“But I was never truly that hungry in my grandparents’ home. It was after they died and I was sent to live with my mother and her husband that I went days without food. If I said or did anything that my mother’s husband thought was disrespectful, he sent me to my room and locked me in. And left me there. Sometimes for days. Once I thought I would die, so after three days I jumped out my window. But it was winter and the snow was deep over the bushes below. I was scratched and bruised and limped for ten days, but it didn’t kill me. My mother was worried. Not for me, but for what her friends would say if I died. Or simply vanished. She had marriage plans for me. One suitor was older than my grandfather had been, a man with a loose wet mouth who stared at me as if I were the last sweet on the plate. And another family had a son who had no wish for the company of women but was willing to marry me so his parents would leave him and his friends in peace.”
I had never heard Shun speak so much. She did not look at me as she talked, but stared ahead and spoke her words to the cadence of her trudge. I kept silent and she talked on, speaking of being slapped for insolence, of a younger brother who tormented her with surreptitious pinches and shoves. She’d spent more than a year being miserable there, and when she adamantly refused the attentions of both her suitors, her stepfather expressed his interest, cupping a buttock as he passed, standing over her if she sat reading a book, trailing his fingers over her bosom as he became bolder. She had retreated to her room, spending most of her hours there and latching the door.
And then one day she received a message and slipped out of the house in late evening. She met a woman with two horses at the bottom of the garden, and they had fled. She halted suddenly. She was breathing heavily. “Can you go first for a time?” she asked me.
And I did, and suddenly appreciated the work she had been doing since dawn. I led us by a more winding way, seeking shallower snow in the lee of trees and clumps of bushes. Even so, it was heavier work than I’d been doing and sweat began to run down my spine. I had no breath to speak and she seemed to have run out of words and stories. I pondered what I’d learned of Shun and rather wished she had shared such tales when first she had come to live with us. I might have been able to like her if I had known more about her. When we paused to rest the sweat cooled my body and I shivered until we trudged on.
I did not last as long as Shun had. I told myself it was because I was smaller and had to lift my feet higher at each step to push my way through the snow and work against the drag of my coat. Shun took the lead again, when I had slowed beyond her patience, and led us on along a widening vale. I hoped desperately for a shepherd’s cottage or a farmstead. But I saw no chimney smoke rising and heard only birdcalls. Perhaps sheep or cattle pastured here in summer but had been herded home to their pens for the winter.
The shadows of the hills began to creep across us as the sun moved and I realized we’d been traveling east. I tried to decide if that meant we were closer to Withywoods but I was too tired and my hunger had begun to creep back, setting claws in my belly and up my throat. “We should look for some kind of shelter soon,” Shun announced.
I lifted my eyes. I’d been looking only at the backs of her legs. There were no evergreens here, but to the south of us I saw bare-limbed willows along a watercourse. They were gray and twiggy and the snow had penetrated to lie shallowly on the ground beneath them. “Perhaps under the willows?” I said, and “If we find nothing better,” Shun agreed, and we walked on.
It began to get darker, and the clear day that had seemed almost kind now seemed crueler as the cold seemed to descend from the sky. Ahead we could see the brushy line that indicated another watercourse would soon cut our path.
We had good fortune. Evidently that stream ran wild and raging in the spring, for it had cut a deep path through the meadow. Now it ran quietly under the ice, but along the undercut banks, roots of trees trailed down and there were hollows in the earth behind them. They dangled like ropy curtains. We beat the clinging snow off the lower parts of our coats before we pushed the roots aside and forced our way into the earthy darkness.
This is good. Settle here and be safe. I felt Wolf-Father relax inside me.
“I’m still hungry,” I said quietly.
Shun was settling herself. She’d pulled her hood well up over her head and had sat down and pulled her feet up inside her coat. I copied her.
“Go to sleep. At least when you’re asleep you don’t think about food,” she told me.
It seemed good advice and I followed it, resting my forehead on my knees and closing my eyes. I was so tired. I longed to take my boots off. I fantasized about a hot bath and my deep feather bed. Then I slept. I dreamed of my father calling me. Then I dreamed I was home, and meat was roasting on the kitchen spit. I could smell it and I could hear the noises flames make when fat drips into them.
Wake, cub, but make no sound. Untangle yourself. Be ready to run or fight.