The Decameron 2.0

Day 5.5 Revenge - WOLF AND REDCAP MiltonMarmalade

The true story of Wolf and Redcap and how vengeance was wreaked on the Woodcutter...

The scar in his belly still ached, but he could live with that. The Woodcutter had taken Redcap, and that left Wolf with restless nights and an anger that gnawed.

She-Wolf was a little bit in love with Wolf. She had warned Wolf not to get involved with Redcap, to be satisfied with being Wolf by day and howling in the forest jazz combo at night. Anything else would lead to trouble. Keep out of the way of the Woodcutter, too. He does a sideline in wolfskin coats. But for Wolf there was something missing, and what he had wasn't enough.

When he first saw Redcap, picking flowers near the woods with two of her friends, she had immediately struck him as different. Three girls chatting and smiling, yet only one of them with a face that was not all surface. The other two existed as their shining eyes, their animation over whatever trivia of the moment had seized them, their dimpled smiles. She had a face which was not the emotions it expressed, but through which they passed, as though that body concealed a world. Those unadorned lips, no tension spoiling their perfect form. Those eyes, impassive, innocent, impossibly beautiful. To the other two, she was one of them, but to Wolf, she was something mysterious, a being of another ilke.

One day, her two friends had errands elsewhere, and they left. Redcap picked up her basket and ventured into the woods. Wolf moved from one tree to the next, following her for a while without being seen. Eventually, as if by accident, he had walked onto the same path and greeted her. They had walked for a while side by side, and talked.

Wolf, thinking back on it later, understood that his motives had not been entirely pure. By night he had dreamed of her face, of her hidden being, of a world he would like to enter, be part of, she, a garden in Arcadia. He would cherish her, protect her from the treacherous world in which he knew too well how to survive. She would complete him, or perhaps he would disappear altogether into her greater being. By day, he remembered her well-formed legs, imagined her young breasts, formed the outline of her body from the memory of how her skirt and blouse had caressed it. He wanted to eat her up.

What sensible mother sent her daughter out on her own into the woods? It was to protect her that Wolf had walked by her side, talked of who knows what, every word a meaningless delight, every word now forgotten, only the memory of her presence burned into his soul. Passing the Woodcutter's hut, Wolf had seen him staring through the window, understood that peeping villain from the badness in his own heart.

Then they had glimpsed Baba Yaga's hut in the distance. What did you expect, that an honest grandmother lives in the middle of a forest? The whole set-up was suspicious from the beginning. The very fence posts had skulls on top of them, and the hut was crooked. It did not exactly stand on chicken legs, but neither did it stand properly on the ground, being supported by random pieces of wood, some looking like bones. Baba Yaga had a reputation for eating everyone.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Wolf had asked her.

"Oh yes," she had replied, her smile innocent of any sense of danger.

He had become absorbed in love and fascinated by desire, he thought. That is why he didn't notice that the Woodcutter had crept round by another route, he hadn't seen him creep behind the trees, he hadn't heard the latch of Baba Yaga's back door.

"Well, here we must part," Wolf had said.

Redcap had smiled at him, looked at him with the sweet expression that was habitual to her, but which Wolf believed to signal love. Then Wolf had also crept unseen through Baba Yaga's back door.