(4)

The Grand Rapids Examiner, Tuesday July 2, 1935

TWO PERSONS DEAD
IN ROBBERY ATTEMPT

Local Farmer Shot to
Death, Waif Missing

Mr. and Mrs. Martin Nordmeyer, their daughter and a foster child were the victims of a robbery attempt at their farm south of here Monday. Dead are Martin Nordmeyer, 61, and his alleged assailant, Aldo (Gus) Hamner, vagrant. Robert Lee Burney, foster child of the Nordmeyers, is missing and is believed to have run away in terror during the fracas. He is described as five years old, brawn hair, brown eyes, slender build, and wearing only a white nightshirt.

The three surviving robbery suspects are under police guard at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital with varying injuries received when they were attacked by a “wild dog or bear” that mysteriously came to the aid of the family. Hamner died at the scene from loss of blood, his jugular vein severed by a bite from the animal that Mrs. Nordmeyer described as a “cross between a bear and a gorilla.”

Sheriff Leonard Kendall reported the farm family’s kitchen “looked like a slaughter house” when he arrived late in the morning to answer a call from Mrs. Victoria Woodson, daughter of the Nordmeyers. “There was blood everywhere, splattered on the ceiling even. Mr. Nordmeyer dead from a shotgun charge in his chest, one suspect bleeding to death, two others in bad shape with the worst claw and teeth marks I ever seen.” Suspect Roger Rustum was hospitalized with deep hip lacerations and internal injuries; Thomas Prokoff, the third suspect, is reported in fair condition with two broken ribs and a concussion. Sheriff Kendall reported the fourth suspect, Oliver Hackett, was not iniured in the battle but is suffering from advanced tuberculosis and is in poor condition.

The search for the little boy, a waif the family had found in their barn about two months ago, is continuing today.

The mystery animal that broke up the robbery attempt has not been positively identified or seen since it ran out of the Nordmeyers’ house after mortally wounding one suspect and severely iniuring another. Upon his being asked it he thought it was a large wild dog, suspect Rustum said, “It wasn’t no dog. It was a fiend out of hell.” Comments from the Nordmeyer family indicated they too were mystified at the appearance of the animal.

Martin Nordmeyer is survived by his wife Catherine, two daughters, Victoria Woodson of Cassius and Renee Hegel of this city, and two granddaughters. Funeral arrangements are pending.

***

I foolishly allow my mind to think about this terrible morning, so that I stop too soon at the little railway hut that is less than a mile from the Nordmeyer farm. I do not think about the hut or what it is used for, only that I must hide, since I cannot shift form at the moment. I dig under a shallow foundation and emerge into the stuffy little tool house where I will wait for darkness. The torn, wet rag that was Little Robert’s nightshirt hangs about me. I tear it away, knot up the harmonica in one strip of cloth and tie it around my waist. The hut contains shovels, rakes, pick axes, other tools leaning against the walls, and a platform with iron wheels and long levers on top. I am steaming wet and sticky with blood, and the smell of creosote in the hut is suffocating. I block it all out to sleep.

I wake full of fear at the sound of crunching cinders. The hut is without cover of trees behind, the nearest ones down the track half a mile or more on the side. How have I been so stupid? The crunching cinders get louder. Men’s voices, many of them. I slip to the hole I have made under the back foundation, but there are already men outside settling against the shady side of the hut. Now they are all around the hut in the shade, talking, rattling metal pails. I smell bread, meat, stale fruit. They are eating their lunch. At the double doors in front of the hut the lock begins to rattle. They will come in. My head is foggy. I force my rage to form, clearing my mind, so that I can visualize the layout of the countryside. I have been here in the nights. Behind the hut it is open country at this point all the way to the river, but directly out front and across the track is first a small creek, then a thornapple hedge that extends a long way to the south. The end of the hedge is almost opposite the hut. I have to go out the front or be in sight for a long while to the men sitting in back of the hut. The lock springs open with a rusted sound and the doors are being lifted and pulled across the cinders. I wait behind the iron wheeled platform crouching low, wishing at that moment to shift, but unable to. I put it out of my mind.

“Let’s wait till after we eat to get it out,” a short round man in overalls is saying. “It’s a heavy sucker.”

As his companion who is partly behind the opened door is about to answer, I charge toward the half opened door, hitting it hard with my shoulder.

