The Wolfman of Oz

By Bill Reed

You could say man into wolf and wolf into man got blasted into existence. You could also say the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Tasmanian Wolf got blasted out of existence too. It’s called extinction and it lasts forever and, when Ihe the wolfman did the sums of early Tasmania, it all added up. This was except for one thing... the existence of the truly last Thylacine Wolf hiding out somewhere life-giving and life-preserving from the ever-hunters and the always-killers.
This made it all the more urgent for him to find the great beast first, in order to brace up its unique animal-kind courage before they tracked him down. They are always tracking it down. But he was Man and he was Wolf, as one, and he was on the scent too... that for every eye done to extinction was a human hunter’s eye and for every done-in eye tooth was a human hunter’s tooth. And for flesh, what better than human flesh?
There was only his famous arch-enemy to hunt down and run from, both.
It was bad enough when he planted his foot on in the wrong place and the Army’s report about it concluded, ‘In any hairy situations, this will undoubtedly change how he gets a lot of looks’. But what would the Army know about the trauma that transmogrifies?
It’s always been nits or nothing, anyway.
It’s just that Ihe the wolfman didn’t want to end up like the presumed last T. Wolf hanging from a rafter. That great shame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Reed
• Release date: Apr 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648764151

Book preview

Reed Independent publishers, Australia, [e-mail]

This is a Smashwords edition

This paperback and ebook are available from most leading retail and/or online outlets.

hardback ISBN 9780648764137

paperback: ISBN 9780648764144

ebook: ISBN 9780648764151

Copyright © Bill Reed 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Extinction is forever. You can’t get enough of it.

Yes, and when he was asked why he had been heard thinking, ‘If you’re going to go all hairy, do it against a tree on the nearer side of the farther or the farther side of the nearer’, Ihe answered, ‘All of everything has always been too much of a mouthful for me. I am for the smaller lump in the throat bolted down. There is nothing wrong with me that’s right. I am Whosit am I.’

Contents

Foreboding

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

also by Bill Reed

about the author

Foreboding

The junior medico saw the movement out of the corner of his eye. He moved his head for the first time in what he hadn't realised was a half an hour there. Half of which screamingly there. Half of which moaningly there. But he had not moved his head and the panic had rooted his body there. Only his mouth had moved moo-ishlv. During that time, yes, there.

The junior medico did not know, would ever come to know, that, not five kilometres away and almost a half-a-century before, but off down the same slivering jungle’d track, three Australian newsmen had registered much the same kind of sickening surge of recognition that they were just about to die together at the hands of a cluck of Indonesian Intelligence regulars. They did. Stubbed against the battle rubble by machine-gun bullets. Dusted up, yes, for all their families to know but the world never really to acknowledge, as in who’s more forgettable of far cries than a hotspot journo?

That was, yes, only five measures away, almost to the spot. And here, in the steam of the mountains, further 'in' in an island of this all-inland, the young medico stood rooted on a bush path between not much to note geographically, but a lot going militaristically. He was standing stymied upon an anti-personnel mine with its own nice turn of killing speed should the young medico take his foot off it as stumpingly as he had trodden upon it. Then froze. As must be. And after this time of infinity stretching all of those thirty minutes had moved his head within some old leftover circumstance of that-then East Timorese insurgency, would you believe it?, when did he notice the flushed movement blur at the perimeter of his vision. It seemed to be boiling away at him in the manner as the surrounding jungle was humming.

In some way, all was nudging to move his foot an inch away from the bomb at his feet and let’s see what happens.

The moving thing at the corner of his eye did not hold. There was too much perspiration and too much bloodpump throbbing him. It was all he had to manage to register the familiar voice and apply a luridly silent please to his team chief, near enough to him, going:

'Cripes, old son.'

'HELP!'

‘You sure you're on a Claymore or whatever?’

‘YES!’

‘Anything by way of proof positive?’

‘CHRIST! HELP ME! COME BACK!'

---------------------

Finally, the chief of that Australian Army medical team returned to the same almost-near again to his junior medico so as to not have to shout, since he had no idea as to the effect of his vibrato might have on old bombs.

‘I wouldn’t move, sonny jim.'

'I don't wanna move. I wanna move!'

‘Take it easy.'

'I'M DEAD!'

'Hey, whoa. Don't step off that thing, fucksake.'

‘I'M DEAD!'

The chief of the Australian Army’s aid-abroad medical team ran then. He had already gotten paces in before he had even got out stuff-this.

