Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale

by David Wellington

  She could hear her uncle’s voice in her head. Telling her she was feeling sorry for herself. Bemoaning her fate instead of trying to fix it. She tried to argue with him, but even when he was actually there that had never worked. He had a bad habit of being right all the time.

  “Okay,” she said, finally, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Fuck! Okay.”

  She rose from her chair and walked out onto the porch. As much as she didn’t want to face her new circumstance, she did need answers.

  The snow between the trees caught what little sunlight made it through the branches and glowed an unearthly blue. Frigid tendrils of mist snaked around the feet of the bushes. Powell was still hiding in his smokehouse, judging by the volume of aromatic fumes streaming out through the cracks around its door. Behind the house Dzo was washing out the bed of his truck with buckets of stream water.

  When he saw her coming around the corner of the house he pushed up his mask and smiled at her.

  “Am I a prisoner here?” she asked.

  He frowned. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “So I’m free to go at any time,” she tried.

  He shook his head and smiled at her again. “No, sorry. We’d just have to come after you and drag you back. You might hurt somebody.”

  She squinted at him. “I think I have a little more self-control than that.”

  Dzo sighed. “A wolf—your kind of wolf—can’t look at a human being without getting blood in his eyes. Normal times, he’s just an animal, but you get him around people and something comes over him. He gets that taste of blood on the back of his tongue. He gets that smell, that smell in the back of his nose like suppertime has come around.” Dzo shook his head. “You see a human being when you’re in that state, you won’t have any choice. You’ll go right from zero to kill in two seconds.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s—that can’t be right. What about—what about you, then?”

  Dzo stared blankly at her.

  “How long have you been hanging around Powell?” Dzo laughed. “Monty? Me and Monty are old buddies. Like, a lot of years.”

  Chey nodded. “And have you ever been around him when he was changed? When he was a wolf, I mean.” She had to remind herself how literal Dzo could be.

  “Oh yeah, sure, bunches of times.”

  “So,” Chey said, “why hasn’t he killed you yet?”

  “I’m special,” he said, as if it were self-evident. “I’m safe. Everybody else is fair game.”

  “Everybody…You mean, anybody. Anybody who crosses his path.” Her breath came faster. Her ankle pulsed with phantom pain.

  “It’s the main reason Monty lives up here.” He spread his arms wide. “No people. It ain’t for the warm weather. You’re the first human being he’s seen in three years. He attacked you without a thought, right?”

  Chey folded her arms across her stomach. She felt suddenly quite queasy. She thought back to when she’d been up in the paper birch. She’d seen the hatred in the wolf’s eyes, the need to kill. She’d seen what that madness was like, up close and personal, in a way she never wanted to repeat. “I didn’t… I didn’t know that. My god—how does something like this happen? What kind of virus does that to a person?”

  Dzo threw his hands up. “You think it’s some kind of disease, huh?”She nodded. “That’s where you got it wrong, see. It’s not any kind of virus; it’s a curse. And when I say curse I don’t mean some old Indian story that got handed down over the years, and when some bright fellow from McGill comes up here he’s going to say, aha, it was actually a vitamin D deficiency all along. I mean a curse, a magic spell. About the biggest and baddest one ever.” He hopped up onto the open bed of the truck and sat down on the tailgate. His eyes looked off into the middle distance as if he were lost in a bad memory. “See, now it happened about ten thousand years ago, and—”

  Chey shook her head. She couldn’t listen to his story. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” she breathed. She thought she might be sick. “I’d rather die myself. I’d kill myself first—but is that even possible, now?”

  “Sure,” he said, smiling again. “Yeah, there’s ways. Bullets, poison, traps, you’re pretty much good against them. But silver—”

  “Silver bullets?” she asked, too quickly.

  “Any kind of silver will do for you,” he said. “Silver knives, silver dissolved in water you drink, silver thumbtacks if you step on ’em too hard. It’s like a really bad allergy, see? You get silver in your system, you’ll come down like a gored ox.” He shrugged. “’Course, around here we don’t keep much silver on hand for the obvious reason. I suppose you could ask Monty. Listen, if that’s what you want, we can make it happen.” He put a gloved hand on her shoulder. “Promise.”

  She shook her head. Was that really what she wanted? Maybe. But not yet.

  12.

  Eventually Powell came out of his shed. Chey watched him through a window of the little house, unsure of what to think or what to do. He knew things, things she needed to learn. She couldn’t bear the thought of asking him to teach her, though.

  Yet when he headed out into the woods, on foot, her immediate urge was to follow him. She slipped out of the house and headed into the woods herself, trying to look casual. Trying to act as if she’d just decided to take a stroll of her own.

  It didn’t work. No matter how far ahead she let him get, he was always aware of her presence behind him. He would stop in the act of climbing over a moss-covered log or lifting a branch away from the path so he could climb underneath it and freeze in place for a moment, then glance back at her before continuing on his way.

  When he looked at her his eyes weren’t as hard as she’d remembered them. He didn’t look concerned or apologetic—but he damned well should be, she thought—as much as sympathetic. As if he remembered his first time changing into a wolf, and knew she had to come to accepting it in her own time.

