Night of the Wolf (3 page)

The sun dipped below the mountain. The evening breeze ruffled the lake’s mirrored surface and the wolf’s fur.

He saw the man.

My,
the wolf thought,
he is a clever one.
The wolf froze. The observer stood in the woods near the top of the hill. He had chosen his position carefully. The breeze blew his scent away from the wolf, and he waited in the long shadow of one of the pines. Only the dark outline of one shoulder and the unmistakable silhouette of a human neck and face gave him away. As the wolf watched, the day faded, his eyes gathered in the last light, and he saw a gleam—the white of a human eye.

He turned his head deliberately and studied the observer, letting him know he’d been seen. The man made no move, threatening or otherwise, so the wolf slipped into the water, swam the pond, and was gone.

What is it? Blaze wondered as he made his way back to Mir’s house. All he’d seen was a wolf. True, the thing was a very large wolf, bigger than most men. The thick gray pelt suggested a mountain hunter, one who made his home in the high passes, moving with his fellows across glaciers. Blaze had seen him clearly in the shadows near the lake. But that thick gray and white pelt would be invisible against snow.

Blaze shivered and not entirely at the rapidly deepening chill of evening. Yes, one struggling along through the drifts might look directly at this gray creature and not see him until he realized he was staring into a pair of large, yellow-brown eyes only a few feet away . . . and ahead of him. By then, there would be time for only a few seconds of prayer.

He’d heard of men taken by these aristocratic wild killers, even men traveling with large armed parties. When he was told the stories, he’d always felt some impatience with these fools and with their escorts, who had sometimes been brought before him, asking for mercy. Telling their tale of having lost a companion or an important individual, and pleading it was not their fault, saying they either heard no cry or only a very brief one. Then, when they quickly retraced their steps, of finding only a few drops of blood soaking into the snow. After seeing this one, even at a distance, he suddenly felt a great deal more sympathy for their plight.

As he was pushing his way through an exceptionally thick patch of undergrowth, he heard a whisper of sound behind him. Blaze’s mouth went suddenly dry and he found his knees weren’t steady. Mir claimed this wolf was sometimes a man, and seemed always able to think like a man.

The creature had seen him and there was nothing to prevent the giant predator from misleading him by going off in one direction, then—as soon as he was out of sight—turning and following him through the dark wood.

Blaze punched at his clothing and found the lantern Mir had given him under his mantle, hanging by a strap from his shoulder. He kindled a flame quickly by striking flint against an iron ring on his finger. As the wick caught, he realized his hands were shaking. He lifted the lantern high and saw he was in a small clearing. The boughs of a huge oak stretched out over him. The ground under him was covered with a mosaic of brown oak leaves.

He almost turned to look back, but realized at the last moment he really didn’t want to. “Father of the gods, protect me,” he whispered as he passed the big oak. At just that moment, he saw the fire Mir had kindled in the clearing in front of his house.

He heaved a sigh of relief and hurried onward. When he reached the edge of the wood, he stopped for a second, intending to blow out the lantern.

Something tugged at his mantle. Thinking it was caught on a twig, he turned and reached down to free it.

The eyes were only inches away.

He knew he screamed. Screamed like a woman. He hadn’t believed he could scream like that, but he did.

He tore free of the mantle—the wolf had it—then flung the lantern at the wolf’s back. Somehow, without seeming to move, the wolf dodged the flaming missile.

Blaze ran, ran as he didn’t think he could still run . . . like a terrified twenty-year-old.

Mir was waiting for him at the door.

Gasping, Blaze looked back across the empty clearing. The bonfire continued to crackle, flames whipping with small tearing sounds, points reaching for the heavens above. At the edge of the forest he saw his mantle, lying like a dark splotch near the flickering lantern slowly being extinguished by the damp leaves.

“Tell me,” Blaze gasped hoarsely. “Tell me I didn’t dream that.”

“No,” Mir answered in a weary voice. “you didn’t. Try not to worry about it too much. Go inside. The people hereabouts have honored you with the best of mead and there are covered dishes, roast meats, and fish on the table. I’ll go fetch the lantern and your mantle.”

