Trophy Cub - 5. She-Wolves and Fundamentalists

Gunnar pulled into the parking lot of the truck stop diner just off the freeway exit in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, Wisconsin. In the ten weeks since he’d left Thomas’s cabin in West Virginia, he hadn’t gotten nearly as far as he originally planned, primarily due to a brief romantic encounter in Kentucky that had left a fresh wound on Gunnar’s heart.

A couple days after beginning his trip he decided to stop overnight in Lexington. Gunnar had planned to take in the local gay nightlife of rural America as he traveled, if any was to be found without resorting to phone hookup apps, and that night in a bar called Crossings he met a handsome middle-aged horse trainer named Roy. Gunnar was so infatuated with him that he posed as an itinerant stable hand looking for work, hoping that the job hadn’t changed that much in the 230 years since the last time he had to take care of horses. Roy offered him a job on the spot, and he spent a wonderful eight weeks mucking out stalls by day, and riding Roy’s equestrian cock by night. One night, after a particularly energetic session of lovemaking, Roy rolled on his side, and softly confessed in his deep gravelly voice, “I love you, Gunnar,” while caressing his cheek. Gunnar closed his eyes, pressed his cheek into Roy’s palm and just nodded, in too much pain to say those words back to Roy. As much as Gunnar enjoyed his time at the stables, and as much as he cared for Roy… genetically Roy wasn’t bear kindred. Gunnar knew that fact from the beginning from Roy’s scent. Even if he stayed with him, Roy could never survive being turned into a werebear, which meant that Gunnar would remain the same age and would have maybe forty years give-or-take to watch Roy grow old and die. It was not the life he wished for either of them, and so after Roy drifted off to sleep, Gunnar quietly packed his bags, left a long and apologetic note on the kitchen counter, and departed in his Jeep in the night.

Gunnar’s next extended stop was in the Chicago area. There were more gay nightlife venues to chose from than what he had found in most of Kentucky and Indiana combined, and one day he saw a bar advertising “Bear Night” that evening. Gunnar chuckled and thought, Why not?

Entering the bar, he encountered the expected crowd of burly gay men, showing off their hairy chests, bushy beards, and bulging biceps like a flock of overly muscled and furry peacocks. Gunnar grinned and strode through the crowd, drawing every eye in the room in his wake as he headed to the bar to order a draft beer. There was much flirting and masculine posturing as a gaggle of men gathered around Gunnar, drawn by an animal magnetism that they barely understood. Gunnar happily chatted with the men but made no advances toward any of them, and one-by-one the crowd dispersed, searching for more willing targets.

As Gunnar finally had a little time to himself to sip his beer, he detected the faint scent of other shifters in the bar, but he wasn’t sure of the species. He took a long slow look around the room and his eyes locked onto a group of four men occupying a booth in the far corner. They were handsome, clean-shaven with angular facial features, dark hair and lean bodies. Definitely not werebears, most likely werewolves.

No, Gunnar internally scolded himself, it’s the twenty-first century. They take offense at being called “werewolves” now. They prefer to be called “wolf lycans” so watch your language.

Gunnar took his beer and made his way around the perimeter of the room until he was standing in front of their booth.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Gunnar said, attempting to get their attention. “Beautiful moon tonight, don’t you think?” he added with a wink.

The wolves looked up at the large mountain of muscle standing over their table and each subtly scented the air in front of them. All four broke out in giant smiles.

“Girl, we came here for the Bear Night beefcake and we found us an actual bear!” the taller wolf in the middle of the group exclaimed. “Get your cute fuzzy ass in this booth and tell us what the hell an honest-to-god werebear is doing in fucking Chicago of all damn places! I know we have the Bears and the Cubs on the sportsball fields, but one doesn’t take those things literally.”

They scooted around in the booth to give the big werebear some room to sit.

“Dish, sugar-bear,” the smaller wolf pressed up against Gunnar’s right side said. “What brings you to the city? I thought all of your kind were the woodsy outdoorsy types.”

“I thought I could have said the same thing about wolf lycans,” Gunnar replied. “I’m really just passing through on my way to the North Woods on a sabbatical of sorts.”

“Listen to Miss Manners over here, all proper, calling us ‘wolf lycans,’” the taller wolf giggled. “Most of the ignorant Illinois trash around here still like to call us werewolves!"