  Eventually he got tired of their slow-motion game of freeze tag. He stopped in a small clearing in the woods and just waited. When she didn’t follow him in after a minute he turned and stared at her. She’d thought she was perfectly concealed behind a stand of whip-thin saplings covered in shaggy needles fifty meters away, but he caught her eye as easily as if they were standing together in an otherwise empty elevator, trying not to make eye contact.

  She started to come forward, a little sheepish. He nodded and called out to her, “We don’t have enough time to play silly buggers.”

  Chey had never liked being scolded and she especially didn’t like it coming from him. “Silly buggers? Who says that anymore except, like, my grandpa?” She shook her head. “Anyway, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

  He shook his head. “You have to start thinking differently,” he told her. “You have to change the way you think about time. Time when the moon is down is precious, because it’s the only time you’re really yourself. Don’t waste it.”

  Maybe he knew what she’d come to him for. She sat down on a slightly damp log and looked up at him expectantly, a pupil waiting for her teacher to start lecturing.

  “You’ll learn to be very conscious of moonrise and moonset. Most places that’s easy but up here, in the Arctic, nothing is simple. This is the land of the midnight sun, right? And the moon cycle’s crazy too. We’re moving through a phase of longer moons, when the moon rises earlier each night and sets later the next day. In a couple of weeks we’re going to have a very long moon—it’ll stay above the horizon for five days before it sets again.”

  “‘I’ll be a—I’ll be that creature—for five days?” she gasped.

  “No. Not the part of you that’s really you,” he said. “We share our bodies with them, but not our minds. They think their own animal thoughts. We don’t ever completely remember what happens when we change back. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why. My best guess is it’s just because the wolf’s memories don’t make any sense when they’re picked over by a human brain.
It’s as if you dreamed in a foreign language, and when you woke you couldn’t translate what you’d said in your dream.”

  She’d thought something similar herself, earlier, but she kept quiet. She was learning the rules now.

  “You have to understand, though, that no matter how good a person you are, you’re a killer now. A savage. Come up here and look at this.” Powell clambered up onto a boulder overlooking a stretch of what looked like a patchy meadow to Chey. “Even the country up here is different, and you need to be careful every time you put a foot down. This is muskeg,” he told her. “Partially frozen bog land. Looks solid, right? If you try to walk on it, you’ll be in for a surprise—there’s plant life on top, sure, but underneath there’s just water, and no way of telling how deep it might go.”

  “The Great White North’s answer to quicksand,” Chey said, and he nodded. She climbed up onto the rock next to him and had a seat.

  “Our relationship with our wolves is like the muskeg, alright? We’re the solid-looking surface. The trap. We can even trap ourselves, thinking we’re in control. But we’re not, and we’ll never be. Underneath we’re deadly—and we can’t change that.”

  She sighed deeply. “Okay. So life sucks and we can’t die. Great.”

  He shrugged. “I won’t pretend I enjoy this curse. But it isn’t a fate worse than death, either. The wolves aren’t completely without their virtues. There are some things they do better than us. They can survive here much better because they know how to get food in ways we can’t. Whenever they eat, we get the nourishment.” He frowned. “I’ll try to remember to teach you how to hunt tonight,” he said. When the moon came up, she realized. He meant he would try to teach her how to hunt when they were wolves. She shuddered at the thought of transforming again. “This land belongs to them. For hundreds of thousands of years before people came they hunted the caribou here. You may have noticed they aren’t like other wolves.”

  “The teeth,” Chey said with a gulp of horror. When she’d been up in her tree, looking down at Powell’s wolf, she’d noticed the teeth most of all.

  He nodded. “The curse was cast ten thousand years ago, right at the end of the last ice age. There were timber wolves here then, but they were smaller and not so fearsome. The shamans who created this curse wanted to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, really mess with them. So they picked an animal they knew would scare anyone—the dire wolf. They had huge teeth for crunching bones and enormous paws for walking on top of snow. That made them look like monsters to your average Paleo-Indian. Dire wolves are extinct now, but in their day they used to bring down woolly mammoths and giant sloths. They were tough sons-of-guns, see? Everything was bigger back then. And nastier.”

  “Dzo said a timber wolf would never attack a human being,” Chey suggested. “He said we don’t look like their food.”

  Powell nodded. “Yeah. Unless you provoke a wolf—poking it with a stick would do, I guess—it’ll leave you alone. The same wasn’t true of dire wolves. They were man-killers, because back then people didn’t have the technology to make them afraid. There’s more to it, though. The curse makes our wolves resent us. They don’t like being human, any more than we like being wolves. They want to be wolves all the time—you probably felt that.”

  Chey nodded. She remembered exactly how good it had felt to change. It sickened her, offended her humanity. But she remembered how bad she’d felt when she changed back, too.

  “They grow to hate us. I don’t know if it’s just natural antipathy or if the curse includes some kind of evil twist, but our kind of wolves go out of their way to destroy anything human. They would destroy us in a heartbeat if they could. There have been times when I changed back and found that I had busted all the windows out of my house because my wolf thought maybe I was sleeping inside.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “But—”

  “Yes?”

