Of Wolves & Winter

The boy had been told many times that death when it came was swift and secret, sneaking in to claim the soul and spiriting it away from under the noses of the living in so quick an instant that a man would be snuffed from life before he could guess what had killed him. But now he was about to die he realised that someone had got it all wrong for things seemed to slow to an inching crawl and the cause of his imminent demise was quite literally staring him in the face. Indeed, it had sunk its vicious teeth into his arm, slicing through flesh until they scraped against bone and held him so that he could do nothing but stare back.

   A part of the boy’s mind was sure that he was mistaken, that any second the reality of death would come rushing back around him and the jaws would release his arm in favour of ripping out his throat.

   Another more fanciful part of his mind found a perverse amusement in the fact that in his short span of years he could not recall once having contemplated the strength in the jaws of a full grown wolf in its prime. And here he was, clutched in the jaws of just such a creature and taken by the realisation that there was nothing more enlightening than experiencing it firsthand.

   And how strong it was.

   The boy was well aware of the weakness of his own thin limbs, the frailness of his young body. He lived with the knowledge that the world was full of people he was powerless to resist, people strong enough to force their will upon him. The boy had always depended on the will of others rather than his own determination to survive.

   In the end the wolf was not so unlike all the others who had steered his life due to their superior might.

   All that marked it out as different was that it would be the one to end his life.

   He was not at all frightened, but rather he was calmed by acceptance of the fact that he was about to die. This must be what they mean, he thought, when they say that your life flashes before your eyes. For now he was aware of memories pressing themselves upon his conscious mind, coming not in any chronological order but seemingly at random. Images of people and places all filled with emotion and the subjective significance that roots them in the memory of an individual, making them personal and precious.

   He supposed that the parade of memories would be swiftly over, skipping through the few years of his life so as not to keep the wolf from the prize for which he hungered.

   How long could it take to tell the story that ended with him pinned down in the blood-stained snow by the dying fire, surrounded by the corpses of slain dogs and at the mercy of a hunter for whom the word had no meaning at all?

Kjartan spat on the palm of his hand and proffered it to the headman of the village with a forced smile on his face. ‘So it is agreed,’ his rich and deep accent betrayed his Skurngelder roots almost as readily as his carefully plaited beard and serious brows as he rolled the words of the low dialect on his tongue. ‘You will allow us shelter, a ration of salted meat and free passage across your lands and in return we will bring to you the heads of the beasts that have cost you so.’

   The headman, who’s name no one cared to know, nodded vigorously as he dribbled into the upturned palm of his own thin hand and reached out to see it swallowed by that of Kjartan. For his part, the Skurngelder tried to force down the urge to spit again, only the second time into the feeble old man’s face instead.

  For one thing he was galled by the very act of sitting around the hearth in the headman’s wattle and daub hut, bandying words with the frail and decrepit fool who in reality was nothing more than a jumped up farmer used to scraping a living from a few sorry fields full of nothing but frozen shit. For another the insult of asking for safe passage through his tiny lands was a wound to his pride as a warrior.