--------------------

For the third time, boots first, the chief of the medical team returned to his young medico. Frontally. No cause for alarm that might make a junior grade twitch and lift a foot a titch. Stratagems afoot, too, by the sound of the low cunning in his voice. Make it so that, when he goes, it is with an explosive, sweet, guileless, witlessly will-less smile in the best Aussie tradition – ie, with a whimper that is enduringly notable. Go he must. There is a limit to the amount of time a man can stand on one bomb without panicking the bomb into giving sway to the final rust-through. Even the thought of a single shudder probably enough, let alone the shudder itself. Always the challenge, replacing the single shudder with the single leaden foot. They don’t teach this in officer-in-charge school.

In the absence of hallucinogenics to cushion the blow surely to come, the medical team chief returned that third time, with, yes, the stratagem of the kindly word to the viced, the least a commanding officer could do given the absence of a 40-foot pole. Kindly-word advice: wait and pray before the cramp becomes unbearable, but promise to allow at least a 20 seconds warning to those only trying to help, plus going in a bedside manner becoming of a higher rank given the circumstances:

‘Listen, son. When the old leg muscles get about to pack it in, don’t forget the heads-up, right you are?’

'I'M DEAD!'

‘Calm now. Trust in one’s natural resistance to splatter. You listening? Say yes. Say yes now.'

'Yyess. Christ.'

'Sssh. I'm here. I'm here.'

'Yes.'

'Want you to try to do what I say. We okay with that?'

'Christ.' Pliant soft now in yes. Junior in rank again.

'That’s the spirit. Now, just get yourself comfortable, what d’you reckon?’

'What...?’

'As in relax. Think of board shorts and the surf’s up.’

‘I can’t swim!’

‘In times like this, how do you know that? Try it. Fade out. Think of your legs, your arms, all of you, occupying the space of real clear water all bubbly. Don’t think of it as a watery grave, but how people are going to think of you watching from the far-distant shore. It’s just in the swivel of the hips, see. Relax. Try now. Do it. There. Clap hands, good. You got your toes curled? Up not down, son. Think of the coolest, the blue-est hang five, not lying on a grey old slab. Say yes, mmm?'

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just a nice word to hear at certain times, yeah?’

‘Yes.'

'There you go. Son, son… you trust me?"

‘Yes.'

'That’s the ticket. So, yes and yes and yes. See how it goes. Floating? Floatings? Cotton on to my voice as a flotation device. That’s it; a nod… was it?... is a good start. Don’t listen to me calling for some bugger to get a bullhorn; it’s just you in a vast’n’soft sea where you only tread water not on, you know, certain rustables. ‘Kay? Sunk all the way to the hello-you bottom. Far away. You know that. You know that now, right?'

‘Chrissalmighty.'

'Don't you?'

'Yes.' Hissfully, himself-fully, the young medico.

'I am going to touch you now. No jumping, surprised You know you're not going to move at all. Not your legs, your feet. Not them toes. Not while I touch you. Right you are?’

'No.'

‘Listen, pay attention to me. Think of me as only a bit of sunscreen moistening up those lips. Ah. Smack, smack. I’m coming in…’

When the chief of the medical team could move on the leeside of the bomb at his junior officer's feet and touch him, he gently fitted the ear plugs of a stethoscope to his young ward’s ears, then hooked the microscope end of it in proximity to the younger man’s mouth. Very gingerly as of medical school and improvising hissing a lullaby as he did so. Patting his charge on the shoulder comfortingly in rhythm, as he metronome’d it, to the other's stented breathing.

He stepped back finally, then moon-walked backwards and away from his strappled assistant, now left there now wired up to the workings of his own body, even beginning to edge towards a swain or a swoon, both, in thrall to the throbs of his ownself’s breathing in his ears. Muffed to swaddling by his own enveloped selfness and his heart beats lullabying me-you, me-you, me-you. Not boards and board shorts, not quite, but a recall of some scuba diving did he have, even while suspecting it had never happened.

From his new rushed-upon safe vantage point, his chin dug into mud, the chief of the Army medical team watched with large, insisting eyes how the young and junior medico, 100 metres away, began to sway. Beside him, his nurse Be Hunt lay very mentally close, almost just as mud-snug, and began moaning as she too watched the junior and young medico begin to sway out of control.

Then did he jerk suddenly in two pendulum sweeps, as though he was being flung violently out of a trance by an angry and mighty hand, but somehow not resisting. Not resisting at all.

