It was a cavernous night, deep into winter, when I set out to fight the wolf.
In summer, people forget their fear of wolves. We see them only at a distance, and they are wary of human noises. Smart creatures, they know the bite of our steel, the crunch of our boots, the flash of our fire. A single wolf is no threat to an armed warrior, and even a pack would be leery of his boiled leather armour, the great reach of his sword, the fierce determination in his eyes.
In winter, the wolves forget their fear of people. Empty stomachs breed courage in men and beasts alike, and desperate creatures will go crazed. A man who has held his slaughtered family in his arms can slay a dozen stronger, better armed men, for he knows no fear of the empty yawning question after life; so too an animal with a hungry Pack and a stretch of white snow beyond him will kill a shepherd for one bite of sweet bloody flesh, and die with fierce joy in his eyes, that he was so lucky as to taste that pleasure one last night.
It was the winter of my tenth year, one of the worst in memory. The autumn had been a dry one, and crops had wearied and died under the yawning orange sun. A fever crept through our village, seeping like poison in the water, and we battled it with broth and herbs. It took three of our strongest warriors, a woman in her birthing bed and the babe too, six of the elders and a score of centuries of knowledge – and my father. I was still young enough to think that, though others died in raids and fevers, in accidents and arguments, my father could not be slain. He had the strength of an oak tree when he lifted me in his arms, and though I threw myself at his legs with all my strength he never fell like my brothers did. He brought down trees eight times his height, and laughed with a roar that fought the crackling fire of the log in the great-house and won, every time. He was as the sun, as the horizon, as the herds of sheep. A part of the world.
Until he was gone.
And then, amidst this sorrow, the rationed food, the line of dead in white cloths waiting for spring, to be buried, then, came the wolf.
Crazed, they said. Blood-mad, they whispered. Wolves do not hunt in the night, but in the dawn and the dusk, when light is dying or being born, when you feel yourself almost – but not quite – safe. The first time it came, it carried away a sheep; one less for us to survive by, one less to eat, one less to breed, one less. The next time, it took the shepherd. He disappeared, not a single noise to warn us, the only sign of his death a splatter of blood, so white against the red snow it seemed like dye. Mother didn’t want me to see it but I crept close when she was busy with my sisters, hiding their eyes and telling soothing lies. It will be alright. We will be safe. There is nothing to fear.
Two nights later it came again. We were ready for it, warriors in leathers, but who was less afraid? Men with warm wives on the other side of comforting doors, men with children to bounce on their knees and stories to tell of their bravery? Or the wolf, hunger in his children’s eyes, ribs pressed tight against starving flesh? He fought my father’s brother, and took a bite of his leg for the trouble The wound festered, and the leg went with the other bodies, to wait for death.
Soon we whispered the wolf was cursed. It was no normal beast, they said, but a creature from the darkness. It was a man, perhaps, gone mad and become the beast. It was a demon, manifested to punish us for some forgotten slights. It was retribution. It was vengeance. It was the fever, it was the drought, it was one thing too much for us to bear. We brought the herds in close to home, huddled together under skins and next to fires, and pretended not to cry.
And then it happened.
“This would not be happening,” my younger brother said, “if Father were still alive.”
“Aye,” I heard. “True.” “Yes.” “He would have stopped it.” “He would have killed it.” “He would not be afraid.”
It happened one night, in the yawning dark of winter, as a boy of ten summers, that I walked out into the winter, to prove my father lived. He lived in me, in the morals he had taught me, in the strength of my trembling arm. He was the leather of my armour, which, though meant to cover the chest, stretched down past my knees. He was the vision in my squinting eyes, which struggled to see through the swirls of snow, the depth of a wooden night. I thought my family needed me to fight the wolf. I thought I needed to do it, so that I would never lose him. Because he was as constant as the sun, as present as the forest, and he was a part of me.
There is a moment, when you have been alone, before you should be able to see or hear anyone else, when you feel that your solitude is broken. If you have felt it you know what I mean, and if you have not you cannot understand when I say that I felt the wolf that night. I should not have been able to find him, in the great expanse in which he could have lurked, so I suppose it is better to say that he found me. It was not as dark as it might have been, the last of the sun still highlighting the sky in a sullen blue, appearing between the darkness of the bare tree limbs. The wolf was grey, fading into dirty brown, with a white muzzle and soft blue eyes that seemed, rather than furious, to be strangely sad.
Time did not stand still, as I have heard so often that it can. Rather it raced onwards, as soon as I saw the wolf. My breath came faster, and as slow as the footsteps were that I took towards him, the leaves that fell beside me had barely travelled to the ground before I was close enough to touch him. He did not growl, did not move; did not, even, seem to breathe, while I felt myself doing all these things. Loud, clunky, interloper. My father’s sword dragging in the snow behind me, too heavy to properly lift. The snow crunching as I shifted, as the sword weighed against my boy’s thin arms.
Those sad eyes.
I lifted the sword, and it fell in an arc that seemed predescribed. The wolf never moved. We stared into each other’s faces, and the sword hit home with the weight of borrowed steel, with the fierceness my trembling arms could never have produced. Blood came hot and fast, droplets striking my face like embers. There was not a sound. No scream, no cry. Just a gentle exhalation of breath, a stillness, and then. Then the slow careful crumpling, the red spreading through the snow, my father’s blood in my hair and salty on my lips, and my own knees hitting the ground, the weight of it dragging me down, sword biting into the frozen ground as I fall.
Those sad eyes, watching me, as life disappeared, and I wondered how hungry you have to be, and how much you have to have lost, to stand silent as the sword falls.
I left my father’s sword in the snow, left the wolf silent and still beside me. I washed myself with snow until my skin was white and I shook with something I could never described and I pretended was the cold. I went home, and I snuck into the house, and crawled into bed with my sisters and my brothers and my mother’s quiet, shaking form. Let my father have killed the wolf, I thought. Let it not have been me.
Those sad, sad eyes.
(yes, I know this is an image of a dog and not a wolf. but when I first saw it, it was so dark it looked wolf-like, and I ran with it) Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, and on Our Contributors page.