“No,” Blaze cried hoarsely, clutching at Mir’s arm. “He might still be nearby.”

Mir gazed at him sadly. “I’m sure he is. He but played with you. Had he wanted you, he would have taken you before you ever reached my home. I have known for a long time he could take me any time he wanted.

“The night, the night after . . . she . . . died, I awakened. I believe it to have been the ninth hour, the longest, darkest of the night. The forest was silent; at that time even fish ghosting in deep pools at the river bottom sleep. But he sat awake, upright on his haunches, tail around his body, near my hearth. His eyes glowed green in the firelight. Such a look he gave me, and I knew whatever our intentions—my intentions, her intentions, even—he didn’t . . .” The old man’s voice trailed off. “Well, no matter. I’ll fetch the mantle and lantern. You go inside and eat.”

Blaze entered the house. The hearth fire blazed high. As promised, there were a number of dishes on the table. Savory aromas rose from them. The girl he’d seen earlier lay on the bed sleeping, her thumb in her mouth.

He poured himself a cup of wine. The beaker rattled against the neck of the cup. He gulped the dark fluid.

Mir returned, carrying the mantle and the lamp. “I know you didn’t believe me before. I know what you thought. ‘Doddering old fool living in a tumbledown shack at the edge of the waste. He has kept company with the birds and deer, the deep forest loneliness and his mad little wife far, far too long. His brain is turned.’ That was what you thought, wasn’t it? Eh?”

“I suppose I might have,” Blaze sighed. “Well, I don’t now. I most emphatically don’t now.”

Mir nodded. “He is a curse. We must be freed from that curse. You are the greatest of our order still remaining in Gaul. Help us.”

Blaze sat down at the table. Absently, he poured himself another cup of wine. His eyes narrowed as his fear faded and he began to think.

Far away, the wolf met his pack in a grove where a wooden female image held sway. Sometimes, at certain feasts, women cursed with barrenness came here to dance in the moonlight. They asked the Lady—she had no other name—for a child. Supposedly it was death for men to come here, but many braved the gesa and sneaked in, concealing themselves in the trees surrounding the image. They did so because the women danced naked, danced themselves into hot desire, and they would often couple in supple abandonment with those whose voices charmed them into the darkness and whose hot spill of seed might quicken the empty womb. After all, bees in the drunken springtime plunder the dreaming orchards by both sun and moonlight. What couldn’t be earned in the marriage bed might be stolen by starlight. But all this came about in the springtime.

Now it was autumn with the mountain winter hurrying in on its heels. Now only the wolves danced and played here in the chill moonlight. They rolled in the short, brown grass, rubbed their heads and jaws against her pillared image, and, at last, sang to the rising moon before the hunt.

No, she hadn’t been beautiful, but then he’d never understood the canons of human beauty. How quick they were to try to hammer something so effervescent, so changeable into a narrow mold. Catch the wind on a net or freeze the play of sunlight on moving water, then you will know what beauty is, but you still will not have been able to lay hold of desire, the fire in the belly that brings us to triumph, heartbreak, or despair.

He had been determined to make the human she in the grove his last. Her pain had scared him. No bitch wolf knew such suffering and perhaps none found it the gateway to the almost transcendent pleasure she displayed so freely at the last. So he stayed away from the lake and devoted himself to his duty—leading the pack, keeping them fed, ensuring the weaker members were protected, and maintaining proper order. Perhaps if he hadn’t lost his leader counterpart, the she who complemented his powers among the females, he might have escaped the trap awaiting him. But the pack’s great female died under the claws of a bear and, for a season, he had no proper mate.

The winter had been harsh. No individual but he could remember a harsher one. The Romans haunted the valley— though he didn’t know them as Romans, only as heavily armed, mounted men who carried powerful compound bows and wanted wolf skins for some purpose of their own. A pack living in the valley was decimated.

He led his to the heights. The men encamped in the valley slaughtered game with both hands. And, as winter wore on and the snows deepened, prey became more and more difficult to find. So when his pack pursued a lean elk into a snow bank and pulled him down, they weren’t about to yield their prey to a snarling bear who appeared and tried to take it from them.