“Crise-a-mighty!” The fat man is screaming as I hit him with my shoulder and he spins away and down. The other man is larger and is carrying a shovel. I slam past the door, but the other man is swinging his shovel at me. In mid-leap I kick with one hind leg, striking him in the chest so the shovel just grazes my back. Then I am down the embankment, sliding in the cinders into the weeds, leaping the creek awkwardly as I hear a great commotion and crying out behind me, and around the hedge for what should be a long straight run that will put me out of sight and reach. I have forgotten the fences. Barbed wire, the first two of four strands, then another one of five tight strands, and in the distance I can see at least two more. They slow me down, and I can hear the men on the railway embankment running and crying out. I wait to pant a moment, lying up under the thorn hedge. It is very hot, the sun’s heat wavering up from the dark soil of the cornfield where the stalks with their dark green leaves are standing about two feet high. The vivid green rows dwindle in perspective toward the far fences where I see clumps of trees, a barn roof, other buildings. That is behind the Nordmeyer’s east field, the one where the Guernseys graze. My mind snaps, clearing my perceptions at once. I smell the dried blood in my fur. I am being foolish again. I wonder for a second if I am ill, then I hear the noises of iron wheels along the track and excited men’s voices. They are catching up with me on some sort of car on the tracks. There is no cover beyond the end of the hedge, and now they will arrive there before me. I glance back along the hedge row, my eyes just above the weed tops. In the waves of heat rising from the dark soil I see the distorted figures of half a dozen men spread out in a line, carrying shovels, picks, iron bars. Their voices come to me now from two directions as the men on the handcar arrive at the far end of the hedge row. The hedge is too thick and thorny to get through. Not time to dig under it, so many roots in hedges. The cornfield with its endless ranks of low corn plants offers no cover at all. I am trapped, and it is because of my own foolishness. But there is no time now to wonder about the cause of such muddleheadedness. The men are at both ends of the hedge, advancing cautiously, sticking their shovels and bars into the weeds and into the hedge itself as they advance. I smell my own fear. I try to concentrate on Robert Lee Burney, but I cannot. There is some block there preventing him from emerging. In wonder I realize that he does not want to come out. To try another animal form would be worse. I am too inexperienced for that. I do not wish to hurt humans. The ones at the Nordmeyer farm threatened my own survival, but I do not wish to harm these men. Also, to show myself to so many witnesses is certain to bring on a hunt I would have great trouble escaping in my present state.

“I’ll come out if you’ll go back,” says a high clear Voice.

I jump, then flatten back in the weeds. The voice is Robert’s, and it comes from inside my own mind. He is making a deal with me. I have the urge to laugh. I think the words, “If you don’t come out now, we will both have great trouble, maybe be killed.”

“Promise you’ll go back.”

“I can’t. They have seen me. It would be a danger to you also.”

“Promise!”

The men at both ends of the hedge are closer, coming slowly, spread out into the cornfields. It is too late to run now without having to fight with some of them. As Robert’s voice screams inside me the one word again, I hear something, a metallic rumbling, then a far off whistle, slightly elevating in pitch. A train is coming, fast.

Now the men at the south end of the hedge hear it too. They are hollering and running back around the hedge. I begin to slip through the weeds in their direction.

“The Lakeshore. The Lakeshore!”

“Get that handcar off the right of way!”

“C’mon, get your ass in gear. That baby’s gon splatter us all over the county.”

The south end of the hedge is free of men now, and I begin running faster. I arrive at the end of the hedge to see half a dozen men in work overalls struggling with the iron-wheeled platform, trying to get it off the tracks as the train appears to swell in size down the track, trailing a flat plume of smoke back along its length. Its black, blunt form approaches at unbelievable speed, the details of the iron engine face becoming clear so fast I have trouble seeing it all. The men on the track have the handcar derailed but sideways on the track. They will not make it. The train whistle begins a shattering scream, the pitch rising unbearable. Only two of them are still trying to get it off the track, the rest are running down the embankment as the train’s wheels begin to grind on the iron rails, a thousand metallic notes higher than the ear can hear, couplings crashing like hammers on anvils back down the length of the train. I stand up to watch the sight as the last two men dive away, one on each side of the track and the towering black engine seems to gobble up the little handcar and blow out its wreckage in a giant blast. A terrific smashing of wood and clanging of iron, and one heavy iron wheel comes sailing over the hedge, spinning and flailing its torn-out axle like the stem of an iron flower cut by the mower. A shower of wood splinters bounces back along the length of the black engine as it rushes on past in spite of its squealing brakes. As the engine flashes past above me, I see the white round faces of two men ducking away from the cab window.

