Part I, A Wolf's Dream
Part II, A Wolf's Hunt
A Wolf's Storm
Kugis had no choice, at least as far as he could think it through. He couldn’t risk climbing down the cliff with the storm bearing down on him. At the rate it was coming it would be on him before he could reach the bottom, and if the storm hit while he was still on the cliff he was done for.
He couldn’t climb up until he knew for sure that the bear was gone. Therefore, he would wait until the storm was almost upon him. At the last moment, when the bear would have gone to take shelter, and when he had just barely enough time to do so himself, that is when he would climb back up. So, he waited and he watched.
The whipping cold of the storm began to bite his back and his face when he turned to look at the storm like long blades of ice slicing through the air, and yet there was no ice or snow, not yet. Holding himself fast to the cliff face with one arm he used the other to wrap up his face as best he could.
Then the snow and the ice began to lash at his body. The moisture didn’t penetrate his clothing, but the cold did and soon he was shivering from the chill. Nevertheless, it still wasn’t safe to ascend.
It wasn’t long before the snow began to become thick, and finally, his hands shaking from the cold, Kugis dragged himself up the cliff face and there it was, the bear, staring at him as if it hadn’t moved an inch. Kugis froze in terror but then the image vanished. He shook his head, was he going mad? Had it just been an illusion in the falling snow?
He pulled himself and hurled himself onto solid ground. When he found his feet he made his way as quickly as he could. There had been a grove of trees nearby earlier, and he made his way towards where he remembered seeing them. Now the snow and ice were so thick that he couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.
He stumbled forward attempting to feel his way through the storm, and then he slipped and fell again. Somehow he had turned himself around in the snow and fallen off the cliff a second time. He reached out to save himself but the side of the cliff was too slippery and his fingers to stiff with cold. However, something else caught his arm and he hung suspended in the air neither clinging to the cliff nor falling. He looked up but through the thickness of the storm he could not even see the end of his arm, everything was a blur of white.
Then he was being lifted by an unseen force and suddenly he was tossed. As he flew through the air he saw it, the bear, pass underneath him. It had taken his arm in its teeth, as delicately as holding a kitten, and thrown him back to safety.
Kugis, now too frozen with shock and cold, and frankly too afraid of once again falling off the cliff, simply curled into a ball and waited to see if the bear would kill him. Nothing happened and after a few moments he felt himself drifting to sleep. Deep in the recesses of his mind he knew this was very bad, but he could no longer rouse himself. Actually, he didn’t know if he wasn’t asleep already because, though it was faint, he felt an immense source of heat settle around him blocking the worst of the wind.
Deep into the night, when the storm had finally passed, and the noise of the snow and ice and hail had subsided Kugis was awakened by the sound of loud breathing. Above him, in the clear night sky he could see the constellations more clearly than ever before in his life, and colorful lights playing across the sky. He felt the massive form of the animal next to him shift it's weight, and then he heard a whisper on the wind speaking... to him. "Bruéshmerzvir."