He and she were the leaders. They knew their duty. As the stronger, he led the attack, circling the bear, snapping at her, distracting her while the wolves fed on the steaming meat and blood of the fallen elk. The ravenous bear, her reserves of fat exhausted by the long winter and drained by her cub, wasn’t intimidated or drawn off by their tactics. She turned back toward the feeding wolves and was nearly able to maul one of the yearling males. The wolves drew away, snarling, from the carcass.

They had to have the food, and the gray knew it. A few of the older members of the pack were already weak. He could tell by the smell of the air that a blizzard was sweeping across the pass. If they didn’t feed now, the wind and freezing temperatures would end some of their lives tonight.

He faced the bear, backing her away from the kill with an open-mouthed roar of fury. She reared on her hind legs and swiped at him. He wasn’t quite quick enough and she left a strip of fine marks all along one side of his body. He circled, trying to get behind her, but she followed him. The she-wolf leaped, diving for a haunch. The bear whipped around, dropped to all fours, and in a movement too rapid for the eye to follow, sent the she-wolf rolling, yipping, spraying blood into the snow. But the pack mother had given the gray his chance. He went for the giant thighbone. The bone crumbled in his jaws. He was able to leap away just in time to avoid a last vicious swipe of the bear’s claws. The broken bone leaped out through the skin like a javelin. The bear gave a cry of anguish, spinning ’round and ’round, snow packing under her paws as her blood pulsed, fountained from the shattered leg and drenched the snow. ’round and ’round she went, snapping desperately at the wound that was killing her until, at last, her struggles ended and she sank down in the scarlet pool and died.

Ignoring the bear’s stiffening body, the wolves returned to the kill. The she-wolf stood, shook off the snow, limped over, stood next to him, and took her share. The blizzard’s first clouds reached them. Snow flurries spattered their fur even as they cleaned the elk’s bones. The bear was only a mound of white near the bloody scraps of the kill when they finished. The she-wolf limped away from the elk and the rest.

He knew where she was going—to the den where she had borne her pups for many seasons. Her head was down, her ears back. She was limping badly now, and looked as if she were in great pain. The rest had another shelter and they would seek it.

He followed her.

The den was beyond the tree line. Up and up she went. The snow flurries had settled into a steady downfall that seemed to grow thicker by the minute. The sky was a uniform deep gray that imperceptibly darkened, washing color out of the world, then slowly strangling light. He moved behind the she over the high windswept waste.

The light was blue-gray when they came to the den. The entrance was choked with snow. She wiggled in and found a corner piled with dried moss. She lay still.

He followed, resting next to her, lending her the only support and help he could. His big, warm body stretched out next to her. He heard her sigh, the same sound she made after sex. The previous springtime’s loving hadn’t taken. She was having a barren year.

Her eyes were closed and her muzzle rested on his back, just below the neck. He curled his body around hers as well as he could. Outside, blue evening became black. The wind howled louder and louder as the blizzard ripped through the mountains, tearing at the naked stony peaks and the glacial heights with frigid fingers, wrapping any unsheltered, warm living thing in a cocoon of icy death. Wailing, sobbing, moaning, and, at last, screaming out the triumph of cold and dark over light and warmth. Of an eternal frozen death over the fleeting loves of a transient springtime.

He didn’t know when she died. All he knew was that sometime in those blackest, wildest, cruelest hours before dawn, he woke to find he could no longer feel her heartbeat and that in spite of his warmth, her body was cooling. When he moved, her head slipped from his back and landed with a soft thud on the moss. She lay on her side, jaws slightly open, the tongue protruding a bit between them, eyes staring unseeingly out into the last darkness. He rested his head on his front paws and awaited the dawn.

When it came, he slipped out of the den. The storm had passed. Sun shone on the snow. The sky was blue.

He returned to the den. She lay where she’d been before. He pushed her with his nose and found her already stiffening.

He turned and went outside. He became human. God, it was cold, but this wouldn’t take long. He pulled at the snow above the entrance to the den. A miniavalanche ensued, sealing the entrance not just with snow, but with rock and pebbles that had been piled on the granite slab that formed its roof.