Woman of the Wild: A Christmas Eve Encounter Turns into an Unlikely Duet

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

-Mark Twain, "Following the Equator"

***

The door was open when Peter came home that night. Inside, a wolf was waiting for him, although of course he didn’t know it at first.

At the chapel entrance, he frowned and set his pack down. Snow was tracked all the way in, but it was too dark to see anything. He was reluctant to go inside, but with the snow still falling he couldn’t stand out here in the middle of the woods all night.

He lit the lantern on the table and shone it around. Two yellow eyes waited for him above snarling fangs in the corner. Alarmed, he retreated to the door and used its frame as a shield of sorts, keeping it between him and the animal. A bit more cautiously this time, he shone the lantern in again

It was a gray she-wolf, thin but strong looking. She laid her ears on her skull and snarled, but didn’t move or stand. She was curled up by the hearth, and seemed unable to use her left rear leg. Maybe she’d been caught in someone’s metal trap.

Peter came back inside. The she-wolf glared but stayed where she was. He shook out his coat and boots and took the old broom from the corner and swept the snow out. After that he took logs from the pile and, very slowly, approached the fireplace.

The wolf raised her head and Peter stopped in his tracks. After a moment the snarling subsided, but she kept her eyes on him. To get to the fireplace he would have to come to within a foot of her jaws…

"We'll both freeze by morning without a fire," he said, advancing. He was so close now that the individual hairs of the wolf's pelt were visible in the lantern light.

Moving so slowly he barely seemed animate, Peter piled one log onto the hearth, then another. When the tinder caught fire the she-wolf's eyes flared with it. Once the place started to warm up a bit she drew closer to the flames, though she seemed intent on keeping a few feet between the herself and Peter. That suited Peter just fine.

Snowflakes drifted down the chimney and died, hissing, on the burning logs. The wolf watched as Peter prepared dinner: a plucked hen. She kept her injured leg tucked under herself.

"I suppose it's good to have a guest on Christmas Eve," he said as he set the meat over the embers. "Though I can't for the life of me figure out how you managed to open the door."

It had been a long time since he’d given Christmas much thought. This building had once been a church, and Peter had once been a priest, but that was all history now. He’d been excommunicated and, in shame, came here, to the deepest, blackest, most remotely forested place in the country, a village peopled only by hard, taciturn, pagan folk who rarely saw outsiders.

The chapel building was a relic of the last attempt to Christianize this place, long before Peter was born. Peter wasn’t sure whatever happened to the priest, but it was probably nothing good, and since then these parts had mostly been left alone.

He’d taken it up because it was the only standing building without a resident, and because it was far enough away from the village—an hour’s march through a forest with no path—that his presence might not offend anyone.

The savory smell of roasting poultry and the snap of sizzling fat soon filled the old place. Peter saw the she-wolf's nostrils expand as she took the scent in, and her tail wagged, just once. He cut some of the meat into strips and tossed one in the wolf's direction. She snapped it out of the air.

Peter ended up splitting his meal with the interloper, feeding her from across the room, the crackle of the logs on the fire punctuated now and then by the snap of her jaws.

He put more wood on. It was growing late and the snow had stopped, which was good because he would have trouble enough digging himself out in the morning.

Still, snowfall on Christmas Eve seemed a good omen despite the work it created. A sound roof, a warm fire, and a full belly, he thought; things I once believed I would never have again.

The wolf seemed to sleep, but he suspected that her eyes were just as alert behind closed lids as they'd ever been.

"I hope you have not been waiting just to eat me in the morning," he said. "But if you have, I appreciate you putting it off at least that long. It's the token of a considerate guest."

She made a low noise.

Peter considered. It had been a long time since he’d slept under the same roof with company. Once, he’d enjoyed all sorts of company: fresh-faced farmer's daughters who had needed private tutelage; widows, still in their black veils, who came for extra comfort and solace; young wives seeking advice upon finding that their new marriage was not what they had expected.

Even certain holy novices who had turned out to be interested in more than just the body of Christ…

But that was all history now too. Letting the fire burn low, he rolled over and slept.

***

He woke to find himself uneaten on Christmas morning. He also found that the wolf was gone.

In her place, defying all reason, was a bundle of wolf skin blankets with luxurious gray fur of the same color as the intruding beast. Peter wondered if it had all been a dream, or maybe a Yuletide phantom. Then the furs moved. From beneath them came a woman.

