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his window, across the dark landscape of Oakland to Schenley Park.
    They knew the town where he had been found. They spoke a language he knew from that dark forgetfulness. They claimed he was one of them.
    He had to go now, while the trail was fresh, and find these people.

CHAPTER THREE
    Tuesday, June 16, 2004
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    Compared to his life among humans, his childhood with the wolf pack seemed like a time of dreams. He remembered no beginning, no mark of the years passing. Seasons flowed seamlessly into one another. He could pick out a memory, as one would pluck out a stone from the river, examine it, and throw it back to be lost among the other pebbles. Here was the forest fire that had nearly killed him. There was the white wolf that had hated him, and how he had killed it. Fleeing a wounded grizzly. Tricking a wolverine. Timeless perfect memories. Vaguely he could sort them out—which came first, what came later.
    He could not even guess how old he had been when he had first joined the wolves. An infant? A toddler? A teenager? He couldn’t count the winters and add to an answer. The seasons seemed endless, as if he had run with the wolves before time began.
    Time, for him, began when Mama Jo caught him in the humane wolf trap. It seemed as if his whole being had changed that winter night in the steel cage. Each day afterward became clearly marked and marched forward in step with the human calendar.Thirty-five days they stayed in Oregon as Mom Jo finished up her graduate studies. February 24 through March 6, they drove to Pittsburgh, a trip made agonizingly long due to his nonexistent communication skills, ignorance of the modern world, and lack of basic hygiene habits. He knew the dates of when he learned to dress himself, eat with a fork, and utter his first words.
    So his life was divided in half. January 20, 1996, and forward, he could recall everything in a stream of ordered minutes, ticked off by clocks, marked by calendars. Before then, though, remained a mystery. Where had he come from? Who was he? He longed to know, but there was never any true way of learning. Even if he returned to Oregon, there would be no insightful conversations with the wolves. Unlike Kipling’s Mowgli, he never truly communicated with the pack. They merely tolerated him and let him feed on the kill.
    If he wanted to know, if these people in Schenley Park truly recognized him, then he had to go to them.
    He eased the long IV needle out of his left wrist. He hadn’t been fully conscious when they put it in and was now amazed at the length. He gave it a grimace and dropped it into the bio-hazard box.
    The doctors had cut off his old blood-soaked clothes, dumping everything that had been in his pockets into a plastic bin. Luckily Max had brought his spare set of clothing from the Cherokee. He dressed quietly in the dark hospital room, filling his pockets again. Wireless phone. Coins. Swiss army knife. Wallet. Two lint-covered midget Tootsie rolls. Spare clip for the .45. The pistol itself, though, Max must have taken or hospital security had locked up. He shrugged at the temporary loss—he hated carrying the thing anyhow. Slipping out of the hospitalproved to be easy; the halls were nearly empty at night.
    At a lope, he headed across Oakland to the park. Fifth Avenue was silent. Forbes Avenue was crowded with students standing in doorways and on the sidewalks; the street beyond was empty, dark, and quiet. He crossed over the bridge between the University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon University campus, up the steep hill to the Schenley Park Nature Center. The crime scene had been to the southeast, in an area that might not truly be part of the park proper, but some area too rocky to build on. Pittsburgh held thousands of such thickets—it wasn’t unusual to see wild turkeys or white-tail deer within a half-mile of downtown.
    He slowed, aware suddenly that he wasn’t armed and no one knew