Storm Wolf (3 page)

Alexei ran through the air, looking down on villages and hamlets that would have taken hours or even days to reach by road or forest path. It was easy to feel lost up there in the sky, since all the landmarks were different, but each time he realized that he was lost he was able to reorient himself and find his way back to an area he recognized. He lost track of the hours in the sky that first time he used the wolf skin. Eventually, he found his way back to the field where he had left his clothes and descended to the earth as the sun was descending.

His paws touched the ground and he skidded to a halt. He felt like a little boy again, playing in the snow for the first time. If anyone had been watching, they would have thought this great wolf had gone insane! He laughed, rolling along the furrows left from the previous year’s plowing.

When he finally came to a stop, he loped over to where his clothes were and suddenly realized that he had no idea how to take off the wolf pelt. Panic gripped his stomach.

“Will I be trapped in this wolf shape forever? How can I regain my human form? There is no cunning woman to ask, even if I could have made her understand my wolf speech,” he worried.

Alexei sat up on his haunches, hoping the wolf skin would open like a coat if he scratched at where the buttons would run down the front of a jacket or the clasp of a belt would be located. He prodded the fur gently with a paw. Nothing. Struggling to maintain his balance, he used both front paws and scratched more fervently, harder. Then with real desperation. The claws protruding from the wolf toes tore at the skin beneath the fur. He could feel the talons slicing the skin and the blood oozing out and matting the fur. Tears welled up in his eyes. Pain and fear mingled in his chest. His paws scrabbled again at the fur on his chest. More pain. More blood. Exhausted, he collapsed on the earth. If wolves could cry, Alexei would have been sobbing at that moment.

The sky was quickly growing darker. He knew that his family would worry, if they weren’t already worrying that he had been gone so long. “I have to find a way out of the wolf shape!”

He pushed himself up onto his haunches again and tried to look down at the vast expanse of fur that was his broad wolf chest. He lifted one paw and gently prodded the bloodstained fur. It was too painful to do much more than that. He delicately traced the line of blood down his breast. Nothing happened. Alexei was out of ideas.

He threw himself back on both hind legs, lifted his face to the sky, and howled. Never had a wolf cry echoed across the fields with such loneliness. Attempting to rip the wolf shape from his true self, he lifted his front paws and scrabbled wildly across his snout, down his throat, across his chest and shoulders.

Suddenly the fur gave way. It peeled away as if a knife had drawn two lines, one down his chest and the other across his collarbone. The pelt fell away from his shoulders, intact and seemingly harmless. Alexei shuddered and hugged himself to keep warm, barely looking at the pelt on the ground behind him. His human chest was sticky with drying blood. Tears could now slip down his cheeks, and he kicked at the pelt in fury. A wild wave of rage, terror, and relief boiled up inside him. Did he ever really want to ever see the wolf skin again, let alone use it? Why had it suddenly given way? Without understanding how to remove it, did he dare ever put it on again?

He huddled there, sniffling and ashamed. “Was grandfather wrong to have entrusted the pelt to me?” he wondered. Finally, he turned and looked at the discarded pelt in the dusk. Calmer now, at least since the immediate danger of permanent captivity in the wolf shape was past, Alexei reconsidered how he had been able to remove the pelt. Slowly and thoughtfully, he reenacted his last frantic movements as the werewolf. As he drew his hands back and forth, up and down, across his face, throat, and then chest, he realized that he had inadvertently made the sign of the cross with one paw and that the skin had peeled away along the four arms of the religious sign.

Alexei gasped and sucked the quickly chilling night air into his lungs. It had been the sign of the cross that had opened the skin. But had it also destroyed the magic altogether? Would the transformation still be possible now that the magic of the skin had been mingled with the image of Christianity?

“Was the cross a magical symbol at some point?” Alexei hoped so. In his experience, he had only ever seen the cross used by the German Lutherans and the Russian Orthodox landlords that had imposed their religions on the people of Estonia.

“Might there have been some other, more Estonian magical gesture that had been meant to transform a werewolf back into a man?” Alexei asked himself.

He picked up the great pelt, still sniffling. Had he accidently destroyed the power of his grandfather’s great gift? There was only one way to know for sure.

