In the fading shadows of dawn, a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes, a wolf whose mouth stretches open, and in its growl there are three faraway voices, distorted as if heard through water, so the hunter shoots. He does not wait to see what he has done.
• • • •
Risha follows the limping stag.
It is so far away that Risha can hardly see it, but Risha drags itself forward anyway. Toward the starkly black beady eye. Toward the musk stench. Risha’s limbs grow heavier with the passing days. Its jaw hangs from its face, swaying with each step. It can’t remember the last time it ate; it is as if the fire inside of its belly, gnawing on itself, has been there since the day Risha was born.
Risha doesn’t know how it will kill the stag, but it smells meat, so it shambles onward. To deny the pull, to lie down in a bed of leaves, is the same as dying, and Risha will not die today.
The icy ground cuts furrows into its paws. Its pelt hangs from its ribs. The stag will save it; the stag is all Risha has. Risha will not die today.
Risha takes another step; its leg shudders and it collapses. Pain slithers across its face, but it still digs its claws into the ground, pulls. Risha will not die today.
Between the leaves, there is a rustling of white fur and blue eyes. Risha’s hackles prickle, but only a dog slinks out from the brambles. It walks with a catlike silence. It smells like nothing at all.
The stag. The stag. Risha tries to stand. The stag is gone.
“Dear wolf,” the dog says. “Rest awhile.”
The dog leans down. There is a sense of wrongness in the way that it moves: fluidly, as if it were swimming. There isn’t a single speck of dirt on its bright coat.
“In another world, you are a man,” the dog says, “I see it in your eyes. When the hunter shot your jaw off, you were meant to wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze. To lie on top of him until the warmth of his body faded away. But instead, you are here. Your suffering is an affront to nature. Why were you born a wolf?”
A low, gurgling sound escapes Risha’s throat. Its chest heaves and its tongue trembles as it tries to speak. White foam dots its lips.
“Oh,” the dog whispers. “I can hear you. Even when you can’t speak. It’s alright.”
My voice . . .
“I know.”
I had a beautiful voice, once.
“I know.”
What—
What are you?
“I am these things today: the dirt beneath your feet, the eye of a wasp, the cypress needles floating in the pond,” the dog says. “I am everywhere, and I saw you stalking a stag you cannot eat. Why?”
Meat.
The dog circles Risha. The strike of its paws against the ground is as hypnotizing as pelting rain.
“I don’t smell meat,” it says. “I smell death.”
No.
“I do.”
NO.
“Do not fear death, wolf.” The dog smooths down Risha’s hackles with its tongue. “Those touched by my hand never die. What is it that you desire?”
Salt heat blood offal fur skin fat bone—
The dog stops in front of Risha and sits, head tilted to the side. Leaning forward, it presses its nose to Risha’s tongue, and Risha imagines how good it would feel to clamp his jaw shut around that snout and drink and drink and drink.
“Dear wolf,” the dog says, “you may eat.”
• • • •
Risha follows the scent of meat to the river, but it does not find the stag. Instead, a wounded rabbit picks its way across the rocks, old blood matting down the fur on its flank. Saliva drips from Risha’s lolling tongue.
It traps the rabbit underfoot, its paw sinking into the softness of its stomach. Risha remembers the sticky warm rabbit taste, and the crunch of bone, and the sweetness of marrow, and as it remembers, the rabbit shudders, goes still. Its skin splits open and its insides wriggle out between the blades of grass until one by one, each piece wilts like a flower in the summertime. More and more, as the rabbit wastes away, a warmth fills Risha’s belly.
• • • •
In the spring, the yearling pups roll in a valley of wildflowers. They were only weanlings when Risha met the hunter and the white dog. Their pelts are black like Risha’s, their faces slender, vulpine like their sire Wether. Risha has taken many mates in its lifetime. It has sired pups by red-coated bitches and carried the mongrels of dogs, and while these may come and go, Wether returns.
Wether carries a fox in its jaws and drops the carcass at Risha’s paws. It does this every time it hunts. When it prods the carcass with its nose, it is asking, “Would you eat? Please?” It has not seen Risha eat since its return; this sharing ritual, performed with the utmost care time and time again, is how Risha learned that it can only eat from the living.
And now there is the beginning of a worry, needling its way into Risha’s mind, that this is a body that it cannot understand, fit with a wrongness that makes Risha’s hide itch if thinks about it for too long. After all, it didn’t ask what the white dog wanted in return; it didn’t even ask to heal.
It has taken the whole season for its jaw to sew itself together with boney callouses. It no longer sways, locked now in its terrible grin.
Risha presses its head against Wether’s, and Wether lets the yearlings pull the fox apart by the legs. They fall over each other in a tangle of gangly limbs. They yelp, and whine, and sneeze.
When Risha returned, it sought out Wether first—and first there was fear. There is no word for ghost among wildkind, Risha has since realized, but there is an understanding that death is not the end for all things: mold eats the fallen tree, which burrows deep into the earth and emerges again as another oak, and so too do the dead sometimes walk. So Wether approached, low to the ground and its eyes white-rimmed, as it took in two long breaths. Risha was acutely aware of how its scent had changed since it met the white dog, strange and familiar all at once, a bit like something left to rot in the sun. But familiar enough, it seemed, because Wether sprang to its feet and licked the space between Risha’s eyes and together they bounded through brambles and nettles and slept that night in a bed of moss.
