The Bodark

By Leland Hames

Gregory burst through the back door followed by four dirty, and excitedly barking dogs. What had been a peaceful Saturday reading time in the kitchen was suddenly a cacophonous chaos. “Dad! Dad!” There’s something in the woods!” Gregory yelled looking around for his father.

Mike sighed and closed his book. He quietly and calmly said, “There are many things in the woods Gregor, more than I could count. Exactly what kind of thing are you referring to? You seem especially excited about it.”

“I was taking the dogs down the trail to swim in the lake, and on our way there, four or five girl-elk…”

”Cows. The girls are called cows” Mike interjected. 

‘Well, they ran across the path ahead of us and then a big bull, (right??) elk, came after them. He looked pretty worked up too, but he was so beautiful that I was staring at him to get a better look, and when he saw me watching, he turned and stamped his front feet and lowered his rack at me. Rascal didn’t like that much and took off after him and the cows, biting at the bull’s heels with Duke and Nicky following.”

Rascal was a surly blue heeler who liked nothing more than chasing and herding deer, elk, and anything else he could. He was a breed developed to round up wild cattle, and he was very good at following where his instincts led. The other two male dogs were hound mixes and equally enjoyed a good chase.

“So, all of the dogs took off and left you?” Mike asked, a little surprised and disappointed—as the main reason that they let Gregory wander the woods by himself was that he constantly traveled around with all four dogs protectively by his side. They had crowded around him the very first day he came home and quickly formed a tight pack with Gregory as their chosen leader.

“Yes and No. The boys did, but Maisy got in front of me with her fur up and took off in the direction that the elk had come from.”

Maisy was a very large, black Akita/ Chow mix who always had treated Gregory as if he was her own pup and sometimes wouldn’t let Mike or even Sandra come near him—especially if he was sleeping. She would stand in his doorway blocking the entrance looking like a big bear/lion, unmoving. Or she would simply lay across the doorway to his room forming an immovable dog barricade. If Maisy had gone after something, she believed that it was a threat, Mike reasoned.

“I heard her barking her head off and chasing something through the brush up towards the ridge when she suddenly stopped, and then, I heard her yelp and the next thing I know, she came flying out of the woods, hit the trail, and headed straight back here. The other dogs heard me whistle and they followed us back. But the point is that there’s something in the woods. Something bad that even Maisy is scared of.”

Mike found this odd as Maisy had once tried to fight a young male black bear that had wandered too close to the house and Mike was forced to call her off before the fight got serious. What would that dog be scared of? He considered this as he tried to decide if Gregory was only over-excited and exaggerating a little, but he could see that Gregory, even in his excited state, was being perfectly frank with him. After Gregory had caught his breath and the barking died down to low quiet barks he stood and walked over to the boy.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “you and I will go for a hike tomorrow and look around and see if we can get an idea of what it was—but the dogs stay here. I don’t need them getting hurt trying to gang up on a bear or running into a pack of wolves. As tough as they are, they’re still dogs, and wild animals fight mean, and they fight to win. I’ll bring the Winchester rifle or something instead; just in case we find trouble. How’s that sound?”

“Okay. That sounds pretty cool. I can go with?”

“Absolutely Gregor.”

Gregory loved going on hikes with his father. Mike worked for The US Forest Service, and Gregory always learned something new about animals or plants each time they went, and he liked how his dad always let him do things that were just dangerous enough for it to feel like an adventure. Mike knew that being outdoors and moving was Gregory’s happy place. The boy was half wild, and at the age of ten, was a better woodsman than most grown-ups would ever be. He reminded Mike of himself at that age; ‘high-spirited’ his own father called it, but it was more likely undiagnosed ADHD kept in check by staying entertained and tired out. It had worked for his father with Mike and seemed to be effective with Gregory as well. The boy was in his element wandering about the woods close to home, building dams in the stream or forts or even stalking and catching small animals like snails, snakes, and crayfish, or strangely, mice; which he was particularly good at spotting, catching, and then releasing back to the wild.

When Mike had noticed Gregory’s natural hunting instinct, he saw it as an opportunity to teach the boy how to stay quiet, still, and patient to sneak up on frogs in the marsh along the lake rather than the usual guns and hunting and killing animals that most boys in the area practiced with their dads.  This had taught Gregor quiet focus and persistence to build his confidence and give him a sense of accomplishment without having to field dress and skin rabbits or squirrels or even a deer. The only shooting they usually did was with a camera.

For both of them, the woods were Nature’s Ritalin.

Mike stood looking at Gregory and thought back to the moment that he first laid eyes on the boy. That morning, he was on his third cup of coffee, trying to balance the effects of the enormous five AM, midwestern-Illinois farm girl breakfast that Sandra was so fond of making. Enough food for a family of five and all too delicious to pass on.

