Wolves Read Online Free PDF Page A

necks.
    Rhododendrons, stabbing and spiteful, massed along the edge of the millrace. Michel shuffled along the top of the wall, holding on to their branches. I followed him. White water rushed beneath us.
    ‘We’ll wait here.’
    The bushes screened us from the path our games teacher, Mr Hill, would take as he caught up with his runners. Of course anyone inside the mill house would have had a clear view of us hiding there – but there was never anyone in.
    I heard Hill running past. I rose and palmed the foliage aside and watched him go. I didn’t like cheating him, but I liked Michel more.
    Michel was quiet, lugubrious, self-contained. For me, at any rate, he had extraordinary presence. A glamour. If he understood my feelings for him, he never let on. He showed very little tenderness for me. He wasn’t interested in my weaknesses. He wanted me to be strong. He cared for me as you would care for your side-kick, your familiar, for the man you had chosen to watch your back. He said we had to toughen up.
    There was a narrow path of flattened grass beyond the bushes. After about fifty metres, even this petered out among bogs and fallen birches. Nothing here grew above a sapling’s height before it keeled over in the soft earth. The ground was so soft you could sink to your waist in it.
    ‘My feet hurt.’
    ‘Put your boots back on, then. We have to do this gradually. No point in getting cut.’
    I found myself a seat – a damp cradle of tree roots – and wrestled damp socks over my wet feet. Balanced, comfortably barefoot, on a fallen log, Michel looked more strange than beautiful. I dithered, hoping he’d help me up. But as soon as he saw I was ready he moved off through the undergrowth, and suddenly a ridiculous fear took hold of me: that here, minutes away from school and everything familiar, Michel would abandon me and I would never find my way home.
    We teetered on logs. We picked our way. Just under the surface of the mud were roots tough enough to sprain an ankle. Ferns towered over our heads. Even in this tiny corridor of untended green, even with the river to guide us, we sometimes lost our way. Nothing grew straight. Nothing held. Trees clung to life amid stands of nettle, oily-looking brambles and, at last, Michel’s centre of operations: a circle of abandoned refrigerators.
    Michel drew a stick through the earth, sketching his ideas for me. Earthworks. Palisades. Curving paths that drew assaults ineluctably to one easily defended chokepoint. Here, where the fridges made a sarsen ring, he planned to dig down, roofing his redoubt with turf and leaf litter. The earthworks too he would camouflage, hiding them behind stands of blackthorn, its barbs as vicious as razor wire.
    The river, swollen by recent rains, babbled against the trunks and roots of trees. ‘One stiff rain and you’ll be living in a mud-pool.’
    Michel surveyed the ground – a golfer lining up for a putt. ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘Besides, all these defences – how are you going to come and go?’
    He rehearsed for me the construction of his artful runs: traps he would safely crawl over, but which would stick an unwary intruder stone dead.
    ‘Just don’t mistake your entrance and your exit.’ What I meant was, ‘Don’t talk shit.’
    Michel, deep in his dream of Millennium, missed the joke. ‘Now there’s the truth.’
    ‘I promise I’ll come visit you during the End Times.’
    Michel laughed. ‘Come the End Times, it’ll be every man for himself.’
    Cadet training at our school started when we were fifteen. The terms of the school’s foundation had gifted it military pretentions which it didn’t particularly deserve. Some came from service families and took being a cadet very seriously. Most of us regarded the whole carry-on as a tiresome cousin of our regular Wednesday afternoon games. There were trips here and there. Now and again you got to fire a gun. Most of the time you spent square-bashing or listening to