“You are my Risha,” said Wether’s teeth when they nipped and tugged at Risha’s hide. “Not moss, not fungi, not meat,” said Wether’s tongue when it cleaned the space between Risha’s toes.
In Risha’s gut, there is the stirring of next season’s pups.
• • • •
In the budding heat, Risha’s tongue dries to leather. Its cheeks dry and crack. With each exhale comes the perfume of decay. Dirt collects in the spaces between its teeth, and when it sleeps, little bugs pick their way across the mountains and valleys of its canines. It wakes to worms digging furrows into its tongue; to something wriggling into its lungs. It scrambles to its feet, hacking and digging at its mouth. Out from its throat springs a ball of rotting meat, slick with mucus. Wether presses its weight into Risha’s side and looks on with big eyes, soft ears. Risha digs and digs, but its paws only leave more sand, loam, silt on its tongue. Tear it off, Risha wants to say, tear it off of me and bury it at the foot of an oak and let no wildkind eat it, but it can speak to no one but the white dog.
• • • •
In its dreams, Risha is not a wolf, but a doe. A new doe, not even two years old. How long has it been since Risha thought of its own youth? It is a new doe, twig-legged and gauzy, and it can remember with startling clarity when it fell from its mother’s womb, and how cold the air had been that day. And now, in its gut, there is a sick, hot pulling that came with the autumn, so strong that the doe is terrified by the sensation. The stags fall so quickly to violence. The thunder-crash of their duels echoes on and on through the woods.
A shadow falls over the doe: a stag, whose head is pulled down to the earth. The antlers of another stag, long dead, just bones and leather now, are tangled up in its own—and these antlers, Risha realizes, are not antlers at all but the gnarled, moss-dripping branches of a gray birch. With each limping step, the stag pulls itself and the corpse forward. There is a burning fervor which keeps it from collapsing into the dirt. It exhales in deep, foggy plumes, as if a furnace sits deep within its chest. It is beautiful.
The doe backs away, knees shaking. It wishes with every part of its being that it were a fawn again hidden by the flank of its mother. But Risha is filled, suddenly, with the knowledge that it has seen the stag before, and that is why it visits Risha now, in its sleep.
“Wolf?” a soft voice calls.
Risha opens its eyes and finds two blue ones staring back.
It swings its head around—Wether is deeply asleep. It is not even dawn.
“You called to me in your dreams, dear wolf,” the dog says.
Risha stands, shaking. It is so close to the dog, and yet, no heat radiates off of the dog’s moonlit body.
“What is it you desire?”
The yearlings can’t stand the smell anymore.
I cannot speak.
The pups make me ravenous.
I miss the stag.
Part of me is dying.
I am full of things that are not me, and I want to kill them.
“Wolf, wolf wolf—” the dog whispers. “What is it you desire?”
Risha waits until its breaths come more easily.
Water.
“You may have whatever you ask for,” the dog says, “but you must keep eating—remember this. You must eat what you have never eaten before, and then you must keep eating.”
• • • •
Risha’s mouth drips with rainwater, its throat finally quenched. It stands and stretches in the morning air and finds that its tongue can move again. It slicks down the fur on Wether’s back.
Its chest rattles with wetness, pooling at the bottom of its lungs like the murky surface of a lake. It is overflowing. There are leaves floating inside of it. When it eats, the water is stained pink with squirrel’s blood. And it must eat. To make the water, it must eat. It has never been so hungry. So it eats: squirrel and chipmunk, a lynx and each of its kittens, a songbird’s eggs, three adders, a doe swollen with twin fawns. The taste of each meal rolls down Risha’s tongue with the rainwater. When it tastes blood, it can almost remember the snap of bone between its teeth, the euphoric act of chewing, grinding, swallowing. It aches to hunt as Wether hunts. It eats: a fox and a lost dog, a vulture full of rotting meat, and a band of stags—arrested by Risha’s eyes, they are already on their knees as it approaches, and their hides are already unknitting themselves—but somehow, Risha still hungers.
It returns to the burrow it shares with Wether, but the smell makes it pause. There is a gray wolf curled up in their bed asleep. Its face is slender and its feet are snowy white. There’s a scar on its left haunch where it was once gored by an elk. It is Wether but not-Wether. Its smell, like ash, makes Risha’s hackles stand on end. Head low, Risha stalks into the burrow, and the ash-smell surrounds it.
Risha is filled with fear, now, because of this thing that has replaced Wether, and filled with hunger—always hunger. It feels as empty as it was when it was dying. When it puts its nose to the wolf’s fur, there is the faint smell of meat. It salivates, twin trails of water and blood.
It lets its claws sink into the wolf’s belly.
The wolf lets out a strangled whine. Why is that call so familiar? Why does it make Risha’s body ache? Just as quickly as the wolf cried, it goes silent again.
Risha eats well for the first time in weeks.
