a bark, shrill and shocked, ringing through the forest. It sounds good on her.
“Butts?” She sounds confused, but also like she’s playing. Humans are complicated.
“You said good but it wasn’t totally good. So I say “Butts?” and that asks you to say more.” You remember that lesson very well. You’re pleased to have remembered a more obscure human rule.
She laughs louder, this one a shriek like she’s defending her territory. She covers her mouth though, so the sound won’t carry. You’ll explain how to shriek louder so her neighbors will hear her better later.
“You say ‘but?’ and then I explain. Right. You’re right, Tarzan. Really good job.” She fiddles with the stuffed toy and pulls into herself again. You wonder if she means to make herself smaller. You aren’t trying to assert dominance, but maybe only a stronger human can say ‘butts?’ when another human stops talking but shouldn’t. Pack politics aren’t this hard.
“So I said you should explain.” If licking doesn’t work, sometimes a bite will do, but sometimes if a lick doesn’t work, a different kind of lick will.
“I’m glad you’re not… I don’t know. Pushy. You act like a bro sometimes but you’re never weird about it.”
You politely don’t mention that this is all very weird for both of you and she just said a lot of things that were individual words she taught you but not strung together that way. Being a human- even only sometimes- has changed you. You make your face into a ‘frown’. Christine indicates that she understands with a hand wave.
“What I mean is that I feel safer here sometimes. Than where I come from.” She shrugs, which means she isn’t sure what you need clarified.
You politely don’t say ‘please explain everything you just said’ because she didn’t mean to be weird. She actively said she liked how not-weird you two are.
Humans. So much effort.
“You are safe here,” you agree, getting to the heart of the matter. “If I am here there is nothing in the forest that will harm you.” Because the bear is actually pretty calm when she doesn’t have cubs, and the moose are gone for the season. You don’t mention that.
“Tarzan what if I don’t want to go home?” She presses her face to her knees and you wonder, just for a moment, if human body language is primarily about being small.
“Your pack will worry,” you remind her even though you wouldn’t mind having her around. She’d have to learn to hunt better to stay, she keeps catching things and then letting them go again. It’s ridiculous. You’ve contemplated bringing her kills between full moons so she will actually eat for once, but she never seems hungry when you see her around other humans.
“What if my pack is the problem?” Her words are muffled, but her meaning is clear.
Poor Christine is the weakest of her pack. That explains a lot. She’d get a lot more respect if she actually killed what she caught. She has caught the same hawk three times! Three times! On three separate occasions!
“You should bring them the hawk,” is what comes out of your complicated human mouth. At her confused wet face, you elaborate without making her say ‘butts?’ “If you bring them the hawk you catch, they will see you are a good hunter and won’t mistreat you.”
She laughs, but you don’t like this one as much. This one is lonely, sad, like she lost a litter of pups. But being the weakest in the pack there’s no way they let her carry a litter, so. You wait as she scrubs her face with her hands.
“I don’t think the hawk will impress them,” she smiles, but this one is bad too. It’s a shrug-smile. You bare your teeth at her and her smile changes a little. “You look mad,” she tells you. “But you’re smiling. Can you tell me what that face means?”
Humans are so complicated!
“You are smiling but it’s bad.” You stop baring your teeth to explain, shooting her own accusation back at her. “You do not think the hawk is valuable enough to impress them. A hawk is hard to catch! They will be impressed! But you have to kill it and bring it to them to eat. The best hunter will tell you that.”
She bites her lip and smiles. It’s a better one, even with the teeth bared.
“I don’t want to kill the hawk, Tarzan. I told you before. I’m not here to hurt the wildlife.” She draws herself up, fills her lungs with air and sits up straight. She’s making herself look bigger and you sit up to listen. She rarely makes herself big like this. It must be important.
“Tarzan,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like a joke. “What if you came back to society with me?”
Society is what she calls her human pack.
“No,” you can only imagine the carnage you would cause.
“But?” She’s drooping as she asks you to elaborate. Stopping being so big. Becoming smaller.
“No,” you say again with conviction, “I don’t want to go to Society. We both belong out here. You don’t like Society. You always come back to my forest. Every day. You say they don’t appreciate the hawk.” You tilt your head down in a way that you hope means the same thing to humans as it does to wolves.
“How did you know I’m here every day?” She is staring at you, shocked and maybe scared. Like there’s anything in the forest you don’t know about.
“It’s my forest.” You shrug, because that’s all there is to it.
