The wolves are howling three-quarters of a mile away along the Kadunce River and across Trout Lake Road.
I am incontinent. It is late afternoon in our late fall with the crisp layer of snow and ice on the maple leaf duff. I am incontinent and it is as though the wolves can sense it. They can smell it.
That’s all right because Foxy is incontinent too. She is five now, and she doesn’t deserve to be incontinent. She has many years to go with me. I am 10 times her age, and don’t deserve to be incontinent. However, I don’t know if I can outlive her. Does any age deserve to be incontinent?
At my father’s deer shack together, we were incontinent. She, of urinary incontinence, on his couch and in my paneled room and on the bed of my father’s yellow lab. She couldn’t help herself. Exhausted from a day in the woods chasing ruffed grouse (and deer), she was done in the evenings and at night, and when she was incontinent, she woke up and squealed and had wet my carpet or his couch or the dog bed, and lifted herself and walked away shame-facedly.
I had the other type of incontinence, and when I woke in the night with a squeal in the twin bed in the paneled room next to my father’s room, I woke and wondered what happened. The sheets and my underwear and the towel with which I tried to clean up I carried out to my truck in the cold and dark.
When I told my father the next morning, he was surprised. He hadn’t heard anything or woken up. He said he’d throw all the soiled stuff in a bag and would take it home to wash it.
I asked him not to. To just let me burn it.
He asked if it had been something I had eaten the night before (cabbage stew that I had prepared). I didn’t tell him that it was probably the cheap vodka I had been sneaking, hiding in the woods, or hiding in my duffel.
I am incontinent and there are many contributing factors to it: the Crohn’s disease in my ileum and ileal-cecal valve and colon, the myriad of medications I am taking for conditions that are unmentionable here, and too much, too much cheap liquor, which interacts detrimentally with all the previous.
When I was a young man, I was a wolf with loping legs and ill intent. Now the wolves are not benevolent or malevolent to me. But they are not indifferent. I am different and when we walk in the woods alone in the evening, there is no safe place for us, but an outhouse, and that, only maybe.
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