“You can take the girl out of the country,” she often said. Then she had spun the screen of her laptop sitting on the kitchen table around and asked him, “What do you think?’”

The image on the screen was of a young, dark-haired boy with a handsome narrow face and striking hazel-gold eyes. Mike was unsure of how to reply or who he was looking at.

“Isn’t he perfect?”

“For what?”

“For us to adopt. He even looks like your family. His name is Gregor. Gregor Vilkas”

“Okay.”

“We are approved to adopt him, but we’ll have to travel to get him.”

“Travel to where?” Mike asked.

“Vilnius,” Sandra had replied.

“Vilnius? Lithuania?”

“Yes.”

“But Honey, why?”

“We both agreed that if we couldn’t get pregnant that we would adopt.

“But why Lithuania?”

“Because you’re Lithuanian and you even speak some of the language.”

“My grandfather was Lithuanian, and I only learned the language second-hand from him telling me stories about the Old Country’. I know about as much as five-year-old.”

“Perfect. He’s five years old,” Sandra replied.

”How did all of this happen?”

 “Easy, Once I found out that the adoption agency there gave preferred approval to Lithuanian families, I applied using yours and my full original names, so Mike and Sandra Miskin became Mikolojus and Aleksandra Miškinus. It worked. Close enough for them.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Not much. He was surrendered at three by his biological parents who were members of a persecuted ethnic minority fleeing the area. A people called the ‘Bodark’. Adopted at four but returned to the orphanage when the local family who had first adopted him discovered they were unable to care for him in addition to their own children.”

“That’s a tragic life,” Mike said, looking at Gregor’s face on the laptop screen again.

“It is,” Sandra said, “but we could give him a great life here. We just need to go get him and take care of the official paperwork while we are there.”

Mike sat quietly thinking until Sandra asked him what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I just heard the voice of my grandfather in my head, telling me a story about the Bodark, ‘people of the forest who wander from place-to-place in groups, never staying long. I assumed that they were some sort of Gypsy/Romani folks. Outcasts.

“So, when do we leave?” he asked,

Sandra leaned over the table and kissed him long and hard with joy. “Two weeks. Dig out your passport.”

The tense trip there and back had been relatively uneventful, but they had arrived back home to Salmon, Idaho with a wonderful, high-energy five-year-old who was just as wild and free as Mike thought all little boys should be, no longer cooped up in some orphanage in a city. They loved him, their four dogs loved him, and everyone who met him loved him. He was clever, outgoing, and charismatic.

Gregor (after he started at school and had quickly learned English became Greg or Gregory much as Mikolojus had become Mike), had filled in the missing piece of their family unit, and in the ensuing five years, it was hard to remember that he hadn’t always been part of their lives.

Looking at him now and into those same hazel-gold eyes, Mike thought about how much the boy had changed their lives for the better and looked forward to spending the day hiking through the woods tomorrow, where they were both in their element.

They woke early, but well after Sandra’s crack of dawn rise, and when they came down to the kitchen, there was a morning feast laid out for them. Gregory went in for seconds, perhaps eating more than even Mike had. The boy always had a voracious appetite; eating far more than you would expect that a boy his age could. Yet, in spite of that, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He remained slender and tall for his age with nothing but lean muscle to show for it. Definitely not the same gene pool that Mike had emerged from, he thought, as he loosened his belt a notch. The boy certainly kept Mike active, which as he neared fifty, proved to be a big benefit of fatherhood.

“Whelp, we should get dressed and going,” Mike said as he pushed back his chair from the table. After getting dressed upstairs, he went down to the gun safe in his study and removed the trusty Winchester 30/30 that had been his father’s before him and after verifying that it was loaded, pocketed some extra rounds. For good measure, he grabbed the Colt 1911 pistol and holster that had been issued to him when he had first moved to Idaho in the mid-nineties as part of the U.S. Government’s efforts to reintroduce the northern gray wolf back into National Forest lands to balance the local ecology as part of their land management program. With a master’s degree in Ecology and a bachelor’s in Zoology, it had been a perfect fit for Mike.

Gregory came bounding down the stairs, sat, and began putting on his hiking boots next to Mike on the bench in the mud room. Once they were ready, they donned some light jackets and headed out the front door with the rifle slung over Mike’s back.

It was a chilly morning, and the mist was just beginning to burn off the top of the tree line as the sun crept its way up and into the sky. “We’ll be back by lunch, sweetheart!” Mike called out to Sandra.

She came and kissed both of them saying, ”Be careful, please.”

They headed for the trail that began from the edge of their property, and they could hear the dogs barking and the sound of Sandra yelling to quiet them from the house behind them in the distance. The dogs were clearly upset that they were not going along with them.

