Tove and The Wolf

At the house at the edge of the woods there lived a Woodsman and his three children. The youngest of these children was a newborn baby boy. Upon the baby’s birth, the Woodsman’s wife died quickly and quietly. The Woodsman grieved this loss enormously, and for many days and nights could hardly bear to touch his tools. 

The Woodsman’s oldest daughter, Tove, took notice of this. She kept herself awake into the wee hours of the darkness, peering at her father as he trained an empty gaze on the fireplace night after night. Each new day, his tools remained untouched and the woods grew thick and the food upon the dinner table grew thin.

At school, Tove kept quiet, praying silently that when she returned home her father would be in good spirits. In her mind, the hearth swelled and her siblings lay on their bellies on the floor playing with newly carved toys. She would set the table just right for her father, and he would serve them all a hearty supper smelling of warming spices. The growling of her stomach shook her from the daydream, and her ears perked as she overheard a group of schoolchildren whispering amongst each other. 

She approached the circle of little huddled bodies wearily, listening closely to the disjointed chittering. 

“Glowing eyes all the better to see you with!”

“Razor-sharp claws all the better to catch you with!”

“A big bloody mouth all the better to eat you with!” 

Tove poked her head through an open cranny in the circle and murmured. “Who?”

The children went quiet, all their pointed gazes landing on her at once. Tove suddenly felt much smaller than she was, and tucked her chin into her chest. 

“Only the big. Bad. Wolf.” One child sneered. “The most horrible, most wretched, most enormous creature in all the woods! He guards the forest’s heart, ready to gobble up any naughty children who wander alone.” 

Tove gulped. She did not care much to hear about what monsters lie in wait just outside her house. She shook her head and turned to leave the huddle when one boy chimed in. 

“They say if someone’s brave enough to slay him, they’ll never go hungry again, that they’ll always have fresh meat at their door.” Tove stood still. She thought of her growling stomach, and wondered if that same gnawing feeling stewed in the bellies of her father, her sister, the baby. They were in no condition to face such a beast. And so Tove took to the woods. 

Between her malnourished smallness and matured face, worn heavily with violet strokes under her eyes, Tove looked exactly her age; all of seven years old. 

With trembling ankles and wrists, skinny and jutting with days of ceaseless hunger, the girl trudged across the frozen dirt, snow-damp leaves sticking to her little shoes. Gnarled branches twined sharply in the sleeves of her shirt, pinching at the loose fabric as she passed by. Her head swam with chill and hunger and exhaustion, but she was not afraid. The forest contained no greater horrors than did the four walls of her home, of this she was quite certain. Even if the wolf was so terrible as the schoolchildren said, she would not allow herself to cry. 

As Tove drew deeper into the woods, with fingers frostbitten and stinging wrapped tight around the handle of her father’s hatchet, she happened upon what she knew to be the heart of the forest. For it looked like a heart indeed. A convoluted knot of roots, all gnarled and endlessly weaving, towered above her. It was at least three times her height. She squinted at it, considering that at once it may have been many trees, which grew too closely together and eventually could no longer be differentiated. The heart thrummed with life. At first she thought it to be a trick of the light, but as she inspected it closer she was certain that the system of roots was moving. Its pace was lethargic, but all the same rhythmic and predictable; the mass of roots curling in on itself then expanding, curling, expanding, and beating just as true as the heart in Tove’s own chest. 

After so many arduous and monotonous hours of exploration, Tove’s fingers twitched about the handle of the axe, longing to be of some use. But the little girl steadied herself; she had no quarrel with the heart, only the dreaded dire wolf which guarded it. 

“Only call him once and he shall come…” Tove whispered to herself, her lips slow with chilling numbness. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled as her father did to call her to supper - when they still held supper of course- and waited.

In the permeable stillness of anticipation, Tove found that perhaps there was some fear in her yet, as the back of her neck prickled with something awful. She was reminded of all the things the children had whispered about at school: an uncountable many teeth, yellow lamp-like eyes, monstrous claws larger than her head, a growl so deep and so terrible that the very ground trembled in its wake. But Tove heard no such growl. Instead, slowly approaching, her ears perked at a cool and tremulous mewling accompanied by a damp thumping of paws. She craned her head and peered into the darkness, the hatchet poised behind her head. 

