Hunger Moon Hex

A knife to the chest did little to stop the wolf from knocking Corporal Urs Reitter of the Imperial German Army onto the ground. He landed face down in the snow with both arms pinned under his chest and no air in his lungs as the full weight of the wolf slammed between his shoulder blades. Reitter wheezed. A puff of hot breath was all the warning he received before the wolf bit at the meat of Reitter’s shoulder. Only his thick winter coat saved Reitter from a rabbit’s death. It wasn’t the type of violent demise he braced for when he enlisted in the war effort. Reitter rocked from side to side but failed to free either of his arms. With a crunch, Reitter dropped an inch lower in the snow. He drew in a breath and cursed.

As Reitter contemplated the merits of screaming, something cracked the wolf over the head. It yelped. The force of the hit traveled down the wolf’s jaws, through its teeth, and sharply into Reitter’s collarbone. Twisting away from the pain, Reitter watched the wolf spit out his scarf. A rifle butt clubbed the animal just above its eye. As the wolf reeled, Artem Ilyich Tarasov kicked it off Reiter.

“Up, up, up,” Tarasov urged. He grabbed a fistful of Reitter’s wool coat and yanked Reitter up and back, putting space between them and the wounded mass of wolf writhing in the snow. Reitter cursed again.

“Good?” Tarasov asked.

“Good.” Reitter was almost confident that it was true. He was standing and his gut was unsplit, which felt close enough. The wolf staggered to its feet, splattered in its own steaming blood. Tarasov let go of Reitter’s coat, raised his rifle and shot once. The wolf snapped at the air with broken teeth and listed to one side. Tarasov shot it again. Finally, the animal eased itself onto the ground and fell still. Dead, Reitter hoped.

“The hunter?” Tarasov asked. Reitter waved a hand in the direction of the figure on the ground, a dark break in the field of unending Lithuanian snow. The wolf interrupted Reitter’s trek to check for a pulse and he felt obligated to finish the task regardless of how pointless it felt. Giving the dead wolf a wide berth, they stomped over to the person. It remained unmoving and stiff.

Idly, Tarasov nudged the corpse with his boot. Its jacket moved enough that Tarasov could see the uniform underneath, and declared, “One of yours.”

“Hm. Not everyone has your luck,” Reitter agreed. Once upon a time, Tarasov had been a similar spot of blood in the vast, white landscape. He’d just had the good fortune not to be dead when Reitter stumbled over him. “Another dead hunter then. This is the road to the field hospital, yes? They were all heading the same way.”

“Which is the way we go. After you,” Tarasov bowed and waved grandly in the direction of the German medical outpost. The path was barely visible in the snow, little more a thin trail trampled down by animals walking single file toward the forest. “I don’t want to get shot by your comrades if we startle them.”

Reitter huffed a laugh, but walked ahead obediently, “What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, comrades included. If my Kaiser and your Tsar don’t like it, then they can solve this wolf problem themselves, can’t they?”

When the wolves first appeared, they more a novelty than a concern. Reitter, who spent most of his life in Cologne and only passed through rural places prior to the war, thought them interchangeable with stray dogs. As the frontline moved from east Prussia into Lithuania proper, the wolves grew less dog-like. They became the large, ominous figures that Reitter’s grandparents warned him about when he was young. The eyes looking back from the ever-thinning forest were numerous and unsettling. Not just animals, but the dangerous forest spirits that his grandmother used to hear on the wind.

When the soldiers marched, the growing army of wolves marched with them. The livestock went missing first. As the winter trudged on, the wolves moved from consuming living horses to the unburied dead. Poisons failed to cull them. Guns kept the threat at bay for a time, but their fear was short-lived in the face of their hunger. Despite grenades and traps, the wolves always returned to the front lines. Left with little choice, German and Russian battalion leaders alike sent whoever they could spare to hunt.

Reitter tried not to think about how he and Tarasov would go back to shooting at each other when the threat was resolved.

It was growing dark when they finally reached the field hospital. The encampment was huddled under a handful of sickly trees and shored up on one side by a rocky outcropping. The natural features shielded it from winds and the noisy biplanes that buzzed overhead in better weather, but not anything moving on foot.

“Hello?” Reitter called. The field hospital was still. No one called back to greet them. No one came to inspect the noise. Reitter craned his neck to look for a doctor or stretcher-bearer, but none appeared. The encampment was absent the low groan of the injured and dying that always seemed to linger between the rows of leaning tents.

“Urs,” Tarasov grabbed the back of Reitter’s coat collar and held fast. “Tracks.”

Nauseous and aching somewhere under his ribs, Reitter looked down. He lacked Tarasov’s hunting experience and keen eye, but even he could pick out a pawprint or two in the overlaid layers of boot impressions.