Behind me I hear again the men coming along the hedge. They are running now, shouting. I double back on the railroad side of the hedge in the shadow, and when I am half way back, I see the men gathered around the wreckage of their handcar. The train is on beyond me, just coming to a stop, its last car a hundred yards up the track. I slip down into the creek, up the embankment and across the tracks almost crawling on my belly. On the other side is a small stand of oaks and maples that leads into a woods. I have made it.

Now that I have been clearly seen by two groups of people, there will be much more difficulty getting out of this country. I must have the ability to shift so that I can pass unnoticed. And Robert is now a part of me. I promise him that we will go back to the farm for just a little bit. After two nights in an abandoned pump house, I return to spend a whole day in the Nordmeyer’s hayloft in the dusty dry heat, peeking out of the cracks in the hay door as black automobiles drive in and out of the lane, people come in black clothes and go in and out the front door. I have never seen people use the front door of the farmhouse before. Many of them are weeping. I recognize Vaire, Anne, and Walter, and see another group that must be the other sister, her husband and child. At intervals in the long, hot day I sleep, trying to recuperate my senses that seem to have been deranged by the battle and flight. I wake to see the narrow sunbeams striking down from tiny cracks and holes in the roof, standing like wires and ribbons and slender pillars in the dusty air. It is quiet in the high, empty loft, like an aisle in the forest when the sun shines down through morning mist. I am thirsty, but cannot go down for a drink until dark. I push back the thirst and wonder at the numbness of my senses. The part of me that is Robert is clearly delineated by a sick sensation inside me. I push it all away and resolve to sleep until dark.

I wake to feel the need for Robert to appear. I have never felt this before. I concentrate and shift, easily.

Robert stepped carefully in the dark to avoid getting slivers from the old, rough plank floor. He carried a rag that had the harmonica tied up in it. The barn was quiet, the cows asleep, the dogs chained up outside the big sliding doors. Biff came over to Robert dragging his chain and wagging his heavy tail, his head down as if it was all his fault.

Robert stood outside the back screen. No one was awake inside, but there was a lamp burning in the living room. The screen was not hooked. Robert opened the door and walked carefully in across the scrubbed dark spots on the porch floor. The kitchen was very clean and empty looking, and the dining room table had been set up again and polished. In the living room, sitting across two sawhorses, was a gray, oblong box made of metal with rod-like handles along the sides. The top of the box was laid back so that it opened up like Aunt Cat’s jewel box on her dresser. Inside, the box gleamed with slick cloth that looked almost wet, it was so shiny. The lamp was sitting where the radio used to be, on the little side table with the spindly legs. It was turned low, the flame unmoving as if it were painted in a picture.

Robert could not see into the coffin, so he had to pull a chair from the dining room. Standing on the chair; his hands on the edge of the long box, Robert looked in at Martin, who appeared to be sleeping with his hands folded on his chest. Robert had never seen Martin asleep, had never seen him so still. He had always been working, walking about the farm, telling Robert things about the animals and about planting and caring for crops. Now his eyes had disappeared behind the walnut burl wrinkles, his mouth closed hard on something, as if he were gritting his teeth, and the corners turned down in disapproval. He wore a black suit that Robert had never seen either, and a white shirt that was starchy clean, and a blue necktie. It looked like Martin, Robert thought, but it certainly was not the happy old farmer Robert had known. He gazed for a long time, leaning closer as if to catch a breathed word or see the beginnings of a smile, as if Martin were only teasing him as he used to do, pretending to be angry. Then it seemed the face began to change indeed, and the wrinkles to move outward into a smile, the eyes to flutter and perhaps would have opened if Robert had been able to watch one more moment.

“Robert!”

The voice was a loud whisper, as if from off stage, calling back an actor who had entered at the wrong cue. Vaire stood in the dining room door in a long quilted robe, her face a white oval in the half light. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large, owl eyes looking into the darkness. Then she walked quickly over to Robert and was hugging him in her arms, against her warmth, kissing the top of his head and crying, putting his skinny little body inside her robe and closing him in.

Robert at that moment began to sob and shiver as he had on that first night. He suddenly felt so weak he could not stand, sick in his stomach, dizzy in his head. He hugged Vaire and cried against herslloulder as she cried against his hair.