“Please, darling,” the smaller wolf on Gunnar’s right cried, “don’t use the 'W' word in civilized company.”

“I take it that you are not a garden-variety wolf pack,” Gunnar observed with amusement.

“You’ve got that right, honey-buns,” the tall wolf exclaimed, “as we said before, we’re here tonight to get an eyeful of the beefcake, but on the weekends we’re here working, darling! You happen to be sitting with the Midwest’s only all-lycan drag queen revue!”

Gunnar tipped his head back and roared with a full belly laugh. “My name’s Gunnar. Do you lot go by your given names, or by your drag names?”

“Drag names only, honey. We gave up our given names when we each left or were forced out of our original packs, and we all go by ‘she’ thank-you-very-much,” the tall wolf stated. “I’m Susie Banshee.”

She pointed to the two wolves to her right, “That is Linda Lovealot and Dixie Doomei.

“The firecracker attached to your side like a leech,” Susie said, nodding to her left, “Is Little Lupita.”

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance… ladies.” Gunnar stated with a bow of his head.

“Such a gentleman,” Lupita sighed, rubbing up and down Gunnar’s side to mark him with her scent. “We’re definitely taking this one home with us tonight.”

****

Gunnar stayed with the drag queen wolves for a little over a week. He shared stories of his two hundred years in both Norway and in Washington DC, and told them tales of his Papa Nils, who fell in love with a young human named Gunnar so long ago and turned him into a werebear so that they could be together forever.

The stories from the “She-Wolves”, as they liked to be referred to as a group, were a bit grimmer, but with happier endings. They all originally came from different Wisconsin packs, and they warned Gunnar that the packs in the upper Midwest, where he was headed, were not the same kind of lycan communities that he may be accustomed to in Europe or elsewhere in the States. The packs in Wisconsin and Minnesota were considered to be the lunatic fringe fundamentalists of the lycan community.

Elsewhere in the world, wolf packs would create their own small towns, and the lycans within the pack would find mates and live together in cozy little houses, bearing and raising pups for the next generation. The Alpha of the pack was usually the Mayor, the Beta the Vice-Mayor, and the Enforcer the Sherriff. Wolves were free to mate with whomever they loved, and couples would usually get married in the human tradition to fit in with the laws and customs of the region in which they lived. All of this would exist right under the human world’s collective nose, with non-lycans not realizing that the quaint little town they were visiting was in reality, populated entirely by wolves.

Fundamentalist packs, however, had their own set of rules that they claimed followed the strict laws of the Old Gods of the lycans and it was a much more rigid lifestyle.

Gone were the quaint little towns where each wolf couple could raise a family in their own cozy home. Fundamentalists had “pack houses” which were large single-building compounds containing communal living and working spaces for the pack members. They tended to build their pack houses in areas where they were surrounded on all sides by woodlands, preferably on a plot of private property stuck in the middle of a state park, so that they could be completely isolated from neighboring human communities as much as possible.

Gone too, were the concept of “mates” or “families”. Males and females were raised and lived separately within the pack house. The Goddess of the Moon was the patron of the female lycans and by her law, no female was to submit themselves sexually to a male unless they were in heat, and even then, only the biggest and strongest male in the pack should be allowed to mate with her for procreation purposes only.

The males followed the God of the Moon, and by his law, sexual conquest was a means to show status and dominance. Males had the absolute right to take and use sexually that which was weaker or inferior to themselves. During times of war between packs, it was common for the victors to take surviving males of the defeated pack to be used as sex slaves. The females of a defeated pack would always commit suicide before allowing themselves to be captured and abused sexually. In modern times, it was not unheard of for a pack to keep one or more abducted humans as slaves for the males’ sexual needs. As humans are physically inferior to the lycan, it was their place to be dominated by all the males in the pack.

One would think that this arrangement and separation of the sexes might result in the males of the pack pairing off into long-term romantic relationships, but again that was not the case. The God of the Moon strictly prohibited same-sex romantic relationships or feelings. Inferior males were to be used as a sexual outlet to be dominated, and nothing more. If it was discovered that one of the males in the pack harbored romantic feelings of love or sexual desire toward another male, their punishment was to choose between banishment or death.

