Wolf

“My God, Dale,” he said, “it’s perfection.” Here we will find our former traveling companion, who in his own boyhood knew a boy named Richard Sloat and, once, too briefly, knew yet another whose name was, simply, Wolf.

The narrator recalls Jack’s childhood companions Richard Sloat and Wolf during his talisman quest.

Confess. Sunlight Gardener, an Indiana preacher whose name had also been Osmond. Osmond in some other world. The broad, hairy face and frightened eyes of a boy who wasn’t a boy at all: This is a bad place, Jacky, Wolf knows. And it was, it was a very bad place.

Jack remembers Wolf, the box, Sunlight Gardener and his death.

As it did, Jack saw that his smile was puzzled as well as friendly, and understood two things at once: first, that there was no harm in this fellow, not an ounce of it, and second, that he was slow. Not feeble, perhaps, but slow. “Wolf!” the big, hairy boy-beast cried, grinning.

The hairy boy-beast introduces himself to Jack as Wolf.