“I don’t see you every day. The fact that you see me but I don’t see you is- is bad!” She’s scared now. Fully scared, eyes wide, feet planted firmly on the ground, hands clinging to the toy you found for her. You briefly entertain telling her that if you wanted to kill and eat her you would have already. You restrain yourself because you are getting better at understanding complex human feelings.
“Okay then you will see me tomorrow.” You hesitate. “I will still be wearing white fur, so you will know it is me.” You touch her robe and she takes a minute to decide whether to believe you. “If you don’t want me to see you unless you see me then-” you don’t know the human word for it. “It’s good.” You shrug. That’s all there is to it.
She smiles without teeth, but it turns bad again, making her forehead wrinkle while she looks away.
“I- there’s a new guy at work. Well. He’s not new. He was here for a little while last year then went north. But he rotated back in. He’s giving me a weird vibe,” she grimaces. So that must be bad. “Just don’t talk to him okay?”
“Weird?” Humans have many types of weird.
“Yeah. Like he looks at me a lot. Sometimes he asks weird questions. Like if I can see well at night. Or he says he gets crazy sometimes and I thought he was making a period joke but-” She shrugs. There’s more to it but she doesn’t want to say. “Maybe I’m being paranoid.”
Paranoid is what she calls it when a human makes a threat display and she pretends they didn’t.
You might have to bite that weird vibe guy. Christine is not a good hunter, he’s probably bullying her.
“I should get back to the ranger station.” Christine stands up, and you haul your ungainly body up, leaning against the tree for stability before you remember how to stay on only two feet. “Thanks for listening Tarzan, this is by far the weirdest part of my job, but I really like it. It makes me feel better that you’re out here. Doing whatever it is you do. I haven’t told anyone about you.”
“As long as you’re in my forest I am here. I see you every day, so I will let you see me too.” You’d lick her, but you found out you’re not supposed to do that to humans a while ago.
You thread yourself through the trees, still so clumsy but at least not as bad as when you were first bitten. You walk Christine back to the edge of the tree line, the ranger station lit up and well marked the human way. You hand her back her robe and she as always offers to let you keep it. You decline as always. You’re cold, but that’s a line you won’t cross. Wolves don’t need clothes.
You navigate your weird human hairless form to your den and spend the rest of the night peering at the collection of colorful things you collected. You’re woken at dawn by the change, but going back to your regular form is always easier and your claws stretch and your jaw widens.
You shake your glossy white fur and stretch, squinting at the muted colors around you. Color is the one thing humans have going for them. You wish you could see colors during the day.
You hunt, eat, and lounge in the sun until it’s time to see Christine.
The ranger station is full of humans, which is why you always stayed fairly far away, but Christine leads ‘hikes’ and sometimes goes out on her own and howls wolfsong along to her ‘phone’. She usually takes a walk alone at this time.
Today though.
Today she’s with him.
You know what the ‘weird vibe’ is the second you see him, and you’re sprinting down the side of the hill with reckless abandon. Christine notices you first and her eyes go wide. She makes a sound of alarm, but your attention is solely focused on him.
Weird Vibe guy pulls out a black stick and points it at you.
“Don’t!” Christine shoves the black stick and weird vibe guy pulls sharply away from her without making the sound that means death, and you skid between them, snarling.
Your tail is up and your hackles are raised and you are showing him all your teeth.
“Holy shit,” weird vibe guy whisper-yells. “It’s you!”
Christine has backed away from you both. Which is for the best. You were about to tear this guy limb from limb and she would have gotten in the way until you can teach her to hunt better.
You lunge and the guy stumbles away, trying to level his black stick at you again.
“Look I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t know anyone was already in these woods!” He’s backing away, “and I’m outmatched okay? I’m only human until the full moon!”
You try to express with your whole body that what he is is a pile of meat. A pile of meat giving Christine weird vibe and getting you into this mess.
“What?” Christine is loud, but in a bad way. “What- wait. WAIT!” She’s yelling so you look at her for a second, and she’s making herself big. She’s even moving toward you rapidly. “Don’t you dare shoot him Jack!” You turn around and the black stick is pointed right at you.
Well. You knew becoming a human would be the end of you but you’re going to take this weird vibe down with you. You lunge.
“Stop it, Tarzan!” Christine is yelling at you, which is not something that’s happened before and you find yourself flinching as her body slams into you and the black stick. She is right in the middle of a fight and she’s not doing anything but yelling.
Weirdly it’s working. The black stick isn’t killing you, the weird vibe guy is backing away from both of you. Christine looks rapidly between the two of you.