He simply toppled, waving imaginary presences off, as in don’t bother with the stretchers.

The chief medical officer and the nurse watched him hit the ground, saw the short-bummed muddy tsunami he created as he did so. It was so flashed out, their watching overtook the time it was taking to bury their own faces in the mud. In the blink of the ruddy eye, and so it went. And when they looked, truly looked, there was the junior medico flung out, angel-swimming in a sludgy pool, as though beached after the most awesome hang-five down the tube, along the tube, out the other end of the tube, waving to the scorers on the beach. Parts intact and not a point lost to the judges. What a way to go! And all in silence, apart from a throat gargle that could have been a giggle or a giggle that could have been a gargle.

There had been no explosion.

The mine sat ensconced in the gloop there as placid as a home plate primed for the dust-off.

In the time between the here-we-go and that-went-well, the junior medico had somehow ripped the stethoscope off him and was holding it high triumphantly as much as if to hail an ankle strap as the only shred left of a board ride from hell made heavenly. And, angel-swimming still, he rolled his high-shining eyeballs towards his commanding officer very accusingly if you were any judge of the gawping nature of trauma victims.

The chief medico was so versed. He hadn’t survived numerous safe distances like this to have such what-the-fucks thrown at him, and certainly not while he was prone in the mud behind a nurse, who was this time, yes, nurse Be Hunt. Not by a long shot was he going to take such accusatory fragments being flung at him, not by bomb nor by some bombed-out. And he was altogether already up on his squelchy boots and standing defiant in the face of a diversity come upon his impeccable record merely because some rotten little half-arsed land mine past its use-by-date couldn’t crank itself up and do its job.

And if that clapped-out bunger wasn’t going to kick up a fuss, he was. He even had the huff height of being cheated out of it to do so too, going really loudly as to almost bring back heyday memories to that bomb right there, even down to the very life-threatening brandishing of his fists:

‘DUD! YOU AND IT! CHEAP DUD, FUCKING FUCK!’

As to the young medico, blacking out about then, it would be many months before he could take that personally, or anything else for that matter.

Dud.

Duds like that can duddle down the brain.

--------------------

Not one to give up when he wanted to sink his teeth into something as to cause and suspicion, the chief of the Army medical team continued secretly a treatment of hypnosis on the young and junior medico in the barrack’s hospital ward, honing the skill as he went along.

It didn’t seem to be having much effect on the younger man, but that didn't matter. It felt right and good to him and that was all that matter since he didn’t give a pig’s arse else-wise. Indeed, he felt in himself he was calling up a new calling in life, taking steps towards the stepping onto the stage as he had always wanted to do. What was this life compared to that? Medicine made you lose patients; hypnosis had them coming back either playing with their u-knows or reaching for the cold hard cash. Medicine made for waiting rooms; hypnosis made for queues. Long ones. Around-the-block ones. Write this cheque and don’t stop until you hear the snap of these-here famous fingers.

It was the progress it gave himself, not with his patient. When, to his mind, he was the Great Quark poster’d, all hypnotist and famously, his mind was racing, his eyes buzz saws. It even soon came to be that he could stand in front of his own mirror and not give a rigid digit about knowing who he really was.

Here was almost there, too, using his zzz-therapies on his patient Ihe-the-phfut. Hey, old son, you go bombast; I go bomb blast. I snap-finger and go Ihe, you go cross Ihe’d. I go dud; you go didn’t-it-ever. I go:

‘Knock, knock. You say Who’s there?’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Bombsa. You say Bombsa, who?’

‘Bombsa, who?’

‘Bombsa bummer, you dud!’

Progress, yes. Quark had the younger man being able to stand in front of the mirror and not look like he cared at what reflected back.

Well, as the saying goes: there’s the hypnotically prone, and there’s the hypnotically easy meat.

Hellsbells, it was almost too much having to indulge the junior little shit snouting and clawing up body hair that dropped flies in their tracks to add to his already pretty disgusting armpits and to the chalk-blackboard-screeching habit of sharpening his claws on the concrete floor when whatever happened to a plain old nail file, for shissake? Plus, that yellow fanging-up and slobbering all over everyone about feeling roadside-bomb let down, boo hoo. Boasting about being able to lick his own crutch. And put some clothes on. Those hairs on the back of his neck making yours stand up too, and who the hell’s the hypnotist around here?