***

Robert had to say something, of course, about the creature they thought had carried him out of the farmhouse that day. To his advantage was the fact that he actually did not remember much of what had happened, at least not very clearly. His own emotional turmoil and the sudden shift blurred his mind so that he retained only the terror and the blood and the sight of the old farmer with his glazing eyes and torn chest. He held to the harmonica as if it were the talisman of his safety and told his fragmented story to the family, the deputy coroner, and some state police officers who looked very large and efficient in their gray uniforms and Sam Browne belts with pistols holstered under leather flaps. The testimony of the section gang whose handcar ended up as a handful of decorations on the Lakeshore Limited helped confuse the issue, for their accounts were highly imaginative, only two of the gang having had a clear glimpse of what came out of the tool shed that morning. Roger Rustum and Thomas Prokoff gave conflicting accounts also: Rustum maintained the creature had jaws like a shark and bear-like arms, while Prokoff saw it more as a mountain lion sort of thing. Oliver Hackett gave no account of anything, as he remained heavily sedated to allay the pain of the tuberculosis which would shortly kill him.

The evidence would not have convicted a sheepstealing dog, and the authorities wanted to believe it could have been an ape escaped from a circus that had been in Cassius the week before. Telegraphed inquiries to the circus, however, ruined that theory, as nothing had escaped, not even the geek.

Further evidence of the strange creature’s existence began to arrive at police headquarters in half a dozen Michigan towns as soon as the evening paper carrying the account of the incident hit the streets. In the next weeks people saw every sort of nightmare monster from King Kong and the Wolf Man to Frankenstein’s creation, with King Kong running ahead by a margin of three reports to one of any other type.

Vaire and Walter had taken Robert to their house in Cassius and given him the room across the upstairs hall from Anne’s room. There he slept in a vast, sagging double bed with springs that talked to him whenever he moved at night. The bed, like the house itself, belonged to Grandmother Stumway who was Vaire’s grandmother and Aunt Cat’s mother. Robert, trying to line up these adults in ascending generations, believed she must be nearly as old as the earth itself.

Robert is comfortable, but sometimes I feel like slipping away and heading for the woods, except that the wide publicity I have received would make traveling difficult. Vaire has seen my form on two occasions, although the one time in church was probably hallucinatory and perhaps not even consciously remembered. She would casually approach the subject of the strange animal at odd times, after breakfast when Anne and Robert were carrying dishes to the sink, when the three of them were picking tomatoes in the back garden, when dressing for bed. She would wonder aloud how the creature had got into the farmhouse so suddenly, and answer her own question by saying it might have come in during the night and been hiding somewhere, or that it had leaped in through the back door and been the cause of the fatal shot from Gus that killed her father. And what had become of the thing, she would wonder, while Anne and Robert waited for the direct question they knew was coming.

“Poor Little Robert. You were probably too frightened to even remember where the creature came from, weren’t you?”

“I was really scared,” Robert would say while Anne looked at him curiously. She had gained a new respect for him now that he had been carried off by a mad gorilla and barely escaped with his life - and Grandfather Nordmeyer’s harmonica. That last always puzzled Anne, as it did some others in the family, for Robert had been holding the harmonica knotted up in the rags of his nightshirt when Vaire had surprised him that night at the coffin.

Walter was inclined to be stern with Vaire when she brought up the subject on an evening after the children had been put to bed. In his forthright and clear-sighted opinion, no such creature existed. The thing was a wild dog that had been hiding in the house overnight and been frightened out by the shotgun blast and started biting people. Little Robert had simply been mad with terror and run away. His ruddy, open face seemed almost to convince Vaire while he was talking. It seemed all quite correct and true to life as she knew it when Walter sat calmly in the long dim parlor of their house and looked directly into her face and said, “It’s nothing but mass hysteria, Vaire. It’s the same as people believing they’ve seen the Indian Rope Trick. Once they’ve been told something supernatural or horrible has happened, they begin embroidering on it, and soon it’s all out of hand.”

“But a dog couldn’t have carried Little Robert away.”

“Of course not, dear,” Walter would say, certain on this point. “The poor tyke ran away. The dog probably knocked him around, and he ran and hid in the barn. That is where he was hiding, didn’t he say?”