  “What about Dzo? Why doesn’t your wolf attack him?”

  “He’s gotten very good at staying out of my way, I guess,” Powell told her. “Believe me, no human being wants to be nearby when the change comes.”

  “And there’s nothing you can do to stop it?”

  “You can lock yourself up when the moon is out. I’ve tried that and found I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t take waking up in a locked room. My wolf got so hungry it went a little crazy—it spent all that night bashing itself against the walls trying to get out. It hurt itself, so much so that when I changed back I found myself in so much pain I couldn’t even walk. Dzo had to bring me food. It was …tough. Too tough. I needed to be free.”

  She wondered if she could handle being locked up. It might be better than running around like an animal.

  He glanced down at his watch and his face fell. “Oh, shoot. I guess I’ve forgotten how nice it is to have somebody new to talk to about this stuff,” he told her. “The time just flew.”

  Chey jumped inside her skin. “You mean—”

  “Brace yourself, is what I mean,” he told her.

  She closed her eyes and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. As monstrous as he was, as much as he had hurt her, she didn’t shrug it away, not immediately. It was some small measure of comfort, something she needed very badly. Without warning the hand got heavier and started to sink through her skin. She looked over in horror and saw it melting through her, even as her own body grew translucent. She glanced over her shoulder to see the moon—

  Silver light blossomed inside her head. Her clothes fell away and her body trembled with the joy of renewal. Wolf once more.

  She tasted him on the wind, felt the leathery pads of his paw on her own leg. He drew back and bounded into the forest, leaves and branches swinging wildly where he’d disappeared. She was supposed to follow him, she knew. She’d gotten as much from his smell, from the angle of his tail.

  Something held her back for a moment, though. She felt something trembling under her feet as if some tiny animal were hiding down there. She looked and saw human clothes lying beneath her. Her immediate urge was to tear them apart, but instead she dug her nose into them and took a good sniff. There was something inside the clothes, something hard and round like a river-washed stone. It vibrated with a noise like bees buzzing. Once, twice. Then it stopped.

  Enough. She turned toward the forest and jumped up to follow the male wolf. She still had much to learn.

  13.

  The power in her legs astounded her. Run, run, run, she could run for hours, far faster than a human, and never grow tired—it didn’t feel like running at all. It felt like the world was made of rubber and she was bouncing along like a ball. Run, run, her body rippling with her panting breath, run. Her claws dug deep into the earth with every bound, absorbing the jarring impact as she touched down, then tensing to send her flying again. She ran with the rhythm of her own pulse, her heartbeat keeping time as the world flashed by around her. She opened her mouth to let the air flow in and out of her lungs, tasting its many smells as it surged back and forth. Unashamed, she let her tongue hang out of the side of her mouth, flapping between two enormous teeth like a flag in the wind.

  She bounded into a narrow open space between two stands of trees that leaned away from each other. He waited for her there, his body as still as stone. The saddle of fur between his shoulders was up and she understood the signal—he wanted her quiet. She dug her claws into the lichen-covered forest floor and focused entirely on him. Her level of concentration almost scared her, it was so intense. And yet nothing had ever felt so natural. Before she had been running and the entire universe was speed and motion. Now she was crouching, waiting, and the planet itself seemed to hold its breath for her.

  The male watched her carefully. He was making sure she understood what that stillness meant. What it was for.

  With her stone-like immobility she proved that she did.

  His ears flicked back an
d forth. His eyes stayed on hers. He was watching to see if she got the next step on her own. She thought she did. Silently, with the smallest motions of the flaps of skin around her nostrils, she breathed in the world around her. It was all there, all the things she’d smelled before, but back then she’d been building a map of smells in her mind, taking in the whole picture. This, she understood, was different.

  He tilted his head a fraction of a degree to one side. Asking her a question. What do you smell? Specifically.

  Enormous sections of her brain were devoted to just this activity. She ran through the vast catalog of things she could smell, trying to pick out the one he wanted. It took only milliseconds before she had it. It was as if a lover of classical music, having gone to the symphony, had been asked to pick out a single instrument’s voice. It was almost laughably simple, because her brain had already flagged that particular smell, had already mapped and memorized and pinpointed it for her. The male wasn’t teaching her technique or finesse here—only to accept and rely on her most basic instincts. There could be only one smell he was looking for, and she had it: an animal, a mammal, something small and defenseless. Prey.

  A whole new set of thoughts, feelings, instincts lit up her mind. All of them revolving around the concept of prey—and the knowledge that she was a predator. She felt reflexively ready, felt an almost unbearable anticipation of pleasure. It was time to learn how to hunt.

  Her human side flinched. She hated her human side—it was so helpless and weak and it wanted to control her, to imprison her. If she ever met her human side she would—she would—but that didn’t make any sense, did it? Her brain warbled in unhappiness. It couldn’t finish that thought. So elegantly, beautifully evolved to pick one smell out of millions, it had far more trouble with simple logic.