Some psychos are just lycos.

chapter 1

When he woke up, really woke up, Ihe felt he must have surely just come out of the penitentiary, which in a wiser guise he might have called cage or enclosure. Yet his eyes found him curiously in a very familiar hostel room that was mentally springing into his mind as ‘mine' and there was discernibly about him the sum leavings, including chocolate biscuit crumbs like peckable trifles about his bare ant-crushers, of many obvious days of his own habitation there, plus, because of the crumbs, many ants.

The considerable dust from the floor and upwards smelt so familiar to his finely flared nostrils that they sent the message of 'lair' to his still slightly bemused mind. Nor did he have to blink tunefully with the neon just outside the window as he would have probably had to do had he just bedded down there. And he felt strong and full-bellied and fiercely in the pink if pink could be used to describe the fine and fine covering of pelage he knew in his human heart of animal heart to be beginning to grow all over his growing taller body, and his nose felt goodness-wet upon his face he could feel was really a snout, and his ears in the cracked shaving mirror which he knew he would never need again showed themselves to be well-appointed with appricked points, tipwise and hairily.

Coming just out of a penitentiary, that place of no sunshine and pastiness of humankind, could never have accounted for the eugenics implied in the luxuriousness of the down cropping itself on the back of his hands and the back of his wrists and in the mounting radar probes above his top lip and under the tongue that he could verily feel was surely his, nor for the highly cultured poniards that no sane animal imagination could ever take as overgrown fingernails. No, these were the spoutings of claws, three parts already and truly advanced. The teeth that he knew had grown piercing sharp beyond the curl of his now black lips told him that. And it was beyond the capabilities of any cracked human shaving mirror to judge these things as otherwise than looking finger lickin’ good.

Still Ihe stuck to the feeling that, now fully awake, he might just have evidently come out of the local Melbourne penitentiary because Ihe the wolfman knew the greater that he now had a growing animal cunning that would secretly distrust the taking of mere human trappings as reality, as animal lore would have it since, to all but the wolf-less, was rightly so.

So, as though a stethoscope connected his great chest to his great ears, yes, he continued to listen to his own breathing for a while and finally fell asleep again. The wolfman back in the lair of his private hotel room, the chippy blind drawn against the early morning, the day after he reckoned to have finished his two months' hard labour no one had dared make him do until such time as he took his appearance away and do whatever one needed to do to resort such appearance to something socially acceptable, even half-decently if need be. Or, peel off the upper layer of the uggers costume, mate, and get yourself sorted.

And all this merely because it was alleged that he had punched the horrible creature on some hospital switchboard as he happened to be passing. (‘I had only meant to dig in an X on the young lady's forehead’, the wolfman wrote to another her later. 'Trouble is I missed and seemed to have skirted over one of the blood vessels with my nails. Being part of her brain, it didn’t bleed much, ha ha.')

The magistrate had also missed with the hard labour he intended when, due to pass sentence, Ihe was told to stand, whenupon the judger vacated the bench and took flight on the first Qantas out of town, any town. But then, earlier, the young lady in question hadn’t missed being further affected either, when her MRI exploded when it imagined, rather than imaged, the certain internal scars she would have suffered from his touch, leaving her looking far worse for wear coming out of it than when she was slid into it. Neither had that van missed that had backed her up against the wall of the hospital's warehouse the week after she returned to work, when most of her had popped but the pins in her skull clamp had held, so much so that, in Autopsy, they had to admire the determined set of her jaw as a subset of her famed obstinacy. Even at her funeral, that elderly priest seemed to have forgotten it wasn't a christening and had suddenly spat a gorbie on his thumb and drawn the sign of the Cross on her forehead, later maintaining he was only reacting to the disturbing vibrations he still felt coming from her body. (‘Rubbish!’, Ihe added in a letter to that other she, ‘It wasn’t as though I shook her that hard’). At the graveside, too, the gravediggers refused to stop at six feet and kept going, only stopping when they were shown the coffin had been cased in lead.

And all this happening to the poor lass just because Ihe had imagined it happening.

(‘She was one of my earliest contacts with the outside human world beyond the mirror place. I shall always fondly remember how her sudden brain fever came on the first and only time I tickled her pink. For the brain-power trouble I had to go through, what thanks did I get?’ was one of his first passage he wrote to the other she and during those early times he kept the sexual innuendoes done to a minimum.)