The path was wide and free of plant life from the deer, elk, and other animals who had first created it and surely widened by Gregory and the dogs who seemed to use it daily as their favorite route into the woods. It was flanked by old, widely spaced trees, a product of good land management, Mike thought to himself.  They had good sight lines to each side and up to the rocky slope to the right that led to the ridge line.

About a half-mile down the trail, Gregory stopped and grabbed Mike’s arm. ”Dad, there’s something following us,” he said quietly.

Mike looked around them, searching the landscape with his eyes and his ears but not noticing anything moving. Gregory’s eyes were much better than his aging ones. “I should have brought binoculars,” he now thought to himself in retrospect, so he asked, “Whereabouts?”

“Up there where things get rocky,” said Gregory, pointing towards the ridge to their right.

Mike visually searched the area not seeing anything until what he had first thought was an old log laying amongst the stones rose and then just as quickly lowered itself and began to move forward in the direction of the path ahead of them. He couldn’t be sure, but by the color and movement, he suspected a cougar might have moved into the area and was now in the process of stalking forward to head them off.

Cougars were rare around the area and now even rarer, since the hunting of them had been opened by the State of Idaho in recent years to control the population. If he was correct, then they were being stalked by a mountain lion. Not a good thing. Cougar attacks on humans were exceedingly rare in Idaho, but Mike also knew from the studies that he had read that young cougars would often move into territories where older cougars who had the experience to fear humans had been killed off, and that in the years after hunting had commenced, cougars became more apt to act aggressively towards humans than in prior years. Mike could only hope that his instincts were wrong but prepared for them to be correct.

“Gregor, I need you to listen carefully, okay? We may have a mountain lion who’s moved into our forest, and I need you to stay ready and keep behind me until I’m sure that we’re safe.”

“Do you think that’s what Maisy saw?” Gregory asked quietly.

“Maybe. That’s possibly the only thing that could have scared that dog,” Mike commented as he verified that the rifle and his sidearm had rounds chambered, were cocked, and had the safeties on.

“Let’s hope that I’m mistaken, but I want to be clear, if we do see that it’s a cougar, do not run. Understand? Just be still and stay behind me. If you run, a cougar will give chase. They’re hunters and that will just excite it, and they’re terribly fast. Much faster than a person. I think maybe that we should just go back home,” Mike finished.

“No way Dad, this is one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me. I can’t wait to tell the kids at school.”

Gregory was surprisingly unafraid of the situation.

They slowly and quietly continued down the trail until it turned and opened into a meadow, clear enough away from the tree canopy that grass grew thickly to either side of the path. An old fallen tree lay across the little meadow to one side, and towards that tree, Mike could see a tan shape slinking low and crossing from the right through the grass to lay in front of the trunk, perhaps hoping to camouflage itself. Mike put his arm out to the side and then swept it backward, moving Gregory behind him.

”Remember what I said. Stay still and stay behind me.” Mike stood tall and began yelling and then began throwing rocks from his jacket pockets that he had picked up as they walked along since spotting the animal. One of them struck the cat on its hind flank but rather than run off, it only flattened its ears back and hissed at Mike, glaring at him with its orange eyes. Cougars could usually be scared away by these tactics, but this guy was persistent.

Mike reached to his side to un-holster the 1911, planning to fire a warning shot into the air to startle the creature. He didn’t really want to shoot the cat, but if it came down to the cougar or him and his son, he was ready to do whatever was necessary for their safety. The big cat hissed again just as his hand wrapped itself around the pistol’s grip.  At that moment, Mike saw a shape flash past, coming from somewhere behind them, running directly at the cougar. Startled, Mike removed his hand from the gun and attempted to take stock of the situation occurring.

A large, dark-furred wolf had dashed forward and was currently growling and snapping at the cougar. Within seconds it had the big cat down on its back, holding it by its throat, the cougar’s legs flailing in the air. After a moment, it released the cougar who turned and hissed at the wolf from over its shoulder. This resulted in the wolf snapping and clamping down hard on the end of the cat’s tail, causing the cat to shriek and take off running toward the ridge. Now satisfied, the wolf sat down on its haunches and proceeded to stare at Mike with yellow-gold eyes and an expression of what he could swear was a look of amusement.

Mike studied the animal, careful not to make direct eye contact, and quickly realized that many things about the wolf did not add up. It was by its coat coloration, a juvenile wolf, a male, but it was long-legged and had high-set pointed ears, a long tapering face, and a white throat and cheeks—none of these were the traits of a northern gray wolf (a Canis Lupus.)  In fact, they were exactly the traits of a Canis Lupus Lupus, which was a Eurasian “Old World” wolf. Although not impossible, as they had been spotted on occasion by researchers in far northern Canada, it was highly improbable for one to be found this far south and within the borders of the US.  