“Uh. He’s rabid?” The other human/sometimes-wolf is asking if you should be killed, that’s what ‘rabid’ means. Or he said ‘rabbit’ which is also something that gets killed. You snarl at him. “He’s not! He’s not rabid! Sorry! Geezus. You speak English?! What the hell.”
“Wait.” Christine has wound up wisely just out of biting range. “He speaks English because I taught him… You’re a werewolf- oh my god?” She looks at you, and she’s shocked, and maybe excited. Humans are complicated like that.
She looks you right in the eyes.
“Tarzan?” She makes your name a question and also a joke. You make the appropriate sound of approval.
“Tarzan!?” Both human and sometimes-human are staring at each other. Their expressions are too complicated for you to read.
“His name is Tarzan. I- I always do the full moon shift because he’s- uh-” Christine pulls her black stick out. She points it at the sometimes-human. “Wait you’re a werewolf.” She has no inflection, but you have this distinct impression she’s confused. Maybe angry.
Your hackles go back up and you plant yourself between the stupid sometimes-human who got you into this mess and Christine. She keeps the black stick pointed at him, so you’re thinking alike. You’re moderately proud of her.
“Okay so listen. I rotated in because I wanted the full moon shift in the woods.” Weird guy puts his black stick down on the ground slowly and raises his hands, which seems counter intuitive, but you don’t have hands enough to think about them too hard and the gesture calms Christine. “But you always took it. Then one night I went out, got into a fight with a big white wolf in the woods and I thought oh shit there’re two werewolves here already because I fought a white male and then your robe smelled like him next month. So I left, right? But then like. You didn’t say anything or address it and I came back to, I dunno. See if you were chill?”
Chill is what Christine calls people who are not threats but also not her people. You growl at the guy.
“I promise I will leave next rotation. I wasn’t in the woods last night because you took the shift right?” He is asking Christine, but his eyes are on you.
Which is smart because if you smelled this guy in your forest he’d be dead already.
“You better um. Go back to the station.” Christine’s black stick has dipped a little but she points it at weird vibe sometimes-wolf and he backs away slowly.
“Before I go, um. Does he turn into a wolf-man too or-?” At Christine’s sharp movement he takes off at a jog.
You’re left alone in the woods as always, but it’s different now and you both know it.
Christine looks at you and the black stick lowers.
“Hi Tarzan.” Maybe it’s not so different. She sits down in the dirt and you turn to face her, bringing your tail to a respectable level and sitting down fully when she makes no move. “Wow. Okay. So. Weird wild man is a wolf man who is protecting me from another wolf-man. Or… is he a man-wolf and you’re a wolf-man?” Her shoulders slump. “Is it weird this is way more plausible than a wild man running around in the forest naked?”
It is massively more plausible for you to turn into a sad pathetic man for a night than for a sad pathetic man to just live in your forest. You couldn’t catch anything in human form, even though Christine catches hawks and deer and rabbits and everything else with ease. You laugh a little at the thought, panting and letting your tongue hang out of your mouth.
“I thought you said you were wild,” Christine smiles her best surprised happy smile at you but it’s also a joke. You think this time you’re kind of in on it and give your tail a hilarious useless wag like some of the pathetic human’s dogs that look more like snacks. Christine chuckles. “Thanks for protecting me, Tarzan. Guess I should have called you something else. Like Balto or Whitefang.”
You like ‘Tarzan’, you’ve already learned it as your name, so you flatten your ears at her to indicate your disapproval. She nods.
“Got it. Tarzan it is. My wild man-wolf.” She covers her face with one hand. “You know rule number one of wildlife handling?”
You do not. You thought it was ‘eat it if you catch it’ but Christine- and humans- mystify you. You wait patiently until she remembers you can’t answer.
“It’s ‘wild animals are always wild’.” She smiles at you and it means ‘sorry’ and ‘goodbye’. You hate that smile. “And you told me that yourself, huh.”
You did. You lie down anyway. Let her know she’s alright. You won’t hurt her.
“You’re a wild animal, but also my weird wild friend Tarzan.” She seems to be reasoning through it herself, and you couldn’t interrupt anyway, so you sit there and listen. “And I have to remember from now on that you’re not- that I shouldn’t anthropomorphize you. You’re a wolf. A white wolf.”
She pauses, eyes growing distant.
“Oh my god!” She looks sharply at you. “You said you’d be wearing white fur when I saw you last night! You made a joke!”
You begin panting as she catches up to your vastly superior sense of humor and she throws her head back and laughs heartily.
“That’s wild!” She laughs. And she’s right.