InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Hedonism ❯ I Know What You Did In Wyoiming, Hojo Akitoki! ( Chapter 23 )

"I Know What You Did In Wyoming, Hojo Akitoki!" by Abraxas (2008-10-24)

 

I feel the call and I know my time draws to its end. This Akitoki withers away little by little. I am half-consumed already now, now I am left a few, precious minutes.

 

I do not fear it!

 

I want it, I need it!

 

This marriage into a world beyond the grasp of man.

 

I was born Akitoki. My mother is Japanese; my father is American. My father married into my mother's family and assumed the surname Hojo. And, as much as possible, that Westerner assimilated into Japan. The conversion was such that my father deferred to my mother's sensibilities about everything regarding my education.

 

I was raised thus ignorant of my roots.

 

I learned only fragments of my father's past. He tried always to forget it. As if there were a secret - a regret? - that scarred his memory of America. He tried without fail to eradicate it - that urge within me to explore all of my heritage. Yet the silence only heightened the curiosity.

 

After college I conspired to explore Wyoming - the land of my father - against the wishes of my family I needed to know that part of the world.

 

My journey started at Seattle where I met a few of my mother's relations. There I learned a portion of my father's history. There, too, I rented a jeep and drove toward my father's land. I traveled the Trail of Oregon - what remained of it - along the way I met many cowboys and Indians. I learned about the struggles of the West we are not taught in school. I was moved by the histories of the people of that land and I wondered if that was a part of what shamed my father's memory.

 

The change started past the crest of the Rocky Mountains. It was at the outskirts of Yellowstone that I was taken by a pathetic kind of sight along the highway. A lone wolf, injured, left as if dead across the road. I feared it was dead and the sight of it awoke a sense I needed to act. That I could not leave it to die. I approached the creature with water and a first-aid-kit. Luckily, it was not mortal, it was a wound caused by a coil of barbed-wire that punctured a foot. I cleared the metal with pliers. All the while the wolf gazed with its wet blue eyes too exhausted to fight.

 

I tended its wound with a strap of bandage - I offered water and it lapped it.

 

I drove away, however, I noticed the wolf followed. To be sure it was not as fast as the jeep but it was keeping up. Afraid it would be injured again if it kept going - and, perhaps, without thinking of my own safety let alone the consequence I let the wolf aboard. It ambled into the back of the jeep and curled next to my belongings.

 

That day I reached my father's homestead. When he left he gave it to a neighboring Indian tribe. I was welcomed and allowed to camp near the site where the house used to be.

 

Amid ruins ravaged by time I saw the wolf retreat into the vastness of the land. I watched. Rapt in awe at the beauty. And jealous of the power to melt away into a world unbounded by the demands of humankind. Work. Taxes. War. Only that was freedom! I shed a tear as it dawned. What a price was paid for civilization. Until I glimpsed it I did not understand the totality of what I could not have - I feared - anymore.

 

So, alone, I sat by the fire and read a copy of the `Reflections of a Pink Desert' that a Nez Perce shaman I met in Idaho gave me after we confessed the nature of our hearts. I was stunned by the customs of the people and again my mind was opened into worlds of freedom I did not know existed. Suddenly I regretted that I spent too much time away. How I wished to know all of it, to inhale, to infuse it into my own being.

 

I gazed at the fire and at the stars and though I did not speak it within my mind I shouted it. I wished then and there that I had not been born in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

 

Then, as I put away the book, I was startled by a bear. Shocked, I did not know what to do. I sat, thinking the fire would be enough to keep it away, yet its intent with me was clear. It swatted the air and I looked away then, then it was attacked. The bear was assaulted by a mass of black fur and white teeth. The fight sounded as fierce as it looked.

 

Just as I got to my feet the bear retreated leaving only a wolf.

 

My wolf!

 

We embraced as much a man and wolf could be embraced.

 

Was I insane? Or - was I aware of something hidden and secret operating beneath the veil of Nature? Where came these feelings of kinship?

 

I slept under the stars with the wolf curled beside me. I drifted into and out of sleep noticing gradually a change surrounding the creature. It seemed to be losing its fur. Reshaping its body. At length it was clear. It was a man. A wolf man!

 

I wished if it were a dream that I would not wake!

 

It was a man and without doubt the most gorgeous and beautiful eyes ever gazed. No - I forced myself to believe it - my wildest, vivid imagination could not have conjured anything as perfect. It was not human. In Japan it would have been called ookami. What it was called by the tribe I did not know.

 

Again I found myself weeping to be so close to perfection!

 

The man spoke in a low, bass voice that retained the tone of music. As if the song of a bird could be reduced to words. It took a minute to realize I was hearing language.

 

I learned his name was Steel Fang.

 

“I know your family - I smell its blood within you - they were kind to us and we embraced. We are tribesmen you and I.”

 

Our lips met as though such a thing were like a handshake. Arms wrapped around bodies. Hands explored what only the night cloaked.

 

I awoke with the taste of semen and the memory of mating -

 

That week I stopped calling my family. I stopped drinking well-water and lapped from the river. I stopped eating groceries and dined from scraps Steel Fang provided. Soon the jeep, the ruins, these things became vague and distant memories. My clothes, too, were disintegrating while Steel Fang and I explored the countryside.

 

At night my wolf and I explored the depths of our souls. It was my initiation back into a world my father tried to escape. He feared what Nature awoke within him yet I embraced those impulses!

 

I could not imagine I would be so close to another man. Just days ago the shaman was the first and only human who knew of my leaning. Now, sleeping naked arm in arm, gazing into the bluest, wettest eyes, feeling his body growing firm and erect within mine, I knew what it was to be alive!

 

“I don't want to leave,” I begged. And he stopped my lips with a lick of the tongue. And I replied with a lick of my own.

 

It was then that I noticed -

 

I leave now I will not return. My body yearns for union with my lover and with Nature. By the gods I am grateful for each and every moment now that I am free!

 

(1293)