The winter wolf's most useful quality is that it makes ice where ice is wanted. Its breath, loosed in one long exhale, turns standing water to a plate as thick as a man's thumb within the time it takes to say a short prayer. Its most ridiculous quality is that it cannot stop doing this. It sneezes, and the trough freezes.
Anika Bryzhova keeps the water at Brzeno Gap, a drovers' halt of three sheds and a well on the high road to Lutovec. She rises in the dark, lights the stove, and carries two buckets of hot water to the stock pen, because the pen's trough is solid every morning from November to March. She chops it open with a hatchet. She has done this for eleven winters. Around the second bucket, she checks the snow along the pen rail for tracks the size of a soup bowl, with four toes and no claw marks, since the claws stay sheathed in fur until the animal wants them. Today there are tracks, and a pale shape is sitting on the ridge above the well, its coat the exact white of the slope behind it. Only the black wet of its nose gives it away. It yawns. A skin of frost spreads across the rim of the well bucket, and Anika sighs and reaches for the hatchet again.
By midmorning she has fed the goats, scraped the stove ash into the lane for footing, and thawed the pump handle with a kettle. Drovers at Brzeno Gap observe one rule: nothing metal is left outside overnight, because a winter wolf's breath fuses a latch or a bit to the post. Anika hangs her hatchet on a peg inside the door. Of the wolves themselves, she says only that they are no worse than the weather, and that the sheep in this pen have never been lost to one. I have watched the animal on the ridge for three mornings and seen it do nothing but sit, scratch behind an ear with a hind foot, and walk a slow circle through the drifts before lying down in it. A large male stands about four feet at the shoulder. Its eyes are a pale, clear blue.
The pack is said to number nine, though I have counted only three at once, and the herders of Lutovec swear that the pack's lead female was born in a snowdrift during a thaw and has never been warm. I cannot confirm this. What I can report is the diet: hare, marmot, and the occasional frozen carcass of a goat that died on the pass, which it eats without hurry. At dusk Anika props the pen gate open for the night's last watering. The trough has frozen again. Beside it lies a single hare, neatly skinned, set on the ice with its feet tucked under.
- Classification
- Magical canine, frost-breathing predator
- Habitat
- High passes and snowfields above treeline
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Snowbound mountain passes
- Binomial
- Canis glacialis borealis
- Diet
- Hare, marmot, carrion
- Temperament
- Aloof, patient, quietly territorial