Howling Winds

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. The shadows of the woods crept closer, drinking up what little guttering flame of lamplight I had to light my way, and the chill that prowled between the trees licked across my nose and cheeks and blew about my heavy cloak. Still, I walked. If I were to stop, I would surely succumb to this dead of winter cold. Come the spring thaw I would be nothing but carrion for the critters that fed upon the festering dead. My mother might never learn what had become of me.

The first time I walked this path, I had been very young, but it was summertime. The woods were verdant and mossy and alive, loud with the chittering of birds and bugs, and though I was deemed old enough to walk on my own, I had never felt completely without company.

“That is your guardian angel,” said Mother.

“That is the keeper of the woods,” said Grandmother, spoken with as much conviction though half as much comfort.

In all my walks from my sparse village through the woods to Grandmother’s house, I wavered between the sentiments. Soothing or warning. Faith or fear. Neither seemed entirely true to me, and I had yet to encounter anything in the woods that might bring my mother peace of mind or my grandmother vindication in her vigilance. Through this walk, through this dead and darkening version of the woods, I was accompanied by the wind howling low and long in the distance.

While my mother set me off with prayers and oatcakes, my grandmother filled my head with cautionary tales and a pagan pragmaticism. By her hearth I heard many stories of the woods, of the beasts that prey upon the young and unprepared.

“Why do you live out here all by yourself then, if you are so certain there is something so terrible lurking out there?” I asked her once.

“The dangers of the woods are simple and to be expected,” she said. “A wolf is a wolf; a monster, just that. A man can don a mask of gentleness to conceal insidious desires beneath.”

Those words, their meaning unclear to me then, came back to me at the beginning of the season. The snow only freshly fallen, the world glittering and white, and the son of the neighbouring farmers leaning against a tree and speaking to me.

“What a pretty red cloak that is,” he had said, running his fingers along the edge of my hood. “A pretty cloak for such a pretty girl.”

His demeanour was casual, his words soft. I recalled my mother’s words then, too, when she asked if I thought him handsome. She said with my fine hair and soft skin I had grown into a lovely young woman myself, the tone not dissimilar to when she spoke of guardian angels and other bright and hopeful things. I wondered briefly if this boy thought bright and hopeful things of me.

“Surely you must require some company in your treks through those woods,” he continued, a strand of my hair between his fingers. “I’d be happy to join you, keep you safe.”

He then smiled, and despite the warmth of his tone and outwardly kind words, a chill slid through my spine and landed like a stone in my stomach.

My, what sparkling eyes he has, I thought. All the better to leer with.

My, what rough hands he has, I thought. All the better to grab and grasp with.

My, what bright teeth he has, I thought. What cunning words, what drooling mouth. All the better to take and bite and tear and ruin with.

My polite refusal agitated him. He still smiled and coughed a laugh and shook his head, his curls catching snowflakes, but I saw it, that slip. Something heated and so hungry peaking through.

I am colder now than I was in that moment, though notably less afraid. I would quietly freeze to death out here on my own. That was simple, that was to be expected. I did not have to contend with the imaginations of a man with a vulnerable woman, of what he might do with her at his mercy.

The flame of my lamp fluttered, flickered, then vanished in a swirl of smoke. Night fell like a heavy blanket and my path was lost. The slivers of silvery moonlight between the bare branches overhead the only light to reach me and turned my red cloak black in the night. Wind whispered around me, sucking warmth from fingertips and ears. I was lost, and alone, and now I was well and truly afraid.

Snow landed in my eyelashes, melted and froze again on my cheeks. I waited. The howling winds were closer now, long and low and breathing.

I am unsure how long I stood there in the woods. Time lacked importance as my footsteps disappeared and the moon rose and rose. But eventually, a new set emerged from the darkness. Soft steps, enormous and clawed. Great billowing plumes of smoke from black, wet nostrils wrapped around thick trunks. From the dark and from the quiet and from the depths of the dead of winter, the wolf appeared.

“Little one,” he said, the sound rumbling deep within his chest and reverberating in my own sternum. “Are you lost?”

My words were nearly lost in the chattering of my teeth. “I’m afraid I am.”

Had I been young and small, any wolf would have appeared to me as big and dangerous as any monster. But I was now grown and bigger and the wolf was still enormous. Dense black fur haloed in the moonlight, his snout as long as I was tall, his chest broad enough for me to crawl inside and sleep in. Every part designed for warmth, for strength in the cold. I stared into unblinking eyes, red as hot blood, with want and envy.

“Cold and afraid,” said the wolf. “That is no way to die.”

And yet, I realized with a sudden relief I was no longer cold, no longer freezing, but instead stiflingly hot, my cloak now a choking and smothering weight. The latch was difficult to undo with my fingertips dead and blackened, but I managed. It fell in a heap around me, kicking up a swirl of snow that landed on my thin clothes and newly bare skin. It stung for only a moment, and then I was so, so warm again.

The wolf stepped closer, the heat and raw scent of his breath enveloping me, a warmth in earnest filling my chest even as I felt my heartbeat slow.

“Come with me, little one,” said the wolf. “I can bring you somewhere safe and warm.”

Safety and warmth, and presumably uncorrupted by the deceits and desires of man, just like Grandmother always spoke of. What bliss compared to a frozen corpse in the snow.

When I tried to speak, I tasted only blood. My soft lips now frozen together, the skin gently tearing even as I breathed. I laid a hand on the wolf’s snout, disappearing up to my elbow in deliciously soft and warm fur. I sank into the wolf, brushed against his drooling, fanged mouth, wrapped myself tight around his throat and did not let go.

Come the spring thaw, when the path was walkable once more, the folk of the nearby village found only a red cloak, a broken lamp, and a few tufts of fur, quickly vanished into the woods by a low and long and howling wind.