Wolves’ Teeth

There was no sound save for the crackling of fire, the steady blanket of snow drowning out all else. The girl, the storyteller, stood before the flames. There were sparks in her eyes as she began to speak:

“In that time before the friendship of the thunderbirds this land was ravaged by wolves. Each night, as the moon rose behind its silver curtain, they would pad softly to our doors and snatch away that which we held dear in their terrible jaws. In the mornings the snow would cover their tracks, and all that remained were the terrible cries of infantless mothers and fatherless children, and small spatters of blood in the snow.

After a time we fled into the high reaches of the mountains where even the wolves dared not go. In caves we slept the sleep of the dead and waited for the worst of winter to pass. The driven snow beat back all comers, even those on four legs, who sought sweet flesh and warm blood. But this was no way to make a life. One by one we began to succumb to the cold, that oldest of predators. We were born to this, not for this, and so in the depths of winter the decision came to pass that we would return to the lower reaches of the mountains and scrape by with our sorrow and our fear rather than be frozen for all time. The land did not love us.

A man and woman there were, a married pair, who had already lost a son to the wolves, and who believed themselves too old to have another. When we decided to return below, they sat unmoving with frost on their brows.

Won’t you come with us, we asked, seeing the resolve on their faces. The woman looked at us all for a time.

We will not follow, she said, no. We prefer the tyranny of winter to dreams of wolves’ teeth.

While we filed down the icy slope back from whence we came, they sat in the cave listening to the wind howl and scream. When the snow and the clouds had driven us from sight they left the cave and began to climb.

Who among us can say what hardships they faced, scrabbling to the top of that snowcapped peak? Blood under the fingernails, burning in the muscles, despair in the heart — these are the climber’s lot, and these must have been the least of what they faced on their journey to the top.

Just before the mountain’s jagged summit there was a cave, and aching in their limbs they collapsed inside it without a second thought or look around, for they had been climbing in the snow for untold days and nights as the clouds and stars wheeled overhead. In the morning the man awoke to make fire, and instead was greeted by the fluttering of wings and the scraping of talons against flint. Two-dozen birds made their nests in the cave, and the husband and wife had unwittingly stumbled into their home. Thick coats of feathers black and gold stood out starkly in the driving snow that ripped down outside.

The largest birds were bigger than the man. He shrank back in fear, in deference, to their mighty wings and wickedly hooked beaks, but the birds paid him little mind. To them belonged the thunder and the lightning — what fear had they of men?

On the third day of their residence in the cave, the man and woman saw that the chief of the thunderbirds (for thunderbirds they were, outpost of an ancient and noble race) was greatly agitated. His cries were terrible, summoning storms to the craggy peak, his massive wings threatening to buffet the man and woman right out of the cave. The cause became clear soon enough. His youngest son, still a chick, was wasting away. The small bird was dying, could not live for want of food, unsatisfied by mountain scrub. And so the man took his knife and carved a hole in his own side. As blood poured out he reached his calloused hand into the hole and removed a kidney. Before black stars clouded his eyes he knelt and fed the kidney to the chief’s son, who tore at it hungrily.

The man fell to the cold stone of the cave and knew no more. The chief of the thunderbirds wove grasses together into thread and with his needle-sharp beak stitched closed the man’s side. When the man awoke some days later the first thing he heard was the cackle of the little bird.

Fifteen years passed. Down below, our people’s war with the wolves ebbed and flowed. A fretful peace hung above the village, with the wolves for a time having retreated back to the forest, which shrank with the progress of each passing year. Above, things changed, too, not at the speed that changes mountains, but at human speed, for humans had come to the mountain.

Three there were: the man and woman — too old, they thought, to have another child — had found themselves expecting one in the weeks after the man had given of himself to save the smallest thunderbird. The woman gave birth to a daughter in the nest of the chief’s wife, for it was the largest and best lined. The girl rose and grew as wild and hard as the mountain itself, but her eyes were eyes of melted snow, and above all else, she loved.

The man and the woman, too, loved their daughter well and a little selfishly. The birds warmed to her in ways they never had the couple, though they had certainly treated their guests well. At night when the wind whistled through the mouth of the cave and the stillness was broken by the rustling of wings, the woman thought this was perhaps because their daughter had been born among the thunderbirds, as though one of them.

Fifteen years is no small sum in a life, and the man and woman were well aware that theirs were reaching an end. They knew that time, with teeth longer than any wolf, was coming for them. They went to the chief of thunderbirds and said to him, We do not have long left to live. We were content with our life here, with our old family and our new one, but we cannot demand the same of our daughter. When we are gone from here, they said, we ask that you take her back down the mountain to our village so that she may make a life for herself in her rightful world, if any such life is to be had. We have no right to ask you this, they said, but we ask it all the same.

The chief let out a cry that rent the air in two. As thunder rumbled in the distance, he bowed low, wings spread to their full width. The daughter had not heard the question, but she had seen the answer.

Some months later a fever burned through the old woman. The man, who had never felt himself to be much without her, went soon after. The chief of thunderbirds buried them. Their daughter stood wrapped in a cloak of feathers, dry-eyed, barefoot in the snow.”

The girl, the storyteller, paused to look around at her audience. The fire had burned down low. She knelt slowly, reaching down to pull something from the frozen earth. When she rose again we saw the spear in her hand.

“The chief of thunderbirds took the daughter back down the mountain that very day. The two children of the snows did not go alone. Seven of the fiercest among them joined the chief and the girl in flight, for they had no idea what might await them in the lower reaches.

Their coming surprised a pack of wolves that had slunk back out of the forest and laid waiting on the outskirts of the village, where they would sow terror and death at nightfall. The thunderbirds, at great cost, slaughtered the lot of them. The chief himself was carried back up the mountain the next day between the talons of two others, whose terrible cries told the whole country the story of their grievous loss.

The thunderbirds saved our people that day. And not a single wolf has been seen in this village since then.”

Her voice, the storyteller’s voice, was gone. In its place was something harder. The voice of the wind. The voice of the mountain. She stepped out of the firelight and raised the spear up over her head.

“Until today.”

As she turned to hurl the spear into the snarling darkness, we saw a black feather woven into her hair.