The wolf lay on its side, shivering as it died. Other wolves would take its place and over time they would bring me down. I would become a frozen corpse like all the others. God was sick of chaos. He had decided to find out which animal was the best, and his patience had run out.
Off to Milan - I actually shot all these in September 2016, but didn't get around to processing them until now.
The dam could be defended, but a wolf had already got in. One of the windows was broken. I would have to fix that, after I had fixed my arms, if they could be fixed. I could hear the wolf, and with darkness falling it had to go, so I set out to kill it.
What did I know about wolves? Only what I had seen on television. They were territorial, they rarely attacked, you should pull a jacket over your head and never break eye contact. I remember a demonstration of a police dog tackling a man. Putting all this knowledge together - all this knowledge - I taped the remains of a rucksack around my forearms, put on thick gloves, took out my knife, hoped that it had a proper whatever it was, the bit of the knife that went into the handle. A tang. I hoped that it had a proper tang that was made of carbon steel, because that was the best. Knowledge was what separated us from the other animals.
They were all shot with an 8mm Peleng fisheye lens on an old Fuji S5 and then defished with software.
I knew enough to know that it never works. Whatever it is, it never works. The wolf would slash my throat and I would die on the floor before the fight began. I would drop the knife. The knife would break at the handle. I would stab myself in the arm. The wolf would hide in a spot that I couldn't reach. I would slip and knock myself out, and the wolf would chew off my face and genitals while I lay unconscious. It would not go as I expected, so I steeled myself. I would explode on the wolf as if it was a tiger and there was a nuclear bomb in my heart.
The wolf didn't care about me. It was a dog that hadn't learned to flatter mankind's vanity. We are what we have, and we live and die alone. I found it shivering on its side, wet with blood. Its chest heaved and although its eyes were open it didn't see me. It had squeezed in through a broken window and it must have fallen on the glass. I remember a video once of a killer whale. It had broken its jaw, the bones cutting an artery. Blood sprayed from its blowhole for half an hour before it died. It sucks to not have hands. That was the other thing that separated us, we have hands.
And so the final battle between two animals passed with a series of wet whimpers as the wolf died. I stood with my arms wrapped in masking tape and thought about stabbing the wolf for all mankind, but God laughed at me. Ragnarok could wait.
