It was the acorn.
Green caught it, placed it in his pocket, then retrieved it again as though he didn’t know how it had arrived.
“If you must call upon our court at this early date, find us in the wilds. Unlikely. In plain sight. At the temple tree, above the place of memories. Yet, we would rather you did not. We have fulfilled our part. And dealings with you are always rather complicated.”
The king paused for a response.
Past-Green gaped, uncomprehending, panting, and clinging to his acorn.
Full movement returned to the world. The silence broke. The crow was gone.
The bus that had killed him moments before rumbled past untroubled. His skull remained whole and its contents within. The man with dreadlocks stood nearby, checking his phone and thinking nothing at all of Green’s welfare.
Green rubbed his temples.
He was back in the nowhere place, seated across from the horned wolf.
Now you remember.
He did.
We understand one another.
He gazed across the emptiness at the wolf. He did not feel grateful, but nor did he feel afraid.
“Well…wolf…I know you now, and I guess you know me, but what do I call you? What do you call yourself?”
I do not call myself.
Green sighed.
He knew the wolf. Heknewhim. The knowledge took away a gallon of fear and delivered an ocean of uncomfortable awe.
“But what can I call you? Humans name things.”
The wolf thought.
What do you call this mountain?
“Appalachians? Catskills? You want me to call you Catskill?”
Catskill. You may call me Catskill.
Green recalled reading the etymology of the name, a derivation of the Dutch for “wildcat creek,” Kaaterskill.
His thoughts shifted from a noisy creek to a trio of enormous house cats leaping through the pines.
The wolf saw his thoughts and brought a rhyming image up frommemory, a tawny scimitar cat rolling with her cubs in late summer grass, laughing at the world.
“Catskill. Sure. I like it. Call me Green. ‘Not-man’ makes my stomach turn.”
The wolf stood suddenly and sniffed the air that was not air. He was missed. The mountains were calling him back, calling him to wakefulness and to duty.
Green felt the call and felt Catskill going to meet it.
“When we meet again, we’ll meet as friends?”
It was part statement and part question.
