The male was trying to get her attention again, speaking to her in a silent language she had never needed to learn. She just knew what he meant when he pushed out his tongue and licked his snout a little. She raised her tail. She put aside human thoughts and concerns. They were inessential. Meaningless. Prey was nearby—and she was a predator.
The wind stirred her hair and ruffled her cowl. She possessed two layers of fur, a dense, woolly undercoat and a much looser coat of guard hairs that stood out from her body and made her look bigger than she actually was. The guard hairs were stiff and they grabbed at the wind. She could feel them tingle as they rose away from her body, as her skin prickled with the sense of movement nearby. She was perfectly aware of everything around her, every small, trembling leaf, every insect crawling through the ground below.
She could feel the hunger in the ground, in the trees around her, and felt it matched by the tightness in her own belly. Summer was the starving time in the forest, when the caribou herds, the great food source for wolves, migrated still farther north to calve on open ground. The wolves had to find other sources of nourishment. Sometimes they could not and they starved to death.
She was a hunter, though. She could provide for herself—once she learned how. She narrowed her eyes and felt for the prey. The ground trembled in time with her heartbeat and she felt where it was not solid, but hollow, where the prey had dug itself in for safety.
She could hardly stand it but Wait, wait, wait, the male was telling her, his fierce energy banked and hidden. Wait for it. Then the waiting was over. He opened his mouth in a broad, silent yawn. Then he snapped his jaws shut with an audible click.
The prey must have been aware of them. It must have smelled them, and dug itself even deeper into its hole. But that sound of such enormous teeth coming together must have terrified it. The sound must have driven it crazy.
A snowshoe hare shot up out of the ground and dashed between them, its gray summer coat flecked with mud. Its dark eyes rolled wildly in its head as its broad feet smashed at the ground.
The male was off like a shot after the prey. She came up close behind, staying to one side of the hare, instinctually knowing how to flank it. They moved like electricity along the ground, dodging around tree trunks, fluttering through shrubbery that rattled and shook but didn’t slow them down. His mouth was wide open as he looked across at her, over the head of the doomed hare. He was showing all his teeth and the meaning was clear. He could have snapped up the prey easily, but he wanted her to take the kill.
Her body sang with excitement and hunger. She dug in harder, pushed herself that much faster and made contact. Without hesitation, without so much as a thought, she brought her jaws together around the hare’s spine and lifted it clear off the ground. With the huge, powerful muscles in her neck she shook the animal until it was bloody and twitching. Her legs came up and she rolled to a stop in the leaf litter, her prize still locked inside her jaws. The hare’s wild eye caught hers as it flopped in its death throes, but any idea of mercy or pity was foreign to her. She was a predator.
Her human side screamed in protest, but she just snarled it away.
He dashed up beside her and nosed her kill, excited by what she’d done, panting wildly. He did not bite into it right away, however. It was her prey and hers to do with as she saw fit. He waited for her to signal that she was willing to share. Then together they tore the hare apart and gobbled down its meat. She cracked its skull between her giant teeth and let the buttery softness of its brains slide down her throat. He crunched its long legs and dug the marrow out of its long bones with his tongue.
Yes, yes, yes! In triumph and exultation she tilted her head back and howled in delight.
When they were done with their meal they fell across each other, sated, bloated, barely able to move. She would have been happy to drift off into sleep and she did, in fact, doze a little. She was woken, however, when he batted at her stomach with his nose. She looked up and caught his eyes—then pricked up her ears.
There was a sound, a sound she didn’t like gliding over the trees. A sound like someone was cutting the wind into pieces. She stared at him but he didn’t have an answer for her, couldn’t tell her what it was. Then she smelled it. It smelled of gasoline and metal. Human smells.
A desire similar to that she’d felt for the hare’s blood awoke inside her. Similar, but not exactly the same. She hated that human smell. Hated it with a purity she’d never felt before. She began to rise to her legs—but he pushed at her again with his nose and she didn’t move. The smelly human thing was high up in the air, flying like a bird. She could no more reach and kill it than she could snatch the moon from the sky. He wanted her to be aware of it, but also to know that some things were beyond her expansive powers.
In a moment the smell and the sound were gone, having passed over the face of the woods and disappeared. She lay back, easy and with a full belly, and thought no more of it. When he started nosing at her hindquarters, she did not turn to snap at him. It was only a friendly kind of sniffing, anyway. This time.
14.
Chey woke up stiff and naked—with Powell, also naked, draped across her legs. His—his penis was flopping across his thigh. It wasn’t quite flaccid.
“Guh,” she let out.
Her heart pounded in sheer unadulterated disgust. She thought she might throw up. When he’d put his hand on her shoulder, that was one thing, but this—she could not let herself get close to him. Not like that. “Jesus,” she said, her whole body shivering, and not with the cold. She slid out from under him and dashed behind a tree. When she looked again his green eyes were open and staring at her but he lay still as a dead man on the forest floor. “This is not cool,” she said. “This is definitely not cool.”
He didn’t cover himself up. He didn’t even look down at himself. “Don’t be so agitated,” he told her. “You’ve never seen a man’s thing before?”