He picked up the now inanimate wolf skin and looked at it. It seemed harmless enough. But the chance that he was mistaken terrified him that he might be trapped again in the wolf shape and not able to extricate himself. He hurriedly dressed and gathered up the pelt. He did not dare to attempt the transformation in the gathering dusk. Darkness might only reinforce the power of the skin and make it more difficult to escape. Alexei was desperately curious but also desperately afraid.

It was two days later and late afternoon before Alexei was able to gather the courage to test the magic again. He took the wolf skin out to the eastern crossroad, a few miles away—a short walk for a man his age—where he thought few would stumble upon his experiment. He set aside his clothes and unfurled the massive fur. He draped it across his shoulders again and grasped it, drawing the lower portion around his legs.

The skin must have grown used to him. The transformation this time was sudden and immediate. Tendons stretched and fur tightened. Alexei couldn’t stop himself from throwing his head back and baying at the rising moon. He lost his balance and fell down onto all fours. His tail swung heavily and warily as new, dusky scents assaulted his senses. The magic was clearly still intact.

“But to remove the skin?” Alexei cautiously sat back on his hind legs and quickly crossed himself, holding his breath as he lost his balance and fell onto all fours again. The skin peeled away in a single graceful movement, leaving an ungainly, naked young man on his hands and knees on an empty road.

The silliness of how he imagined he must look overcame him and Alexei couldn’t stop laughing as he dressed. He laughed until he cried and he kept crying as he made his way home, relieved that his grandfather’s trust had not been misplaced and that his fears of captivity in the wolf shape had been allayed.

Midsummer came. The village gathered around the bonfire that everyone helped to build in the middle of the village to celebrate the turning of the seasons. Children shouted and ran around. Young men jumped across the flames, hoping to impress the young women. Young women hung together, hoping to be noticed by the young men. Married couples and grandparents sat and watched the younger people playing around the fire. Everyone drank and sang.

Alexei joined his friends, singing and drinking before he finally jumped across the flames himself. Everyone cheered as his feet skimmed the tops of the flames, as they did for all the young men. But then, like so many others, as his feet touched the ground on the other side, Alexei stumbled and fell forward onto the grass. Little boys, chasing each other around the edges of the fire, leaped over him as he had leaped over the bonfire. Everyone clapped and laughed as he sheepishly pushed himself up from the ground. Another mug of beer was pressed into his hand. He joined the other men who had jumped across the fire and they clapped him on the back, singing to celebrate the solstice. He turned to look back across the fire and then he saw her.

Alexei blushed and looked away. The beautiful young woman with the long golden braids smiled at him from across the midsummer bonfire. He knew her name was Grete, that she was the daughter of a farmer in a nearby village. He knew that when she laughed it was like sunlight spilling over branches in the forest. She was here to visit cousins for Midsummer. He had often admired her when she and her family would come to his village for seasonal markets or to visit relatives. But Alexei had never imagined that she might be interested in being friends—or more—with him.

He glanced back at her. She winked. He felt his cheeks grow warm again. She tilted her head and studied his face. He could not pull his eyes away from her. She leaned over and whispered to one of her cousins. The two women blushed and giggled, turning away from him.

When Grete looked back across the bonfire to him, he caught himself winking at her as well. She smiled. His heart sang.

There were no storms that posed a danger to Alexei’s village or the surrounding area until the next winter. By that time, he had married the lovely Grete and a baby was on the way. When he donned the wolf skin to fight the storm, he was nervous but did it to protect Grete and their new baby as much as to protect the town.

Alexei trotted up from the barnyard behind his house. Thunder boomed and ricocheted in the air around him. Lightning burst above, dazzling his eyes and blinding him momentarily each time, until he learned to turn his face away from the jagged spears of light that came sizzling through the air.

Beneath the thunder, he heard old women laughing. Coming up through the lowest hanging clouds, he saw a trio of storm hags holding hands and skipping in a circle as they laughed and sang. Their tattered cloaks, draped over their heads and wrapped loosely about their torsos, reminded Alexei of the moldy and decaying shrouds he had seen wrapped around the bodies of the dead occasionally dug up from their graves by earthly wolves looking for food in the winter.

