I spread my legs to anchor myself. With the flail in my left hand, I drew the sword. 
The wolves stopped. The first, after staring back, bowed its head and trotted several 
paces to the side. The other waited as if for some invisible signal. The first looked at 
me again in that uncannily calm fashion and then plunged forward.
  
  I started swinging the flail so that the spiked ball went round in a circle. I could 
hear my own growling breaths, and I know I was bending my knees as if I would spring 
forward, and I aimed the flail for the side of the animal's jaw, bashing it with all my 
strength and only grazing it.
  
  The wolf darted off and the second ran round me in a circle, dancing towards me and 
then back again. They both lunged in close enough to make me swing the flail and slash 
with the sword, then they ran off again.
  
  I don't know how long this went on, but I understood the strategy. They meant to wear 
me down and they had the strength to do it. It had become a game to them.
  
  I was pivoting, thrusting, struggling back, and almost falling to my knees. Probably it 
was no more than half an hour that this went on. But there is no measuring time like that.
  
  And with my legs giving out, I made one last desperate gamble. I stood stock-still, 
weapons at my sides. And they came in for the kill this time just as I hoped they would.
  
  At the last second I swung the flail, felt the ball crack the bone, saw the head jerked 
upwards to the right, and with the broadsword I slashed the wolf's neck open.
  
  The other wolf was at my side. I felt its teeth rip into my breeches. In one second it 
would have torn my leg out of the socket. But I slashed at the side of its face, gashing 
open its eye. The ball of the flail crashed down on it. The wolf let go. And springing 
back, I had enough room for the sword again and thrust it straight into the animal's 
chest to the hilt before I drew it out again.
  
  That was the end of it.
  
  The pack was dead. I was alive.
  
  And the only sound in the empty snow-covered valley was my own breathing and the 
rattling shriek of my dying mare who lay yards away from me.
  
  I'm not sure I had my reason. I'm not sure the things that went through my mind were 
thoughts. I wanted to drop down in the snow, and yet I was walking away from the dead 
wolves towards the dying horse.
  
  As I came close to her, she lifted her neck, straining to rise up on her front legs, 
and gave one of those shrill trumpeting pleas again. The sound bounced off the mountains. 
It seemed to reach heaven. And I stood staring at her, staring at her dark broken body 
against the whiteness of the snow, the dead hindquarters and the struggling forelegs, the 
nose lifted skyward, ears pressed back, and the huge innocent eyes rolling up into her 
head as the rattling cry came out of her. She was like an insect half mashed into a 
floor, but she was no insect. She was my struggling, suffering mare. She tried to lift 
herself again.
  
  I took my rifle from the saddle. I loaded it. And as she lay tossing her head, trying 
vainly to lift herself once more with that shrill trumpeting, I shot her through the 
heart.
  
  Now she looked all right. She lay still and dead and the blood ran out of her and the 
valley was quiet. I was shuddering. I heard an ugly choking noise come from myself, and I 
saw the vomit spewing out onto the snow before I realized it was mine. The smell of wolf 
was all over me, and the smell of blood. And I almost fell over when I tried to walk.
  
  But not even stopping for a moment, I went among the dead wolves, and back to the one 
who had almost killed me, the last one, and slung him up to carry over my shoulders, and 
started the trek homeward.
  
  It took me probably two hours.
  
  Again, I don't know. But whatever I had learned or felt when I was fighting those 
wolves went on in my mind even as I walked. Every time I stumbled and fell, something in 
me hardened, became worse.
  
  By the time I reached the castle gates; I think I was not Lestat. I was someone else 
altogether, staggering into the great hall, with that wolf over my shoulders, the heat of 
the carcass very much diminished now and the sudden blaze of the fire an irritant in my 
eyes. I was beyond exhaustion.
  
  And though I began to speak as I saw my brothers rising from the table and my mother 
patting my father, who was blind already then and wanted to know what was happening, I 
don't know what I said. I know my voice was very flat, and there was some sense in me of 
the simplicity of describing what had happened:
  
  "And then ... and then. . ." Sort of like that.
  
  But my brother Augustin suddenly brought me to myself. He came towards me, with the 
light of the fire behind him, and quite distinctly broke the low monotone of my words 
with his own:
  
  "You little bastard," he said coldly. "You didn't kill eight wolves!" His face had an 
ugly disgusted look to it.
  
  But the remarkable thing was this: Almost as soon as he spoke these words, he realized 
for some reason that he had made a mistake.
  
  Maybe it was the look on my face. Maybe it was my mother's murmured outrage or my other 
brother not speaking at all. It was probably my face. Whatever it was, it was almost 
instantaneous, and the most curious look of embarrassment came over him.
  
  He started to babble something about how incredible, and I must have been almost 
killed, and would the servants heat some broth for me immediately, and all of that sort 
of thing, but it was no good. What had happened in that one single moment was