Moon village wolf full#
‘Good girl,’ Grandma says to the night air, and goes to scrub the blood from her mouth.The full moon's timing is the same everywhere - though the hour depends on your time zone. The first screams ring out just after she locks the door. Then, silent as a shadow on snow, she is gone. Without a word, she puts on the wolf-skin and crouches down, to walk on all fours. And if you get caught, make sure it’s by someone worthy of donning the wolf-skin.’ ‘You are a worthy wolf,’ she tells Rosalie. The old woman – just a woman, now – grins. She stands tall and looks Grandma in the eye. Biting off the limbs of all who threaten or strike her. She imagines the strength, the fearlessness of the werewolf. She sees the thousand shades of silver, grey, pewter, pearl, soot, cream catching the moonlight and glimmering like ripples on water. She strokes it, feeling the rough velvetiness under her fingers. ‘Give me my fur coat, dear granddaughter,’ she implores. The old woman rises up on two legs, nursing her injured hand. Rosalie slings the pelt over her shoulder and prises Grandma free. Its pelt peels away, until only Grandmother is left, her hand bloodied where the trap’s teeth have dug in. With swift bold movements, she steps forward, grasps the beast by the snout and the tail, and tugs. Then Rosalie remembers what Grandma told her. ‘He ruled with his fist, until I bit it off.’ ‘I will bite off my hand, then come and find you and bite off yours, as I did to your Grandfather,’ says the wolfwoman. ‘I will leave you here to starve, Grandma,’ says Rosalie. Rosalie remembers Daisy’s three dead husbands, how her aunt wept so much the earth around her cottage was salted and became fallow. ‘Then my blood will curse you, as the blood of my pack brother cursed Daisy,’ says the wolfwoman. ‘But you’d kill me, Grandma,’ she answers. ‘Set me free, darling,’ says the wolfwoman. The wolfwoman observes.įor a half-dozen heartbeats, they are frozen in tableau. Rosalie shudders as the terrible knowledge seeps into her mind like frost. There’s even a metal band on its third finger, a silver wedding band that looks like Grandma’s…
Rosalie stares at the skinned paw, which looks eerily like a human hand. The creature has struggled so ferociously that the trap has torn the werewolf’s pelt from its flesh. Rosalie is almost sick with fright, until she realises the beast’s front forepaw is caught in a trap. She scoops up the last ears and surfaces, only to be confronted by a werewolf.
Rosalie is picking up dropped ears of corn, curved steel tucked in her belt for protection, making haste as the light turns mauve and the swollen moon peers above the horizon. The Harvest Moon draws them into the fields, as if sucking poison from a wound. Werewolves are especially dangerous the night of the Harvest Moon. An uneasy truce holds until the night of the Harvest Moon.
The werewolves howl their defiance but keep their distance. Men patrol the fields with bows and arrows. The dead wolves dangle dull-eyed and rigid, teeth forever bared in a rictus snarl. The corn gleams, but not as bright as the wolf blood that drips from the gibbet in the village square. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you,’ Grandma answers, kissing her goodnight. ‘What did you mean earlier, about the tail and the teeth?’ ‘Grandma?’ Rosalie asks when the tale is finished.
She tells her about a king who served up a meal of human flesh at a banquet and was turned into a wolf as punishment. The family is abed, but Grandma tiptoes into Rosalie’s room to tell her a bedtime story, as she had done every night since Rosalie was a podgy little baby. Grandma grins, her old teeth creamy and sharp. Unlike her parents, who just tell her she shouldn’t ask silly questions, Grandma will always give her favourite grandchild an answer. ‘What is the right way, Grandma?’ clever, unruly Rosalie asks. Aunt Daisy, who once killed a werewolf with a pitchfork, who was married three times and widowed within a year three times, makes the sign of the cross. Grandfather, who’d had his right arm and leg bitten off by a werewolf a hundred moons ago, sucks sulkily on his pipe. ‘Werewolves are no more dangerous than wild wolves – provided you take them the right way.’ ‘Nonsense,’ Grandma scoffs, her wizened fingers nimbly knitting a new scarf for Rosalie. Wolves are nothing more than a nuisance, but werewolves are the Devil’s own children. Werewolves are a thousand times worse than wolves.
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