Now, though, Ihe slumped over the table. In his right hand was a double-sized caramel-shake carton and lick-lippish three half-eaten chocolate Arnott biscuits. In his left hand, held there still in a formal regard as much like an eye-test card for the arm's length as much is, was a full-page advertisement torn some time ago from the inside back cover of a news magazine.

Its headline was boldly stout: 'Extinction Is Forever’.

Beneath this was a photograph of a wolf with massive jaws and stripes on its back and its barrel chest made to look even more huge by virtue of the rope from which it was hanging stretching its rib cage and abdomen and hind quarters against the tug of everyday gravity. Its tail stiff in a downward slope and its front legs stiff before it. Yet a gleam in its eye, perhaps not just from the camera’s flash, and its jaws set open in anger rather than rictus, fancifully set against its killer sitting there on a box – and so dust-up proudly! -- next to it with his side-by-side hunting rifle resting across his arms for the trophy pix.

Behind them both were the mock classical columns of a Victorian-era photographic studio and beneath the shot the World Wildlife Fund's blurb began: 'Tasmanian Wolf. The tale of the Tasmanian Wolf really related to the wolf, is one of the saddest in the history of Australia's marsupials. Expelled from the land by the dingo, he found a more ferocious enemy in Tasmania -- the European settler. Tasmanian Tigers or Wolves were initially hunted solely for their unusual skins. Then the government of Tasmania placed a bounty on the wolves, claiming they were a menace to the growing pastoral industry. The last documented member of the species died late in 1934 in the Hobart Zoo. The Tasmanian Wolf is most likely extinct.’

Across the word ‘extinct’, Ihe, the wolfman, had scrawled: ‘AAGHH!!!’.

He did not stir. He remained slumped exhaustedly, breathing deeply, as though he was still listening to the umbilical of his own breathing again. The oar of light past the blind was casting a Slavonic glow across him. A fly buzzed. Lair. Before him, framed by his outstretched and loaded arms, was another letter to the other she, or her. Lair. It read:

‘My darling, my own filthy-bitch spit-spit love, my sweet erection (1 hope you don’t mind me calling you those things. I can’t call you Miss after all these years and hardly even knowing you, can I? Guess who? It’s me. My sex is stirring red-bull for you). You’re the only one of them all who’s not a bitch. I am of the mind that it all says very little about the general level of intelligence in this country and I am tempted to say that, having just spent a few days of near incarceration in a place that would have consisted of indescribable vile language and dirty filthy thoughts, that we are a hag-ridden community of ignoramuses full of bitches who ought to have Xs clawed on their foreheads so decent god-fearing people can tell at a glance who these rotten things are. I just can't imagine how you can keep working for him! Oh yes, I saw your picture in the paper with him. Beware, that’s all I’ve got to say, because you're a harlot and a moll. No doubt you are asking what I’ve been doing all these years you haven't heard from me. Well, I have just found my Mission. Yes, Mission. Had you really all forgotten as a nation what you did to the Tasmanian Wolf? God forgive them for they knoweth not what they have doneth while doing! Et cetera. How people can be blind to such a thing, I don't know. I am ashamed you are still working for that evil person. Yours sincerely.

‘P.S. Please, please reply soon. I would love to hear all your secret sexual desires before I finally remember what you look like.'

Ihe had not signed it yet. The dried blood on his claws had, for a charmingly obscure reason, perhaps otherwise referred to as discretion in a fully human world, dissuaded him for the moment. It was his own blood. It was drying on his own claws. He had not gone for his own eyes out of grief as yet, but had only gone for his own dear, grief-rent flesh stretched on the outside of his thighs, between which, anatomically speaking, either human or animal, same diff., lay his lap, upon which and metaphorically speaking, humanwise and not animalwise, was another bone of contention. For on his lap was a book and it was lying open at the following follow-fillip passage:

'…For example, the Tasmanian Aborigines had become extinct not just because they were hunted like animals for an afternoon's sport, but also because a world in which this could happen was intolerable to them; so they committed suicide as a race by the few survivors refusing to breed. Ironically, and as though to confirm the Aborigines’ judgement, the mummified remains of Truganinni, the last old lady of pure race, had been mostly preserved as a museum curiosity. Yet it was she who witnessed what they had done to King Billy, the last full-blood male of the Tasmanian Aborigines. They had cut off his hands and cut off his feet and removed his skull from his still-warm corpse and had body-snatched him from the grave for his body never to be found again.'