The hags danced and seemed to be singing, though Alexei could not hear their words over the roar of the wind in his ears. They laughed as rain cascaded from the clouds struck by their scrawny feet. Their long, tangled hair darted about their faces in the wind, like snakes. Toothless gums smacked with glee, their rheumy eyes peering about them, but each hag apparently unable to see beyond the withered hands that grasped her own. One stepped on a hanging corner of another’s cloak and tripped, the threesome stumbling and nearly falling. Righting themselves, they howled and cackled. More rain tore down from their footprints and flattened the wheat fields below.

Alexei leapt at the trio of hags, snarling with his fangs bared. Two scattered, tripping and falling over themselves as he caught one in his great jaws. She screamed and scrabbled at his face, trying to scratch his eyes out with her clawlike fingers, but Alexei held her shoulder firmly in his jaws, her gray storm blood spilling out from between his teeth into the wind like ribbons. He shook her and shook her and shook her repeatedly until she finally stopped struggling and he could toss her now lifeless body aside.

Alexei stood peering through the clouds around him. The other two storm hags were nowhere to be seen.

But, no! He saw one of them, above him and to one side, shaking her fist at him and screaming with rage, her cloak and tangled hair snapping around her in the wind. She was daring him to attack her as he had attacked her sister. Roaring with fury, he charged her.

His jaws snapped shut on air as she darted to one side. Something cold and heavy smacked the side of his face and he stumbled into the clouds beside him. He heard a whistling that was not the wind and saw a manlike figure coming after him. But the man had a dog’s snout and lower jaw and was swinging an axe over his head.

Alexei guessed that the flat head of the axe was what had struck the side of his face. The dog-snouted man barked and howled, swinging his axe. Alexei tripped over something in the cloud drifts around his feet and the axe came down, nearly cutting open his foreleg. The dog-snouted man howled and swung again. Alexei grabbed the man’s wrist in his teeth and the man dropped his axe as they went tumbling through the clouds together. The man’s dog snout closed around Alexei’s shoulder. More of the gray storm blood seeped from the man’s wrist between Alexei’s wolf fangs as Alexei’s own red blood seeped into the fur around his shoulder. In a single movement, Alexei roared and flung the dog-snouted man down and away as he ran further up into the heights of the storm.

The dog-snouted man did not seem to follow him. Thunder crashed around Alexei, deafening him for a moment. He saw another man stumbling about the clouds, holding a jug that he lifted to his lips to take a long swig from before stumbling off again. Thunder boomed each time he drunkenly knocked into a cloud drift. Thinking the drunk no threat, Alexei kept climbing into the storm.

Off to one side, Alexei could see another manlike figure, but this one was large—nearly three times the size of the largest farmer Alexei knew in their village. This giant was nearly indistinguishable from the sky, seemingly formed of the same dark-gray clouds that he stood among. The cloud giant flapped his arms and shouted as he stamped one giant foot into the clouds he stood on, grimacing as if he had just drunk a chalice full of serpents. Thunder shook the sky, nearly knocking Alexei over. A terrified herd of cloud cattle came stampeding past Alexei, driven on by the giant’s antics. Thunder boomed and shook the clouds, more rain pouring from the gashes the cows’ hooves cut into the clouds as they stampeded past.

Alexei threw himself at the giant and locked his jaws around the giant’s leg. He pulled and tugged, trying to pull the giant over, but the giant just picked up his leg and shook it, attempting to dislodge Alexei. They hung there, wolf and giant, Alexei grinding his teeth into the giant’s leg and feeling the giant’s leg bone resisting him deep within the giant’s leg. Finally the giant reached down, shouting something at Alexei in words that he could not understand, and wrenched Alexei’s jaws from his shin. He picked Alexei up and tossed him like a ball in a game of ninepins. Alexei tumbled head-over-heels through the clouds, striking the haunches of one of the still stampeding cows. He fell to the clouds at the cow’s feet, nearly trampled by the last of the herd running alongside. Then the cattle were gone and Alexei lay there, bruised and bloody and panting.