The Wolf Who Cried Boy

Sam Rasnake

There was a boy who cried wolf. We know this fable, and call
it the beginning of literature. Thing with no name. But truth is
– it was a wolf who cried boy. According to Kafka, anticipating
Nabokov, the origin of literature is when a wolf comes down
from the crags, out of the dark, forbidding forest, and into the
open, crying, “Boy! Boy!” but there is no boy. The pack is, of
course, astounded, mesmerized. Someone first tells it. Someone
writes it down. Dreams it. And so on.

There had to be a wolf, eventually – we all know this – to write
it down. A book written by a wolf – about people no less, about
trucks, banks, and pots full of water, about blazing fires and
mountain laurel, sheep and cattle. On the back cover, he wears a
jacket and jeans, a fedora and scarf, one paw at his hip. His bio
reads: “His work has been widely published in The Village
Voice, Conundrum, Teton Tales, and Alpha. The first wolf to be
recipient of a Fulbright, he studied literature and architecture in
the Carpathians. For two years he wrote a weekly column for
the Denver Times, ‘The Poet and the Beast.’ Living in the
Wyoming Basin, he directs a creative writing program from his
den.”

The story begins … There were no pigs’ huts of straw or stick or
stone. No chimney or door. Nothing worth his time to enter,
nothing to tear down for another meal – which was quite
disturbing, even for a wolf, since the times were so depressed
and one never knew where the next meal, if and when, might be
coming. Of the book, critics write of how well the protagonist
assimilates the mind of a pig. Thumbs up. Five stars. Book of
the Week. A sales ranking of 383. “More real than real.”

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