Having just woken up, really woken up, oh yes, Ihe the wolfman, being animal more than human as he now realised, did not connect the dried and lachrymose lumps caking the fur at the corners of his red and blazing eyes with the discolouring tear stains that blotted that very selfsame page of the very selfsame book lying open on a bone of contention in his lap. It was not so much a shame upon a written-down shame, but it was all a crying shame, yes. Showing in the shameful hang of the wolfman's head and the self-inflicted bloodiness upon the sorrow crooking of his wiry shoulders.

The animal in him stirred in mourning. Between what was in the wolfman's hand and what was written in the book on the wolfman's lap, the animal stirred in him again with a growing awareness of a bleeding heart and silently moaned its inquiry in and of him: what has happened to the world since I have been away in my lair for these all-generations? Upon what have I endured such slurp deprivation making my upper jaw stick to my lower jaw?

For all the Rip van Winkle time that he might have been asleep before he had just woken up, really woken up, and for all the time of waking up and for all the time of not waking up, meaning realising, after having woken up, really woken up, Ihe the human could not answer the animal within. He did not know, could not hardly even remember, having ever remembered an answer to it anyway. Had no reply.

Tasmanian, Oh, Tasmania. He could only think abhorrently. Extinction Tasmania Is Tasmania Extinctively. For Tasmania Ever. All’s gone south.

Ihe the wolfman sat there, slumped with animal grief. And for it ever so.

-------------------

It hangs from the rope from the rafter like a hyena. But it is not a hyena. This is not jackal. It is the last and the first and the evermore. It is the Thylacine. It is the unique last life’s form that was the Tasmanian Wolf. Strung up, a common carcass, in a forgotten photographer’s studio.

------------------

It was only a long eternal moment. Ihe the wolfman rallied to a human-being-kind and, with an unconscious spurt of wanting to explain that which he really had no idea of, took up pen to continue finishing off the letter to her:

'PPS, whatever that PPS means. Humans think they’re so bloody smart. Did you think you could get rid of me as quickly as all that? Not without this PPS, you won’t! Not while you stay living and sexing-off and making a scandal of your life with that Evil Human Being you’re working for who will meet his Maker with the real hypnotic eyes one of these fine days very soon, you won’t! What I want you to understand is that I think one time I might have been a human being myself. You can laugh, but it is not impossible that I have once been a human being, before I realised I was really a wolf. If I wasn’t a human being at some stage or another, how come I have been recently in a penitentiary or cage or trap-like enclosure or all three together or singularly? If not, how come I haven’t? To put it another way: how come I can stand on bombs? If I hadn't been a human being, how come I know such words as the following if I have always been an animal: shoot through y’mug, dead fucken centre, shoot whydontcha?!, bag the bastard, godalmightyfugme, bite me bum, bite your own bum, chop chop, whassa whack?, paper yabber, allasame up yours... and so forth ditto etcetera. Words that no dictionary I’ve ever worked my way through thread-by-thread has anymore. I have more to add too:

‘Tasmania, that hellhole of hunting maniacs! I was lucky, that’s all I can say, of being able to pass as a human being when I was probably down there as my other true self when I thought I might have been in a penitentiary or some trap or enclosure or all three, as I have said, together or singularly, bloody land mine or no land mine, recently during the same time I might not have, either. Or neither. Tasmanians! First they go and assassinate the Tasmanian Aborigines -- that poor old inoffensive group of people if ever have tasted anything of the sort, them without a pot to piss in too, and then go and stitch up yer grand old lady Truganinni, and then they -- oh, it pains my heart to have to write it dipped in blood, whosesoever’s! – dare drive out of all forever my Tasmanian Wolf, that magnificent creature of which there is even now only one, surely!, left, not meaning me, though it’s nice of you to say, you skanky you.

‘And don’t ask how I know. But since you do, I’ll tell you how I know, gorgeous. I know only because I met with Queen Truganinni herself, that’s all! You ignorant human beings might think she is now only something out of the pages of an old history book, but I found her something right out of the box when I think I remember being in the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart while in penitentiary or trap or cage-like enclosure, or not. Oh, how she stirred me to pity! She made more hair grow between my toes! She said to me, Look how they strung m’old bones up in this coffin-like box here when I died, and they’re going to do that to you hairy lot like they did to my burley lot, too, matey!’ I asked her in a rather withdrawn manner what she meant by you hairy lot". She turned her large black and sorrowful eyes onto me. They shone like a cub after its first round of buckshot.

