by Erin Brown
The wolf had the brambles to thank for the extra few minutes of life. He had chosen to sleep in the tangle because it had grown a roof of snow, keeping him nearly warm through the winter night, as well as completely hidden. As a result, when the smell of meat and spices and the sweetness of song roused his body in the early morning, the thorns arrested his instinctive pounce before his mind awoke enough to remember caution. Then he recognized the voice.
The song was sweet as any sent to greet a morning’s sunlight, and the smell of the meat twisted his stomach into knots, but the voice made him curl up into a ball of aching bones and frost-tipped fur, and he swallowed a growl. The song grew closer, and then he could see it: the bright red cloak of the hunter girl.
The wolf glared as he watched her approach in her long red coat that dragged across the snowy ground. Behind her, a fist-sized chunk of green and shining bacon was dragged along on the end of a thin rope. It had long ago stopped marking a trail in juices and simply scraped its path across the snow, across her boot prints. She walked slowly, singing all the while, and her crossbow hung by her side, pointed down, carried stiffly. The wolf could barely tell if the ache in his belly was hunger, or hatred. The words of her song silenced the few birds singing above in the bare trees.
Here little wolf, little wolf, little wolfie
Come to me, come to me
The winter is cold, and my gran needs a blanket
So I’ll never let you be.
The wolf restrained himself from snapping his jaws at the brambles, from tearing at the thorns until the way to her was as exposed as a throat. As she walked, a bright red blotch against the whiteness of the world, black scratching the white sky all around by the barren limbs of the trees, her cloak flapped a little, and the thick grey lining showed itself. The tops of her boots were fuzzy and brown. The wolf knew them intimately.
Her boots were lined with the hide of his mother, the scent tainted by the girls own body scent. Her cloak was lined with his brothers, their skins draped across her shoulders, or dragged across the snow. The red hood on her head hid a mottled white fluff that had been the belly of his sister. He did not know whose fangs made up her buttons, but to get close enough to find out was to get close enough to bite, and be bitten.
His mouth filled with bitter saliva, and it drooled down his jaw and froze in his fur. The bacon, as hungry as he was, barely mattered. The girl was stout and strong, and her smell healthy and hot. But her cloak. Her cloak held the warm, soft, stolen remains of all that the wolf had ever loved, all covered by a blood-red cloak and filled with that poison-sweet song, that venomous laughter.
There had been so many winters without his pack, his family. All of the other packs had been chased away. He was so alone. Food would not stop his misery, just prolong it. Only the cloak was home.
With the memory of love of family warming his hide like weak wet winter sunshine, the wolf stifled a whimper of desolation, but not enough to fool a hunter. The girl stopped and spun around, and looked right into the bramble. She crouched down slowly. His brothers’ skins bunched beneath her, against the snow. His mother, his sister, all dead skins curled around her, to keep her warm. It was intolerable. The girl in the cloak laughed to hear him growl, and set her crossbow across her knee. And smiling right into the wolf’s eyes, she sang.
Here little wolf, little wolf, little wolfie
I see you, I see you
The winter’s so long, and I’m cold and I’m lonely
I’m bettin’ you’re lonely, too.
She laughed at him, her mouth wide and pink, her white teeth so small. She tugged the bacon forward and swung the rope so that the meat landed just a bound away from the brambles, and she laughed when she heard him whine. But she misunderstood the source of his misery. When she had tugged the rope, the reddish-brown fur over her arm showed itself, and the smell of it caught the wolf by the throat. It was a familiar hide, it was family, but the wolf could not remember who. He was forgetting family, love, warmth, life. He was forgetting!
The furs called like howls to his heart. The girl kept singing. But the wolf only heard the silent songs of his family, all warm panting snarling playful recollections, loping across his memories of life before this red demon had appeared to them for the first time, so long ago.
There would be no more winters, either for himself or for this horror and her bow and her cloak. This would end. One of them would laugh, would sing the winter hot as blood again. Only one of them.
The girl swung her crossbow up just as the wolf exploded out of the snowy brambles. She had aimed for the bacon, where she thought the wolf was going.
But he was aiming for home.
* * *
About the Author
Erin Brown is a black, neurodivergent author of horror, fabulist, and fantasy short fiction. She has been published in Fantasy Magazine, FIYAH Magazine, The Deadlands, Midnight and Indigo, The Los Suelos CA Interactive Anthology, and 3Elements Literary Revue, with work in the anthology It Was All a Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right. Erin is also the recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship in Creative Writing for Spring 2022.