Such was the fate of each of the She-Wolves. When they allowed their same-sex feelings and attractions to be discovered by the pack, they were banished and immediately transported outside of pack territory with little more than the clothes on their back. It was through sheer luck or providence that the She-Wolves were able to find each other after fleeing to the city, and even greater luck that they each proved to be such a talented drag queen.

“Do any of the humans here know what you really are?” Gunner asked one night after a particularly enthusiastic drag show performance at the bar.

“Some do,” Linda replied, “But gays are good at keeping secrets when it really matters, don’t you think?”

****

They went over Gunnar’s planned itinerary on a map, marking in pink hi-lighter the borders where the known fundamentalist packs were located so that he could steer clear of those territories. The ladies weren’t sure how the packs would react to a lone bear shifter passing through their territory, but they were concerned enough that it might be seen as an act of aggression, and they didn’t want Gunnar ending up chained naked in a pit, being used for combat practice or some other form of barbaric entertainment.

“How does the Lycan Council allow these packs to get away with that kind of behavior?” Gunnar asked, studying the places that they had marked his map with the pack locations and mentally adjusting his planned route.

“The Lycan Council was formed hundreds of years ago, and at the time vowed to uphold and respect the individual religious beliefs of all packs,” Susie told Gunnar, not hiding the tone of disdain in her voice. “Given the fact that they keep themselves so segregated from the human world, with the exception of the occasional human kidnapping, the fundamentalists are pretty much allowed to do as they please. In return for being left alone, the fundamentalist packs don’t campaign for any seats on the Council and keep their noses out of lycan politics.”

“Well then,” Gunnar said, looking at the map again and pointing as he spoke, “I guess when I head out, I’ll split the difference between these two packs, and head up to Fond du Lac and Appleton before turning west toward Minneapolis. That will allow me to bypass packs here, here… and here as well.”

“Good plan, Papi,” Lupita commented. “But, you’d better come out with us one more night before you leave. Once you start on that route, you’re going to be in a dead-zone of any kind of gay nightlife between here and Minneapolis, and we know how you like to get your freak-on at night!”

“Right,” Dixie piped in, “Unless he went to the Silver Bullet, but what self-respecting queer in their right mind would go there?”

Susie flashed Dixie a look that indicated that she should shut her fucking mouth, but it was too late. Gunnar’s interest was already piqued.

“What’s the Silver Bullet?”

Susie sighed, and pointed to a spot on the map about ten miles south of Fond du Lac.

“Papi Bear,” she began to explain, “I’m not going to tell you not to go there. You’re a big boy and can handle yourself. All the rest of us self-respecting queers have been there at one time or another in our lives. Some of us would go there before we were banished from our old packs, and some of us, like myself, found it to be the only place we were welcome after banishment.

“It’s a rough and dirty bar, lycan owned and operated. It’s where the closeted queers in all the fundie packs go in secret to hook up with like-minded lycans to get their cocks sucked and their asses plowed.

“There are no human customers allowed inside. Lycans and Weres only. The last time I was there the security was run by a big angry Kodiak werebear checking scents at the front door.”

“There are bears working in a place like that?” Gunner exclaimed.

“Just that one doorman-slash-bouncer as far as I know,” Susie replied. The rest of the staff and clientele were wolf lycans, with the occasional wereboar running about here and there for anybody who wants to get into the really piggy kind of sex.”

Gunnar only nodded, but Susie could see the wheels turning behind his eyes and sighed.

“I’ll write down some directions. It intentionally isn’t an easy place to find. I still think that it’s a bad scene, but who am I to get in the way of a grown-ass grizzly once he’s made up his damn mind.”

“Thank you, Susie,” Gunnar said. “I promise I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“It isn’t your behavior I’m worried about,” Susie replied, but she took out a sheet of paper anyway and began writing out the directions.

****

Gunnar now sat in the parking lot of a truck stop diner just off the freeway exit about ten miles south of the outskirts of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. That was the first landmark on the handwritten set of directions to find the Silver Bullet. After Gunner had sat and read through the directions two more times, he was sure he would be able to find the place. He shifted the Jeep back into drive and turned down the dark dirt road behind the diner, determined to see for himself exactly what a lycan gay-sex club was like.