“What did I say?”
The wolf shifted her gaze away from him and stared out at the thorns.
“Look, I said I’m sorry. What more do you want me to do?”
The wolf lifted her head and looked at him. She did not growl, nor did she bare her teeth at him. She just looked at him and, in that look, he understood, somehow. The hurt that she conveyed in that wilting look would have melted a jaguar. She dropped her head to rest on her legs that were spread out in front of her. She turned her head back to the briar wall leaving him to deal with his guilt alone.
He started to apologize once more but he knew that it was not going to do any good. In fact, it might insult her further. He lowered his eyes down to the dirty piece of fabric that he was holding. He couldn’t see any damage to the ripped pair of shorts except the whole being ripped in half thing. He took out the other half of the shorts that he had carried with him inside his pants. He held both pieces of fabric together. He looked over at the wolf. She looked like she was asleep. He knew she wasn’t.
He kept his eyes on her until he could barely make out the outline of her body against the deep surrounding shadows. From behind she was covered with only softly textured black fur, almost impossible to see in the deepening dark that fall around them. He didn’t know if she was sleeping or not. He looked at her for a long time before a light, fitful, guilt riddled sleep took over him.
He awoke at the sound of helicopter blades. The helicopter was close, much closer than he would have liked. If it was the same helicopter that they escaped earlier, it was traveling much slower and much lower to the ground. He jerked himself up and looked around. The she-wolf was already at work digging under the briars of the enclosure. He wondered why she was digging. The noise from the helicopter was loud and he knew that it was close by. But even its searchlight wouldn’t be able to penetrate the thorns that enclosed them.
He moved over to the she-wolf. His ankle was fine even after so little sleep. He moved it, rotated it and put his weight on it. There was no pain and no sign that anything had happened to it. The noise from the rotor blades was deafening even though they were insulated from it by the briar patch. He moved beside the wolf. He lifted his hand to pet her but before his hands came above her head she snarled and whipped her head towards him. She bared her teeth at him and growled. Her snout was about three inches away from his face and he could see death in her golden eyes. He withdrew his hands from her head and she turned back to her work. The helicopter had either entered into a hover, or it was moving at a snail’s pace because the noise of its rotor blades wasn’t getting any softer but it wasn’t getting any louder either. His mind reeled in panic. Did they find us? How did they find us? What would they do when they finally caught them?
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The she-wolf obviously wasn’t ready to be captured yet and she was working on an escape route. If those guys in the helicopter had tracked them here then they had followed their trail into the briar patch, so the tunnel they had used to get here was not an option. Now he understood why the wolf was digging under the thorns. They had to get out another way.
He dove beside her and shoved his hands in the rich dark soil and began moving handfuls away from the hole that the she-wolf was digging. Those guys probably had people on the ground and if they were in a military helicopter, it only stood to reason that they would have military personnel on the ground looking for them. Those military personnel would be armed.
He dug more. If the helicopter was still hovering, and the sound hadn’t changed for a minute or two, then that would mean the ground assets hadn’t arrived yet. They still had some time but he had no idea how much time. His hands became bloody from scraping up against the thorns that he was digging under.
Time was moving too quickly. They didn’t have any time. Any minute some soldier would poke his head through the entrance tunnel and order them to stop, or just shoot them both in the back. His mind was in a blind panic. What do they want from me? He was sweating with the exertion of the work but also from fear and the phantom soldiers that would shoot him any second. He almost cried out for nothing else than to drown out the noise of the helicopter. He dug faster but it wasn’t fast enough too much time had passed.
Just when he thought his phantoms would drive him insane, he could see a small opening leading out of the briar patch. The she-wolf lowered herself and scrambled through the hole. He turned around and saw the two pieces of denim in the dirt where he had left them. If those government guys had tracked him here, then there was no reason to keep the fabric. But he picked them up anyway and stuffed them into his pants. Turning toward the hole he dove after the wolf.
The briars grabbed at him and dug into his back. He fought and kicked his way through the hole into the open forest. The night air was dark and cold. He would have looked up for the stars but the search light from the helicopter outshined all the stars and filled the would-be somber atmosphere with its loud mechanical sound that he could barely hear himself think through. He put his hands to his ears and dove behind a tree as the search light passed over where he and the wolf had escaped from the briar patch.