As he stared at it, he could see huge clumps of its hair falling off and to the ground, revealing bare, pink skin beneath. The wolf’s shape also seemed to change, elongating and growing taller as it reared up, appearing to stand on its back legs. He could not resolve what his eyes saw until he tried again and finally realized that what he saw was Gregory standing where the wolf had been, bare and shivering slightly at the chilly breeze coming through the trees.

Mike spun around, expecting to see Gregory still behind him but found only Gregory’s clothes and boots in a pile on the ground. He gathered them into his arms and turned, carefully and slowly, moving towards what appeared to be a naked Gregory standing in the grass before him. As he approached the boy, Gregory looked at him with those striking hazel-gold eyes of his and a look of fear that he had never seen before on the child.

Gregory looked up and into Mike’s eyes and asked, ”Are you mad?”

“What?” Mike replied, ”No, I’m not mad. It’s just that my brain is spinning right now, and I’m trying to wrap my mind around what I think I just saw happen. This has been one crazy morning. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“You’re going to want to send me back to the orphanage,” Gregory said, looking down at the ground with a distraught expression, tears welling up in his eyes.

“Gregory, look at me. That is not going to happen. You are my son, and your mother and I love you no matter what you do, what happens, or who you grow up to be. Nothing can change that. Do you understand? We run in a tight pack, and you’re not going anywhere. You’re our son.”

“I thought that the other family who adopted me felt that way, but when they found out what I was because I couldn’t control it as well when I was little, they became afraid of me and then Mr. and Mrs. Baillys took me back to the orphanage.”

An involuntary laugh escaped Mike’s throat. Perhaps it was stress, but he found this name funny. ”Their name was “Baillys”? Seriously? Doesn’t that mean “Coward” In Lithuanian?”

“Yes.”

Now Mike guffawed out loud. “What a perfectly ironic name. I never thought I’d be thankful for cowards.”

“Between you and me Gregor, I’m not scared. As a matter of fact, that was probably the coolest friggin’ thing that I’ve ever witnessed in my life.  If anything, I’m proud. Confused, but proud. You are a badass, my man.

“However, as your father, I never want you to do that again, do you hear me? Not the wolf part but the cougar part. That was brave but foolhardy. Cougars are not to be trifled with. Ever. They are killing machines and pointy at almost every end. You could have gotten seriously hurt. Now please get your clothes and boots back on, we need to head back for lunch. Your mom is waiting for us and probably worried.”

As they walked, Mike began to ask Gregory all the questions racing through his mind. “Did you really just turn into a wolf?”

“I did.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I just can.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“Whenever you want?”

“Yeah.”

“I was born a Bodark. We all can.”

“Even your parents?”

“Yes. But they taught me to never let people know because then they would fear us, and when people fear you, they will hate you and make you leave”.

“Well, they weren’t wrong. People treat all wolves that way, but you could have told us. I’m going to want to hear all about it. Everything that you can think to tell me. I mean, I’m a wolf specialist for Cripes’ sake. I love wolves.”

“I know, but I was afraid. I love you, and I love it here.”

“Just like we love you and love you here.”

“I’m glad.”

“Another question: Do the dogs know?”

Gregory laughed and said, ”Of course. They’ve always known. They’re my pack.”

“Well, your mom and I are too, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, what we need to figure out is how to explain this to her. That part may be difficult. She’s not going to believe it.”

“Maybe I could show her.”

“Then you’ll have to show me too. I didn’t get to see that part.”

“Sounds good to me, Dad.”

 Mike once again heard the voice of his grandfather in his head saying, “The Bodark are people of the forest who wander from place-to-place in packs, never staying long”—and then the part he had forgotten—“as wolves are known to do.”

As they cleared the forest and the house came into sight, the four dogs came running to greet them, crowding around Gregory, tails tucked, whining, and jumping up to lick his face. Suddenly, this behavior became perfectly clear to Mike for what it was. It was the exact behavior of wolves towards the Alpha wolf when it returns from hunting. They were welcoming him home. Now, it was time for lunch.

Leland Hames is the writing alias of Paul Cook, a 55-year-old former songwriter and performing/touring/recording musician fronting the band “The Bottletones.” Originally from Southern Illinois, he now resides in Chicago, IL.  His life performing was sidelined by a massive and nearly fatal ischemic stroke in 2022, leaving him paralyzed on his left side and in a wheelchair. He continues with his voracious reading habits as he physically recovers and has turned his creative drive into writing short fiction after being encouraged to do so by his wife, and his best friend and co-songwriter/bandmate. He is a parent to two children (15&12), 3dogs, a cat, and a fat, lazy bearded dragon. He strives to write fiction that both kids and adults can enjoy. (He is currently working on a YA novella.) He spends his days as the facilities manager for a busy and well-known Chicago live music venue and the rest of his time reading or creating fiction.