The Long Dark Before the Sun

It is the last time we’ll see the sun for 41 days. We watch it dip below the horizon as we string coloured glass beads to hang in the windows. These are our guardians during the long dark. My little sister whimpers on the bed and I scoop her into a cuddle. She asks when the wolves will come.

My mother tells us stories of before the wolves, when the long dark was just cold and sunless, but survivable outside our huts. They used to light the paths with candles sheltered within jars and pushed into the snow to keep them upright. She told us the lights were fairies, and only turned into jars when you got close enough, so they weren’t discovered. The village would hold markets and dances and tell stories round a large campfire. She always looked beyond us when she reminisced and I could see her, small and bundled in layers, darting from one light to the next to try to catch the fairies before they changed.

The wolves started hunting further south a few years before I was born. There were reports of villages picked apart during gatherings. There was no longer enough food up north and the wolves were hungry and getting bolder each year. When they first made it as far as us, it was market day and my uncle was killed as my mother ran back to the hut. He was one of twelve who didn’t survive that year. The next year, half the families stocked up provisions and didn’t leave their huts. The rest thought they were foolish and five more were lost. The year after, more families hunkered down, and more the next, until every one of us stayed inside for the 41 days.

Last year, it took the wolves a few days before they ventured as far south as our village. This time, it took a day before we heard them. I was washing plates when a howl rose into the air and was joined by others. I looked out the window and could see the moon, not quite full, throwing icy shards of light across the huts. I looked for movement, but I could not see the wolves. My sister came and huddled into my leg as I scrubbed a bowl and I let her stay there. She was only five and I was fourteen. I was used to the wolves now and knew they could not get us inside the huts. She had nightmares and would wake screaming there was one inside with us.

One time she asked what would happen if the wolves didn’t head north when the sun came back. She looked at her doll in her lap and stroked it’s string hair. Mother looked at me and I looked back, both knowing we couldn’t answer her. We tried to tell her the wolves always went north, but that was like saying they never came south. That had been true once too. We played games to distract her and to distract ourselves and pushed the thought deep into the furthest crevices.

We had strung old food tins and string between the huts so we could still talk with our neighbours. Wind could interfere, blowing the string about and muffling the words, but on a still night we could hear them, and on those nights, we would laugh and shout and remember there was more in the world than the three of us and the wolves.

Each day I would play with the beads in the windows, twirling them between my fingers and holding them up to the candles so they’d shoot fragmented colour around the room. We’d play shadow puppets or tell each other old tales my mother had been told by her mother and so on. We’d talk about our father and the kind of man he’d been before he’d been killed in a hunting accident. Every year, he got taller and stronger and braver. This year he was the size of a bear and could lift ten men. I laughed at the thought and my mother tickled me under the chin before pulling me close.

We would play out ordinary scenes with random objects. A candlestick would be our mother and marbles would become fruit she was buying from the market. She would ask us what she way buying and we would name exotic things we’d read about in the encyclopaedia we kept next to the bed. We’d never seen them except on a page and we guessed at what they would taste like. Other times we’d play as our neighbours talking about the village news. Mother always shushed us and laughed when our impressions got close to the truth.

This was how our days passed, playing and cleaning and cooking, and washing ourselves and our clothes in the tub by the fire. Mother always teased that she bathed us for her sake more than ours because she didn’t want to be driven out of the hut by the smell. She said she’d risk the wolves if we didn’t bathe for a week, so we always bathed.

We counted the days and waited, and finally, on the evening before the end, we made paper garlands and hung them round our hut until there was colour in every direction. We spoke down the string to our neighbours and told jokes and sang to each other. We ate more than we needed to and went to bed with full bellies.

We woke still in the dark and made preparations for sunrise, which would not happen until nearly midday. We pulled instruments out from under the bed and cleaned them. I had a horn and my sister had a drum. My mother had a pipe carved for her by my father and ran her fingers over the holes as she sat in his chair by the fire. We busied ourselves with other work until she told us to be ready. We stood watching the window facing east. I stared at the strings of beads, willing them to shimmer. The first deep orange rays bled through the window and the centre of each bead glowed like an ember. My heart beat and I blew my horn as instruments across the village went up in chorus, every one of us joining in celebration.

The first sunrise and sunset were minutes apart, the briefest of days, and we played our instruments until the sun had set again. The last wolf howl we’d heard had been two days ago. As the light had crept northwards, they had retreated ahead of it and we knew, this time, that the long dark was over.