The Wind Like Wolves

     He first came upon them freezing and naked on the snow. Their clothes, torn off and thrown into a heap, lay powdered next to the half-buried bivouac and the remains of a fire. The two girls were unconscious, faint plumes of frigid breath leaving their frostbitten lips, and one man was dead. His body was face first in the snow with his arm ripped off at the elbow. The frozen sinew like daggers exiting the wound. Planted in the snow a few feet away, the missing forearm stood lifeless and yellowing. A few bites had been taken out of the meatiest section. 

     He went to the women and put one over each shoulder and covered them with the deerhide draped over his body. This was easy for a man such as himself, a giant. Almost seven feet in height, wide and barrelchested, bearded and hirsute. The bodies were light as kindling, debris lost in the snow. 

     The last man, hunched on his knees, was conscious and extended his paleblue fingers towards the giant. He groaned and his lips cracked open. He crawled forward.

     “I cannot carry you all,” said the giant. “If you want to live you must walk.”

     He perhaps did want to live, the giant thought, as these words brought an intelligence back into his clouded eyes. The man tried to stand but could not. The giant moved slowly away with both women over his shoulders and the man following on all fours like some wretched animal limping through the snow. 

     They moved up the mountain, through the frozen trees and whitestone bracken. Crossing a stream, the giant heard the man splash through the shallow flow and thought that surely he would die. His pink skin would burn and then freeze and he would lay still in these forests until spring came. His thawed body would be gnawed upon by things yet to awaken and he then would forever become a part of the mountainside. 

     Wind blew up the loose snow along the pathway into ghostly spirals and it howled into the hollow and trotted alongside the party like wolves. The cold nipped at their skin and each step through the frosted forest weakened him. The land whispered: Death would be easier, more comfortable, than this. The giant pushed ahead, resisting such temptations. 

     His cabin sat boldly in the clearing. The trees had been removed years ago and the snow surrounded the building like a moat surrounds a castle. His feet crunched into the stiffening snow then cracked on the damp wood of his deck. While the giant unlocked the front door, the freezing man collapsed at his side. He thought that they’d lost him long ago. One could hear little with muffled ears and deafening winds. 

     He brought them inside and laid their bodies next to the hearth and covered them with furs. In a pile, they huddled together in the newfound warmth while the giant rekindled the fire. He fed it dry twigs and then logs and soon it burned fiercely. The stranded he’d found began to breathe more fully; their bodies unwound like threads within them were melting away.

     The giant boiled water and made a broth from the last of his onions and roots, thinking he would need to go scavenge for more food tomorrow. The smells of the soup soon filled the room and this too brought life back into the dying folk. He added scraps of jerky to the soup once it was done. He took a sip, satisfied, and fed them one by one.

     As their bodies thawed, so did their minds, though not to desirable states. The women were immediately struck with fear. They backed into the corner of the room, clinging onto the furs like armor, and screamed and sobbed if the giant took a step in their direction. The man was insane. After he’d been fed he rolled onto his back in wild laughter. A cackling. The giant knew nothing except madness could ever be that funny. He tried to stop the man, but eventually had to gag him with a rag. This terrified the women further. “I won’t hurt you,” the giant assured as he bound the crazed man. They whispered to each other, embraced against the wall, and the giant looked at their bare and burnt extremities. Fingers and toes, noses and ears that would never heal from time bare in the cold. It was unjust that those so young could know such pain.

     The man stopped making noise and fell asleep against the wall. The women calmed some and took their furs back and lay at the base of the fire. The giant sat in his chair across from the strangers, watching them drift into sleep again. Long after the sun died in the west he retired to his room and secured the door behind him with a wooden chair. 

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     The next morning he awoke to find the man missing, his gag and bindings left behind on the floor. The women slept still. Cold air streamed in through the open door. He cursed to himself as he shut the door then added fuel to the fire and set out some bread for the sleeping women. Then he clothed himself for the cold and slipped the last of the meat jerky into his pocket.

     For the next few hours the giant searched the mountainside to no avail. There was no sign of the man living and his frozen body, a more likely state, had disappeared. He trekked back to the place of their origin, the campsite, and found that the other corpse was missing as well. He figured that they had been lost in the snowfall of the night, and returned to the cabin. 

     The front door was open and the blizzard spilled inside. He saw trails of snow along the damp wood like ghostprints. He thought that the man must’ve come back soon, that some of his sense had returned once realizing the cold would kill him, but this was not the case. The fire was just coals and the women were missing too. He swore again and turned back.

     The day was growing dim and the snow fell thickly from a knit woolen sky. The suffocated brush whimpered as the giant searched the forest. The snow piled higher and higher until he thought himself stupid for searching. Surely they were all dead or would be very soon. Perhaps he was lonely, and though the newcomers only thanked him with fear and madness, it was a taste enough of humanity and he had acquired newfound hunger for it.

     A mile from the cabin he encountered fresh blood—drippings from a wounded thing, dragged or limping through the powder. The droplets bloomed like a floral compass leading him towards his quarry, twisting through the snow and halting behind a juniper bush where one of the women's bodies lay dead and silent, her throat torn out and her hair splayed on top of the snow like roots.

     He went far down the mountain, to a place where the switchbacks zigzagged through tallgrass now hidden by frost. At the end of the trail the forest opened into a clearing littered with pines dead of beetle kill. The husks of trees. Someone was squatted at this center. The giant approached slowly with knees bent and soft feet as to mute the crunching ice beneath.

     The last woman was curled above the body of the madman. He was sprawled over her knees, arms behind his head and jaw agape as if screaming. His fingertips were gently entering the snowpack. From his vantage the giant read the woman’s spine, knobby and columned beneath paper skin, her shoulder blades sawing the sparse flesh of her back, and winced as she dug into the soft stomach with sharp fingers, putting handfuls of meat and organs and entrails into her face by the mouthful. It sounded like she was humming.

He took another step forward and a branch hidden underneath the snow snapped. The woman stopped eating and looked back, her eyes white and penetrating in the dusk. She coughed, blood speckling the snow before her. “Hungry,” she said. “Hungry.”