• • • •
Risha looks for Wether in the woods. Wether. Wether. Wether. It follows wolf trails where packs have pissed and scratched their signs into the trees, but when it finds them, they carry the same ash smell. All of these wolves taste the same. Risha tells itself that it could never kill Wether. Never. Something has stolen Wether from it, and somehow, searching day after day, Risha still cannot find its mate. Even in Risha’s dreams, it can’t smell Wether—it can’t smell any wolf at all, not its mother nor its sire. Ash-smell is food-smell now and food is ash. It wants to tear the woods apart until it is wrapped up in Wether’s warm oak smell, but instead it claws at its stomach until its skin glows red and blood beads between its fur. It throws itself against the trees and cuts the skin between its teats with the sharp stones that jut out of the earth, but still, the pups writhe. Wether. Wether. Wether. It can’t be dead. Risha remembers the ash-scented corpse and how it cried with Wether’s voice. Risha smells Wether in its own piss, but it is a warped kind of Wether: the Wether of amnion, rotting wood, the Wether that haunts the living. Wether. Wether. Wether. The pains come in the middle of the night and Risha finds that it cannot even cry, It knows it lost its voice so long ago, but never has it wanted to snarl and whine and growl more than it does now.
Instead, the water in its throat bubbles over, froths like the waves of the sea, and as its belly heaves, bile makes the water cloudy, then the blood of its last meal, and then tufts of gray fur. Wether. Wether. The taste of Wether. There is something sick about this pain; never has whelping felt as if they were clawing their way out. There is no relief when it is done. The pups smell like Wether, but they don’t look like Wether: they are all black and their jaws are stretched open and they don’t breathe.
• • • •
In its dreams, Risha is always a doe, and there is always the stag who carries the dead. Risha watches the stag with a strange longing. It remembers its waking body, the wolf who should have died in the winter, and how it would have dragged itself toward the stag until the end of time if it had to. Once and only once, the stag mounts Risha the doe and then the spring rains come and the fawn drops—a fawn with two heads, with saplings sprouting from its forehead, dead—and Risha curls up around its cold body, waiting for daylight to come.
When Risha wakes, there is nothing by its side.
It startles to its feet. It paws at the ground, then it digs until it hits tree roots. There is nothing buried here. The fawn must be here, somewhere. When it tries to speak, water gurgles out of its throat.
Put me back inside the doe.
It needs the white dog. Where is the white dog?
Put me back. Put me back. Put me back.
Rainwater fills the hole at Risha’s feet. It paces around its new little pond as a gnawing hunger eats at it.
It has not seen another wolf in weeks, and it no longer pretends that anything can sate it other than its own kind. It slinks into the depths of the woods again until it finds a flash of gray fur.
Risha stalks forward; it finds that it can’t breathe. In a grove of willows, a wolf rakes its claws down a tree trunk, its head sloping gently into its muzzle, its toes tipped with white.
Risha is forgetting what Wether looked like, but it thinks that Wether may have looked like this.
No. The wind picks up: this wolf smells like ash.
• • • •
It has been so long since Risha has eaten a deer that it nearly ignored the smell, the pinprick eye hidden between the leaves, until it heard it—not the gentle cadence of a doe’s lope, but a shuddering, limping gait and the crash of broken branches as the great beast hauled itself forward.
Risha follows the limping stag.
It follows the stag for days. The sun bites at Risha’s back and the night closes in. It follows the stag through forest, swamp, and grassland. It feels its own muscles wilt against its bones. It shudders with every breath. What happens to a body that cannot die? It will walk until it is no longer a wolf, and then it will keep walking. Each day, when the sun rises, it can just make out the stag’s silhouette on the horizon.
It is so tired that sometimes the sleeping world and the waking world merge into one. In dreams, it sees the stag as if they are a hairsbreadth apart. It witnesses the change, the becoming of the stag who carries the dead.
The clash of antlers and strike of terror—each stag realizes, suddenly, that they are not two beasts, but one. There is nothing that can untangle their antlers. In the frantic battle to escape, Risha’s stag breaks its leg in two. The stag was never meant to walk like this. On three legs, with the weight of a skeleton pulling it to the ground. Now the muscles on one side of its body are overgrown and as knotted as the trees that crown its head. It doesn’t move like a stag is supposed to move; in its ugliness and wrongness, Risha sees itself. Its future. In a century’s time, it is warped and still walking.
Waking, Risha returns to its body to find itself pressing onward, carried by legs which can hardly stand, breathing through a throat gone dry. It can smell nothing but musk, piss, and blood; hear nothing but the peal of the stag’s steps.
Only in Risha’s dreams does the stag speak. It lowers its head to the earth. Its flanks heave as it bellows: IT CAME TO ME AS A DOE. IT CAME TO ME WITH A COAT GLOWING LIKE THE MOON. Risha the doe cowers, urine streaming down its shaking legs, as it is surrounded by the thunderclap of the stag’s hatred, its love, its longing. But it is too late for the stag’s warning now. And even as the creature dressed in white finds another and another, the stag will cry out to a forest that cannot hear, and Risha will drag itself forward.
When it meets the stag, Risha tells itself, it will feast.