“A man’s thing? His thing? What are you, twelve years old?” She turned away and covered her face. When she looked again he hadn’t moved. “Put that thing away, please. Now.”
He waited a moment longer. Then he smiled with a certain degree of self-satisfaction. She didn’t like it at all. Eventually he sat up and moved his legs so he wasn’t so—so entirely naked.
“You knew we would be naked when we came back,” he said, which sounded almost like an apology.
“I didn’t think you would be stretched out all over me!”
He shrugged. “I can’t control what my wolf does.”
A new wave of disgust surged up from her stomach to the roof of her mouth. “Oh. Oh my God. We didn’t. We definitely did not. Please tell me we didn’t—”
“My memories are hazy at best. But no, I don’t think so.”
That was some kind of relief, anyway. She clutched her arms around herself, hiding her breasts, and said, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. Don’t look at me!”
He put his hands up and covered his eyes. “Dzo will be here soon enough. I’ll try not to look at you until you’re dressed.”
She sat down on a soft carpet of reindeer moss. Her arms broke out in gooseflesh, but at least this time she knew she wasn’t going to die of hypothermia. She watched him for a while, watched him keep his hands pressed tight over his eyes, and started to feel a little guilty. She had been harsh, she decided. Everything he’d said had been true.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her stomach rumbled and she realized that maybe some of her nausea didn’t come from the horror of waking up naked with Powell. She felt like she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her. With a sudden inpouring of wisdom she realized she did not want to find out what it might have been. “I know you didn’t ask to get saddled with a newbie wolf who didn’t even know how to hunt. I’ve been pretty abominable so far.”
“It’s understandable,” Powell said. “You didn’t ask for this either. I just hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me.”
She started to
talk. Then she bit her lip hard enough to make it bleed.
She’d been about to take a step in that direction, had reflexively almost said yes, that she did forgive him, but then her old self, her purely human self, recoiled inside her head, squirmed with negation. Not on your life, she wanted to say. Never.
She decided to deflect the subject. Say anything, anything else. “I’m so far out of my element,” she said. “Nothing up here makes sense to me. Compasses don’t point north. This is midsummer, the days last eighteen hours, but it never really gets warm. And these trees. Why on earth do the trees point in all different directions? For my entire life I was under the impression that trees pointed straight up.”
“These did too, originally.” He rolled over onto his stomach, his hands still over his eyes. He wasn’t technically showing her his butt. But she could see it if she wanted to. She told herself she 100 percent did not want to. “It’s the permafrost that does it. That’s soil where the groundwater is permanently frozen, and the groundwater never thaws, not even in summer—”
“I’ve seen a nature documentary before,” she told him.
For a second he looked like he had no idea what she was talking about. He went on. “Some parts of the ground, the shadowy parts, stay frozen all year. Other parts thaw out and turn to mud, which sags.” He held his two hands next to each other, then lowered one, which had the effect of making the other look higher. “The earth around here is fluid. Not stable at all, even if it looks solid right now. It just moves very slowly. If you could stay still long enough to watch it, say over the course of a year, you would see waves rolling through it like on the surface of the ocean. The miners and loggers who used to come through here called this the Drunken Forest.”
Chey rested her chin on her kneecap. “You’ve been up here a long time, haven’t you?”
“Nearly twelve years now. You learn plenty about a place by just being in it and paying attention. I’ve even come to love it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, it has its charms. For one thing, north of the Arctic Circle there are days every month when the moon never rises. Of course there are days when it doesn’t set, either.”
“No,” she said. She caught her breath. This was one of the important questions. One she’d been asking herself for a long time. “I meant, why did you come up here in the first place? Dzo said the main reason was because there were no people up here for you to hurt. Fair enough. But if that’s the main reason, it must not be the only reason.”
“I’ve got others,” he admitted, his voice suddenly rough. She looked around the tree and found him staring at her. “I don’t know if I should trust you with that kind of information or not.”
“Don’t you think you owe me?” she asked. His eyes narrowed and she shifted uncomfortably. “This isn’t just obnoxious curiosity. I have to understand you better if we’re going to be stuck together for the rest of our lives.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said, a little too quickly.
Hmm. For once she seemed to be getting through his armor. She decided to capitalize on the advantage. “Isn’t that exactly what we’re looking at? Dzo said it—you can’t let me go. I might go south, back to civilization. Where I might hurt somebody. So you’ve got to keep me close, where you can watch me. This place,” she said, indicating the whole of the North, “is one big prison cell, and we’re bunkmates. You want me to forgive you for—everything. Why don’t you start with a little honesty?”
She could see it was working, that she was persuading him. She wanted him to say it, to admit why he had fled to this frozen place. If he would just confess to what he’d done it would go so far with her. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but just then they heard Dzo’s truck honking through the woods, honking for them.
The spell was broken. “Maybe we’ll talk about that later,” he said, meaning they wouldn’t. She knew that game.