“Yes, but for three whole days while those people were searching all over the farm? I’m sure some of the men must have looked up in the hayloft, and that’s where he said he was.” Vaire honestly hated to contradict Walter in anything. He was such a good person. But it really was inconceivable to her that the little boy had hidden naked in the loft for two days and a half while the farm was swarming with deputies, detectives, tracking hounds, and newspaper reporters.

This always exasperated Walter, so he would refill his pipe, which he had recently taken up as an aid to his public image. The refilling and lighting and adjusting took some time and gave him the look of someone with all the answers at hand, although at times when he spoke without taking the pipe out of his mouth it would swing wide as if on a hinge and he would have to be fast and ungraceful to catch it. And then when the process was completed, his answer was notably weak.

“Well, what else could it be?” he would ask finally, as if the lack of an answer were proof of the superiority of common sense in all matters.

I am in the habit of lying in bed for sometime in the dark shifted into my natural form to relax. It is comforting, even in cramped places, to be oneself again, and additionally, I can then easily listen to any conversations taking place downstairs. In fact, Robert would have been able to hear most of it if he had gone to the register in the floor of his room and pushed it open slightly, as it was a square hole with a register grate on both sides that opened into the corner of the dining room ceiling nearest the sliding doors to the parlor. Sitting on the floor, looking into the warm darkness through my screen and listening like a prisoner to the orchestration of the summer night, I hear Aunt Cat, Walter, and Vaire who are sitting around the dining room table drinking some of the home-made wine from the farm. Aunt Cat has had more than enough of the wine already, and Walter keeps trying to slow her down, although he is powerless before the tall, older woman who brushes off his remarks as if he were a child.

“But you’ve said many times, Mother,” Walter says, “that you couldn’t recall clearly what the creature looked like. Now you’re saying you can remember exactly.” He begins filling his pipe again, scraping it out with the handle of a spoon.

“You can’t say everything to strangers, newspaper people, detectives, and the like. You don’t know what they’re up to,” the older woman says.

I listen to Vaire whispering to her mother about the wine, that it is good, but too much is no help for grieving, and her mother saying back that nothing is any good, but wine is better than most. The conversation becomes more carefully noncommittal on Walter’s part, more pointedly angry from the farm woman. Vaire comments that the children are sleeping right above them, but Aunt Cat is not to be put off. She has something to say, and it appears she is going to say it.

“Don’t sit there, Vaire, Victoria, my very own and very first daughter, and tell me you did not see that thing.”

“Now, Mother, if a big wild dog came leaping in ...” Walter was saying, but he was being ignored.

“I saw it, Mother, but I can’t remember it exactly. You know that man had my arm twisted up and then he was jumping around waving the knife and screaming, and I thought he was going to kill me.”

“When that thing. stood up in the back doorway over your father’s body,” her voice rising now, “and looked right at us.” And she stopped for emphasis and to take another drink. “With Martin’s harmonica in its teeth!”

I am listening so closely now that I am almost not breathing. Perhaps I have underestimated the human capacity to accept the strange.

I hear Walter’s chair scraping back, Vaire getting up also. The older woman making sounds of moving around. They are all standing now.

“You saw it, Vaire!” She is almost screaming. “There was no little boy near that thing, no Little Robert near it, and it had poor Martin’s harmonica in its mouth, that he played that very morning while I made breakfast.” She stops and sobs, but angrily, and then says, still weeping, “Vaire, did you see it? Say. Did you see it standing in the back door? Those big unnatural eyes, those jaws?”

“Yes, Mother,” Vaire says very softly.

“You’ve got good eyes, Victoria. You saw it.” I can hear from her slurred words now she is drunk. She keeps sobbing while she says again, louder, “You saw it.” There is a pause and then suddenly she seems to turn on the two young people.

“What was it wearing?”

“What, Mother?” Vaire asks, her voice full of fright. Walter comes in with the same question. “Wearing?” he says.

“It was wearing Little Robert’s nightshirt!” she screams, and the words make my fur erect suddenly in that hot August night as if a blast of snow from the north woods had engulfed me.

“Oh my heavens. Oh, Mother,” Vaire is saying.

“I’m going to get Doctor Fleishman,” Walter says. “Mother, sit down.” Walter is being stern.

“Are you afraid to say it, Victoria?” Mrs. Nordmeyer asks. “Are you afraid to say what that Rustum person said, that it was a fiend from hell?” She is screaming loudly now. “Well it was. It was. A fiend from hell, and it killed my husband.”