“They’re dead,” Reitter breathed. Perhaps something of his grandmother’s notions trickled down to him after all, because Reitter knew down to his marrow that there was no one left to save here. Shrugging out of Tarasov’s grip, Reitter stumbled to the nearest tent and threw open the flaps. A dead soldier lay splayed across the ground, partially covered by a dusting of snow and a smear of frozen gore haloed around him. There were two dead men in the next tent. The doctors lay tangled in a heap outside near the long cold fire pit, bellies and throats ripped open, clothes stiff with frozen blood. Reitter spit out a prayer like a curse. Tarasov crossed himself once.

“There’s over a dozen men here. How many wolves to kill a dozen men?” Without waiting for an answer, Tarasov started poking around for things to salvage. “Check for supplies. We need to start a fire soon. No starving wolf will let this much food rot.”

“Nothing rots here,” Reitter said absently. Tarasov smacked him on the shoulder, jarring Reitter into motion.

“Quick like the bunny. Food, medicine, ammunition. Hop, hop.”

There were more casings than live rounds scattered around the camp but not a single dead wolf to be seen. Reitter focused on stuffing his pockets with canned goods, and tried not to think about what that meant. When they were done, they met back at the fire pit. As the better woodsman, Tarasov begin building the fire while Reitter picked through their canned goods for the least off-putting rations. They were only halfway through their tins of meat, with toes barely thawed, when Tarasov noticed the burning coal-bright eyes staring at them from between the tents.

“Urs!” Tarasov barked, and grabbed his rifle. Cursing, Reitter threw his can in the wolf’s direction, missing by a mile. He stood, trench club in hand, and braced for another fight. The wolf that emerged from the shadows was too large, and only grew larger as it approached them. It stopped on the other side of the fire, a nightmare roughly the size of a horse. Tarasov raised his rifle. Instead of lunging for them, the wolf raised its chin and howled. The sound was a funeral dirge. It caught Reitter square in the chest and made his bones itch. The trees just inside the firelight began to crack in half, booming like artillery shells. Tarasov let the end of his rifle drop. While Reitter understood nothing in the cacophony, Tarasov began translating, just loud enough for Reitter to hear.

“Do you know what you’ve done, little goats?” The not-wolf snarled when Tarasov was mid-sentence, thrashing its large head from side to side and splattering them all with steaming blood. Reitter startled, but Tarasov squared his shoulders and realigned his rifle sights on the creature. Brave, steady Tarasov. Reitter wanted to grab him and run. If they moved fast enough, perhaps they could outrun the wolves and the war altogether. Though it was too late now, as the not-wolf leaned closer and resumed its awful keening. Hot blood dripped from its mouth.

“You have uprooted the old woods, and freed the ugly things below them,” Tarasov continued, “Human hands must fix what human hands broke.”

“How?” Reitter was a decent tinkerer, but he knew nothing about forests. Nothing about fixing trees, nor salvaging the miles of mud and bodies that used to be woodland. He nudged Tarasov’s side gently, not wanting to throw off his aim. “Ask him, Artem. How can we fix it? What if we just left? The trees would just grow back, wouldn’t they?”

Tarasov glanced at him from the corner of his eye, just a flash of warm brown iris, before he stared up at the creature again. Dutifully, Tarasov translated. The not-wolf’s large ears perked. Its voice, low and ugly, echoed through the men again.

“No. There is a…cost? I don’t know the word it used. It could be asking for anything.”

If only Reitter paid more attention when his grandmother told him old folktales. How did you bargain with a forest spirit? More eyes began to appear on the edges of the firelight. Dozens, hundreds, Reitter couldn’t count them. There were no words clever enough in his mind to trick their way into freedom, much less past the threat growing around them. Reitter couldn’t save them both, but maybe he could save Tarasov.

“I will pay the blood price for us both. See if it will let you go,” Reitter said. Maybe if he sounded enough like one of those fairytale knights, they’d both be able to ignore the waver in his voice. Tarasov frowned. It was small, barely an expression at all, and yet Reitter felt it like a blow.

“If you keep us alive and together, we agree,” Tarasov said instead, once in Russian and then again in pointed German. Quieter, Tarasov added, “You can’t understand it. How long before it ate you for not following orders?”

After a moment of consideration, the not-wolf grunted. It licked its bloodied maw and turned to walk back into the flickering dark. That felt like agreement. A buzz settled just under Reitter’s skin as snow began to fall. He latched into Tarasov’ coat with his free hand, unwilling to risk separation now.

“Urs, do you remember the hunters that went missing…?” Tarasov faltered; his expression pinched in confusion. The creatures watching from between the tents and the falling snow were still there, but they no longer looked like wolves. Instead, there were men. Absent any uniform, they stood naked and ice pale, all with coal-bright eyes burning in the dark. Their mouths were smeared with blood. Reitter looked away. He focused on Tarasov’s coat, watching snow accumulate on the wool.

“We found them.”