Protector: A Short Story

by Stefan Bolz

A young wolf cub, separated from its pack during a fire, is caught in a trap near a human settlement. Jack, a twelve-year-old boy, finds it and, against the rules of his clan that demand to bring the cub back to the village, he frees it. One year later, the boy, together with a few scattered survivors, is on the run from a group of brutal scavengers. The wolf picks up the boy's scent. It is on him now, to repay the debt. A legend is born.

31 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2016

About the author

Born and raised in the Main River Valley in Germany, Stefan came to the U.S. in 1996 where he settled in upstate New York. He grew up on German poetry, soccer, Nutella, and American music. His love of writing began to surface in 1999 (yes, he was thinking about the Prince song while he wrote this sentence). He studied screen writing for five years during which time he wrote a bunch of scripts (one of them came dangerously close to being optioned). After that, there was a foray into poetry and essays on life and existential questions. That brought him to his first novel, The Three Feathers, a fable about a young rooster who follows a dream to search for the meaning of life and finds it in the friendship to a wolf and a war horse. While writing it, he realized that writing has been his own dream all along. Now, four novels, one novella, and a bunch of short stories later, he still feels the same way. You can find him at www.stefanbolz.thirdscribe.com.

Reviews

[Seamus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful short story, should be expected from Stefan Bolz.

[Aletia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stefan is one of my favorite writers. His story Protector definitely illustrates why. Stefan has the ability to tap into the reader's emotions, and to tell a whole story in such a small amount of space.

I originally read this story in, Tails of the Apocalypse, a collection of animals stories and the apocalypse.