She was short and thin and around middle years. Her hair was long and it was gray but not, it seemed, from age. She was naked, and when she stood Peter saw she was lame in the left leg. And her eyes were yellow.

Peter stared. He expected her to vanish at any moment, but she didn’t. Her nose twitched as she sniffed in his direction. The corner of her mouth pulled back in an expression like a snarl, but it disappeared in an instant.

The she leaned over him, looking into his eyes, and Peter felt something deep inside him, a feeling between fear and awe. It was a feeling, he reflected, that all prey must have felt when confronted with the sinister beauty of the predator since before the dawn of human imagining. It froze him on the spot.

And then the strange woman walked away.

She walked right out the chapel door, barefoot and naked into the fresh snow, and vanished. She even left the door open. When Peter looked out she was gone, though there were tracks in the snow. They didn’t appear entirely human…

The pile of wolf's furs on the floor was now the only evidence of what had happened. For a moment Peter considered throwing them onto the fire and never thinking of this again. Instead he folded and stacked them as neatly as possible in one corner and put more wood on.

Then he put on his coat and scarves, took an old and began the chore of digging the snow away from his door and walls. Mysteries and phantoms would be just as mysterious when he was finished, but the work would go nowhere in the meantime.

He'd been toiling for perhaps an hour when the woman reappeared. Her skin and her hair were so pale that she barely showed up against the fresh snow, popping into view like a ghost right in front of him.

She handed him something: It was a hare, its little throat torn out. She held it until he took it and then she went inside. Stumbling a bit, Peter followed.

The woman spread one of the wolf skins on the floor and sat on it. She seemed to be expecting him to do something. Shrugging, Peter began skinning and gutting the dead hare, then cut the flesh into strips, parceling out some for him and some for her. She ate half of hers raw but waited for him to cook the rest. They ate in silence.

Peter watched her. She was still naked. She should have frozen out there in the snow, but she seemed unharmed except for her leg, which had all the signs of an old injury.

She ate everything in quick bites, barely chewing, and when she was done she licked her fingers clean and wrapped herself up in the wolf skin for a nap. Within a minute her breathing was slow and regular. Only her crippled foot stuck out from beneath the furs.

I've gone mad, Peter thought. It was the only explanation that made sense. Somehow, it was a comfort. He went out and finished shoveling the snow.

When he came back the woman was still asleep. Now he dared to lay a hand on her to confirm that she was real. She was unbelievably warm; he would have thought she was dying of fever but something told him that was not the case. Instead it was as if she carried a tiny fire inside of her.

Whoever she was, she could not be one of the people from the village, he decided. They were dark, stocky sorts, and she was pale and sinewy. Was she from some place on the other side of the forest? Or from even further away than that?

As the snow began falling again, Peter sat whittling a piece of wood and watching his sleeping guest. He thought: So now is the time God decides to show me a miracle? Not when I needed it, but now, after I’d given up?

And I wonder how Adam felt when he woke one morning to find that Eve had appeared, full-grown out of nothing, beside him, he thought…

The woman woke at dusk and went out into the cold again, returning for a second time with food. He wondered how she caught anything with that limp.

This time he attempted conversation as they ate. What manner of thing are you?" he said. She didn’t reply.

He tried again. "Do you have a name?" Still nothing. She looked at him with her yellow eyes. He essayed several more:

"Where did you come from?"

"How were you hurt?"

"Are you the wolf who came here last night, or are you something else?"

The last, of course, was the most important, but the woman remained inscrutable. He thought she looked almost amused by his badgering. That night she went to sleep under the wolf skins. She seemed to indicate that he should join her, but he dared not after entertaining visions of waking up snuggled beside a real wolf again and losing his throat in the bargain…

He slept in the corner.

She didn’t vanish the next day or the day after, and it became clear she meant to be a long-term guest if not a permanent resident altogether. She brought home food twice a day but did no other work.

Sometimes she followed him around as he worked about the old chapel and observed. At idle moments he talked to her but could never quite decide if she understood him or not. Figuring she needed a name of some sort, he began calling her Eve.

When three days were up he sallied to explain to her that he had to go to the village and would be absent, but there was no telling if she understood. So he made the two hour tramp through the snow to Buchard, hoping all the while that she had sense enough to stay put. The people here had taken to a grudging acceptance of him since he came at

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THE END