I am standing near the window now, listening to everything: Walter is starting the car in the driveway; Mrs. Nordrneyer has apparently fallen to the floor, and Vaire is getting something in the kitchen. I extend my unused senses: Anne is asleep. There is no one on the street where Walter’s car is swinging its headlights away toward the corner where the streetlight is hidden by maple trees. No one is approaching.

“Mother, Walter’s gone to get the doctor. Put this under your head, and here’s a cold cloth for your face.”

The older woman’s voice is so soft her daughter must have trouble hearing it: “What can it be, Vaire?” she is whispering. “What can it be?” She rolls her head on the pillow. I can almost feel her eyes burning holes in the floor where I crouch. She is whispering again.

“It’s up there, you know. Up there with Anne, up there in your house, living with you, the devil, the fiend from hell.”

“Mother, please. You’ve got me so upset.” Vaire is crying too now. “But you can’t say that about a little child no older than Anne. It can’t be such a thing, Mother.” And she is weeping openly now.

“What does it want?” the older woman goes on whispering in so eerie a way that my fur prickles again. She is frightening me.

“Mother, please stop,” Vaire is wailing now. “You’re scaring me.”

I wait for Vaire to come up the stairs, but she does not come. She is apparently torn between her mother and her child, and the fear is overbalancing her to stay downstairs until her husband returns. I hear no more words from the older woman, only mumbling as her mind fades out. In a few more minutes the car returns with the doctor, and there is a roomful of masculine solidity and heartiness to replace the wavering fear that had infected us all. By the time anyone comes to check Robert, he is in his bed asleep, sweat on his head from the hot August night, his nightshirt rucked up around his stomach.

***

Little Robert is an enigma to me now. He knows of the superstitious feeling of dread he evokes from Aunt Cat, and the often poorly concealed nervousness shown by his beloved Vaire. He is really only comfortable with Anne and other children who have no unconscious fears to make of him a sort of freak. But he does not want to leave the family, and I am reluctant to force him away, although I am sure I could do that if it were necessary for survival. It is strange to think about his getting stronger each day in his own personality, harder to reason with, harder to subdue if he does not want me to shift out for an evening’s run in the dark fields. I wonder if I have created a monster, and the thought makes me smile into the terrified eyes of the rabbit I have just caught and am about to eat. The rabbit has not been much fun to catch, being a cross with the tame ones the people in the town raise for food. It is large, brown, and fat, with a wattle of fat under its neck, very unlike the lean, fast cottontails I would catch in Martin’s hedge rows and creek banks. But it tastes very good, almost sweet like chicken or lamb. My tastes are becoming more fastidious also, I find, spitting out chunks of hide and fur. I no longer enjoy bolting small animals whole but find myself picking them apart for the good bits and wasting much of them. Perhaps I too am becoming civilized and will soon be eating Red Heart dog food in three delicious flavors out of a can.

But the warm. summer nights retain their full, sensuous charm as I lope through the pastures and newly cut grain fields outside of town. I sense the sleeping cows under the dark umbrella of a maple tree in the corner of a pasture, and the muskrats are lying in the mouths of their tunnels in the creek banks, sniffing for crawdads and minnows; the cats are out, their eyes shining like lanterns as late automobiles pass on the streets and country lanes. The crickets and frogs make angular sounds along every ditch and stand of weeds. The earth is good to my feet as I pace quietly, feeling very much a part of life and breathing in scents of the crawling, hopping, running life of the night, the hungers appeased so easily in the summer nights, the animal feeling of fullness and happiness that forgets the freezing winter and the stupid torpor of a burrow under the snow with the stomach slowly shrinking in on itself and the cold making the heart slow and the brain numb and without even dreams.

I look up at the sliver of moon that barely makes shadows in the darkness. There is something else, something that has been growing and making my mind seem to itch strangely. I feel it sometimes even when I am trailing a fox and get a whiif of her musk. Robert feels it watching his beloved Vaire. It is like wanting to kill and eat luxuriously but without hurting the animal I am killing and eating. Indeed, it is a paradoxical feeling I have not had before, and can only attribute to Robert’s growing strength as a personality, something humans experience that is spilling over into my own life. It is something then that I must deal with, for it seems now that I am committed to existence with the human. They are strange, terrible, suffering creatures, but I am one of them now that Robert has come into being. This feeling can be savored like any other sensation, and so I am content with it, even though it is an irritation. Any sensation, even pain, is to be experienced and is better than no sensation at all.