‘She was the last of her human type of race, see, and she had a bearing that was noble beneath her rag-doll’s frock and brown bomber’s head scarf. Smelly bloomers. Pity they hadn’t invented thongs. Then she took me by the paw and knelt down on the ever-winding mountain trail at my feet, where the claws begin and end. I tried to raise her to her feet, saying, Just because you are the last of the line of the almost extinct Tasmanian Aborigines, you do not need to go all human on me and beg for mercy, just because them others of your tribe could have done it long before this without leaving it all up to you at this late hour of extinction etc. But she would not be raised and only continued to kiss my paws, cleaning my fur, often missing and kissing the ground at my feet, as you humans often describe them. They ain’t feet, you dope! Then I repeated my question of what she meant by you hairy lot. Then did she raise her watery eyes, soon to be extinct as ever-mores, up to me, like, and she said as if I didn't know:

Why oh wryly, all you Tasmanian Wolves or that ridiculous alias Thylacines, who can remember that? Dumbo, go look in a mirror or start stinkingwell reading ads that start ‘Extinction Is Forever’.

‘It was then that I realised fully I am really of wolfhood and have been placed in this world for true lairizing purposes. It went to prove, and I can see this clearly even now as I write, even now as you are undoubtedly squirming with the thought of my hot breath on the back of your sweaty neck, that I might have been away for a little time trapped or enclosed, but I have most certainly been around this earth for hundreds of years just waiting to be told my true destiny by one who was a vision of loveliness, even if she was a human being as black as a very sooty certain part of a coalminer's grotty jockstrap and the last of a unique human line butchered by those Tasmanian maniacs just because her people were less than pasty and smelt bad because they hadn’t invented soap such as they could still be saying to the world: ‘You ain’t smelt nothing yet, stinky, ha ha!’

Ihe the wolfman stopped the PPS to her. He laid down his human pen. He laid down the advertisement that showed the Tasmanian Wolf fettered to the photographer’s ceiling and the blurb screamer of ‘Extinction Is Forever'. He shucked off his momentary depression. He had come awake. Really awake. Sniffing the very air. No doubts now. He did not have to give an answer to the grieving animal that had stirred questions in his mind now.

The book and the advertisement dropped and fluttered, both, the one circumspectly after the other, to the hotel room’s floor at and under his feet, make that pads. He stood. He was magnificent ramrod of back, of arch, of strong bow-yanged back. He stood on his own mountain top and howled into the wide and stingingly lunar night. He stood in his familiar hotel room, having now come awake, really woken up, to his true destiny. Of all he surveyed. What he had to do.

He was Ihe the wolfman. Off on his Mission. No two extinct Tasmanian ways about it.

The crouch and the slouch. His heart was full and pumping blood. May my guts get so thus plump and feeling full to the gills.

-----------------------

But first he caught a bus back home. This is a time the Mission had not properly got underway. On the way he happened to find himself in the grounds of a young ladies’ hostel that crossed his path and led him right up into’n’up it.

It was called ‘The Stook'. In whereupon did he find himself on all fours beneath the loaded and mothly-flying clothes line. He tried to cry out, going:

‘What pretty little flags! What hart-bleeding banners for we fluttered young men of Youngblood Country’

but saliva stopped up his mouth.

It is hard to utter when saliva cascades from the corners of the mouth, harder to raise and lower emblems when they’ve greased the clothes-hoist’s central pole. So Ihe sat at its base and wept for the taste, he wrote later, of curds’n’whey, though a woman’s group rumoured that it was moans and non-melodic gnashings. (He maintained in a later letter to her: ‘It was only a briefs moment.’) Until police sirens closing in and his legs cantering. And just as his embarrassment was about to yield itself to confession, one of the older hostel lasses came forward and showed him how to get through the gate, flashing her knickers in a private showing. Linger not but read-it-n-weep, fair knight. He wrote, ‘If one day I meet a girl I want to marry, I hope it will be in circumstances like that -- happily helping me out in a situation into which I have wandered with more spirit than discretion. Good on you, girl.’

Her arm was in plaster for five weeks, but she claimed it had only been a mouthing, the sort of what a puppy might bring.

But home-going, yes. It was at such hairy moments as this that things seemed to go especially wrong for the wolfman. There was his mother, Mrs Ihe, his sister, Miss Ihe, and his brother, Mr Ihe, of course. Ihe had thought that, with the higher ambitions revolving around his Mission, he would have earned some grovel-making marks with the rest of the family, instead of the usual gravel rashes. But no; for some reason his mother and his sister, at home at the time, weren’t all that enthusiastic about his having done the weeks of hard labour at a local penitentiary, or even the cage or trap-like enclosure. About the Mission, they were not to listen.