They walked together naked through the trees, Powell in front so he wouldn’t stare at her. She studied the angular shape of his back, the bones that stuck out beneath his shoulders, and wondered if she really could have connected with him anyway. She had to shake those thoughts out of her head. It had worked before to talk about other things. About the weirdness in his world. “Will you tell me something else, then?” she asked.
He sounded guarded when he grunted a yes back at her.
“Will you tell me how you got your wolf?”
He turned to face her and her arms went up to cover her breasts. He was looking right into her eyes, however. “Alright,” he said. “I’ll tell you that much.”
15.
“I was born in Winnipeg a while back,” Powell began, when they were seated in the back of Dzo’s truck and headed for the house. “I had a pretty normal childhood. I played at tin soldiers like any boy, and worked some for my father, who was a grocer. Never went to much school, but I didn’t know what I was missing, so I didn’t complain. Then, when I was nineteen, I was called up to serve this country in the Great War,” Powell said, facing away from her. “What you would call World War One, I suppose.”
“Hold on,” Chey said. She’d just thought of something. “This all happened when you were nineteen? The First World War started when you were nineteen?”
“I was born in eighteen ninety-five.”
She shook her head. “You don’t look a day over forty,” she said. Except his eyes were old. They’d always looked old to her.
“We change almost every day. When that happens we don’t just sprout hair and grow our teeth out. Every cell in our bodies is altered and renewed. Our cells never have time to age. It’s true, Chey. I’m a hundred and eleven years old. And for most of that time I’ve been a wolf. I can guess your next question, but I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if we die of old age or not. I feel as healthy as I did the first time I changed, but beyond that I just don’t know.”
Chey’s spine tingled at the thought of living that long running from one forsaken corner of the world to another. How long would her own life last, she wondered? Decades—maybe centuries of endless transformation lay before her. Of waking up naked in the frozen forest. Chey shivered and it wasn’t because she was naked. She felt a pressing need to change the subject. “Did you wear one of those funny dish-shaped helmets?”
“Yes, I goddamned did,” he said, the back of his neck turning red. It was the first time she’d ever heard him swear. “I wore a Mark One two-pound helmet. And I wore khaki leggings to keep my feet dry, but they never did. I don’t know what you’ve been taught that war was about, or why we fought in it at all, but for me it was just about mud. Oh, there were some very pretty songs they had us sing about queen and country, but in the real day-to-day, when all was said and done, most of what I remember of the war was the smell of other men’s feet and plenty of mud. Mud everywhere, and the Germans shelled the tar out of our mud, and we shelled theirs, and sometimes we took their mud away from them and sometimes we had to give it back. We dug down into the mud to try to get away from the explosions and then we crouched in our mud and waited to die. Every so often they told us to crawl over some barbed wire and shoot anything we saw. Everybody knew what that would mean, which was that most of us would not be coming back. This was the war when they first used machine guns, you see, and tanks, and aerial bombardment, and poison gas, and nobody knew yet how men in Mark One helmets and leggings were supposed to survive going up against all that, so a lot of us didn’t. We did what we could to not think too much about it. There was always alcohol around, but cheap stuff, stuff people brewed in old coffee cans, and it would make your stomach sour for days. Then there were women. This was France, after all, and France was supposed to be full of pretty girls. Too bad they’d all packed off for less muddy places when the shooting started. Those who were left weren’t the prettiest, but they were—well—more friendly, I suppose, than girls back home. Especially if it was the day after payroll came down the trench. You understand what I mean?”
Chey smiled. “Oh, yeah.”
“One night like that my buddies and I borrowed a field car and just motored around for hours looking for anyone female who might enjoy some uniformed attention. Just when we were ready to turn back a mate of mine from Vancouver shouted out for me to stop. I looked ahead through the windshield and there she was, standing by the road as if she was just waiting for us. A woman, a God’s honest French jeune fille like we always used to talk about finding but knew we never really would. Oh, she was beautiful. Long red hair and creamy skin and not a stitch of clothing on her.”
“That must have been a surprise,” Chey suggested.
“Oh, heavens, yes. Especially back then. You won’t believe me, but in those days if you saw a girl’s ankle you hurried back to your friends to tell them about it. When we saw that girl standing there in a state of nature, well. I suppose we thought she must be some kind of ghost or angel or something. None of us could figure it, how we got so lucky. Still, this was wartime. You saw crazy people around all the time. You know about shell shock?”
Chey frowned. “We call it PTSD now. Post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Powell shrugged. “It was brand new back then, so we made up our own name. Human beings weren’t meant to see some of the things we saw on a daily basis. Bodies stuck in the wire that nobody was brave enough to fetch back. Whole chunks of French countryside disappearing in clouds of smoke, leaving craters behind. Good men shot by snipers half a mile away because they were foolish enough to light a cigarette at the wrong moment. People went crazy with the noise of the shells, and not just soldiers—plenty of civilians, too. When they got shell shock they would turn inside themselves. They would stop looking at your face and get real quiet. And then, sometimes, they would start crying, or screaming, or maybe they’d start fighting everyone they could get their hands on. Compared to that—this woman looked alright, she was just naked. We weren’t about to hold it against her.”
Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale Page 7