Arrived home full of missionary fire in his fiery eyes outside of the normal, yet given a zealous steely silence at the door by the she-wolferine (he wrote) who had suckled him, he was turned away in the manner of having her arch-backed striding back down the passageway of the family residence on Eastern Hill, not inconsiderable itself as a city suburb self-aware of where it stood, and certainly a cradle of wolves of imaginations let loose once upon a time. Mother Ihe, yes, went back to sitting in the sun with her considerable, inconsiderate eyes turned tch-tching upon Ihe and Miss Ihe sitting in the sun with a broken sentence about the trouble being dogs’ doings becoming pavement rife upon her sorely tempted lips and wanting to say something wolfaline to the sudden appearance of her crim or ex-trapped brother. And she might have even completed something of both had not she been warned of the unwantedness of his sudden wanton appearance by the tut-tutters of Mrs Ihe's eyes and the clicking of her tongue showing itself. So Ihe had the steely silence instead, and instead sat down notwithstanding and proffered an unsteady observation instead, going:

‘Since my release from the iniquity of being ensnared or something, mother and sister of mine, I have noticed that all women are bitches and that there is an air of a little resentment, of jealousy surrounding me.’

The reply or their replies went unrecorded, although there probably wasn't any whatsoever given the two days he stayed stubbornly in the house, curled up on the best less-trod lino there. On the third day, he had finally flung himself against the stony silence of his mother, Mrs Ihe, his sister. Miss Ihe, and his absent brother, Mr Ihe, by jumping up and down in front of their seated selves shouting, going:

'You cunts!'

although assuredly he had never known nor ever materially used the word or its object in his life, not even to get his mouth around it. Not before or since, or, as he later wrote to her, then. And certainly never when naked, as he happened to be at this time.

As it was, the oddest thing happened the next day, even without him wandering about the night before to lick, if only.to give his manor-born a topping-up of much-needed lickspittle. While he was at the height of this, mentally penning a note that they should get a new cleaning lady with more spit than polish, he looked up to find himself surrounded by police officers spread as thin as they might about him and a large well-spread ambulance driver in the company of his brother, Mr Ihe, who had kindly arranged his committal to nothing short of a lunatic asylum.

Ihe turned the eyes of the innocent upon them as a collective ear and tried the human technique of persuasion first, going:

‘But surely, gentlemen, this sort of thing has to be arranged by a doctor?’

He had forgotten perhaps that two hours before he had been interviewed by same, almost to the minute he had mentally punched his sister Miss Ihe in the eye. Or at least -- as he wrote later -- had only verbally done so by breathing into her nostrils exactly 100 whispered times and insinuating that she had a black eye, sprouting like the real bitch of a thing it looked to be, black-eye-wise, wolfishly and hairishly. Did it hurt, you dingo you, ha ha? Either that or, as he revised again later, that he had merely been trying to brush a pesty fly off her fat lip and her head had slipped.

‘Gentlemen, is it, numbnuts?'

The police officer, biggest of the six of them in thinning formation there, punctuated with the huge hold he had on the wolfman's highest shoulder by means of an artificial arm extender. His other one drooping a bit hound-doggishly, having been first to try a living touch. And Ihe rightfully pointing out high-horsed, going:

‘I have had no rheumy… meaning as in dripping, not as in an enclosed space between four walls that in human throats sounds phonetically quite similar, if you didn’t know whereof you growl… yes, rheumy consultation with Doctor Drooler, the family shrink, a shrinking violet, not two hours ago, pardon my pig!' Ihe, yes, on his Ihe horse.

‘He hit her!' Mother Ihe, up on hers and much Iher.

'He hit me, too.' Sister Ihe getting up herself much, much Iher and even more confused.

‘I already said you, dumbcluck.'

went Mother Ihe, retortive and with her carefully-wrought small-girl's curls in knots, but only producing like petulance from Miss Ihe equally, as in:

'I don't care. He still hit me too!'

Whereupon the well-spread ambulance driver was to the rescue. He tipped his cap at Sister Ihe as much as to Raleigh the cloth of it before her muddy feet, and loudly put in a bellow, going:

'Doctor Drooler has certified this mux is a dog having musth breath to watch out for; so, warning, no