“If you be the wolf, then show yourself!” She cried, sounding only a bit braver than she felt. From that spot of darkness crawled a creature which was only remarkable in its thinness. A wolf, yes, but neither big nor bad nor frightening. Frightful, perhaps, in its hollowness; strange and wan with a coat of matted and silvering fur. The girl stared at the weary thing, perplexed, lowering the axe of her father. 

The wolf seemed to take notice, but did not bare its teeth in reply, instead offering a slow and deliberate nod towards the blade in Tove’s hand. She glanced at it and felt suddenly quite sick with herself for boasting to kill something so obviously pathetic. 

“You have come to slay me.” The wolf spoke, its voice laden with grit and gravel, heavy with disuse. The girl winced, but was not want to lie, and nodded apologetically. The wolf slowly blinked its large dull eyes and continued. “Well, then.”

Tove stared at it. If she were to kill this creature it would be no great victory, no brutal slaying, but a merciful and swift death. With childish curiosity, she found herself approaching the thing with an outstretched hand. The creature did not flinch away, and Tove felt no fear as she lay her hand upon its head and scratched affectionately behind its drooping ears. Touching it, she was startled to find its body cold as ice beneath its meager coat. 

“You’re cold.” She said plainly. The wolf nodded solemnly. 

“This winter is especially cruel, little one. You are wise to wear such a warm coat.” Said the wolf, its nose pointing to her grandmother's hooded cloak, passed down to her as the eldest child. Tove had not grown into it yet, and it hung heavy and limp about her tiny shoulders. The girl considered this a moment and unfastened the clasps of her coat before wrapping it about the body of the wolf. 

“Oh child- I cannot accept this.” The wolf protested as it was dressed, but it lacked the strength to shake the cloak from its shoulders. 

“I’m not so cold.” Tove lied, her teeth clacking sharply together. 

“It is a waste to bestow warmth upon something so near to death as myself.” The wolf said, though it held no sorrow in its voice. Tove’s brows creased. She was not so downtrodden yet to believe the lies of grownups; knowing that even the most fleeting moments of kindness mattered greatly. 

“You are to die?” Tove asked. 

“You are to kill me.” The wolf answered. 

“Is that what you want?” 

The wolf sighed, its slight shoulders heaving under the weight of its breath. 

“I have watched these forests since I was only a pup. For many days and months and years I wandered here, guarding her heart.” Its eyes flickered to the gnarled mass, beating slow and constant. “But I am old and weary now, not so strong or brave as one such as yourself. There are powers too great now for me to defend her against.” 

The corners of Tove’s ears burned at the compliment, but she was thankful for the warmth. 

“I am not strong.” She muttered. 

“But you are brave.” The wolf said, a graveness creeping into its voice. “You came all this way. You have heard the stories. You know what must be done.”

Tove blinked in awe at the creature. She was certain she did not want to kill it, and yet she recalled the day she found a deer in the wood just outside her home. The poor thing had caught itself in a bear trap, its legs bent at unnatural angles, mewling in pain. Tove watched her father take a hunting knife to its throat, joyless and somber. He had explained later that it was a kinder death, if a bit more expedient. The wolf was not so different, only a bit more dignified, nobly bowing its head, accepting its fate. 

Tove’s fingers twitched tighter around the handle as she raised it slowly above her head. She sucked in a deep, frozen breath, steeling herself. The wolf met her gaze, its eyes dark and enormous. She grimaced, mumbled a prayer, and swung the hatchet. It sliced through the air and landed against the wolf’s head with an ear-splitting crack. The blade stuck on the lip of its cranium, and Tove wiggled it free, bits of blood and fur flecking the snow. She raised the hatchet and swung again. And again. And again. Until the wolf lay in a muddled heap.

She breathed hard, the cold stinging her throat and nose. Her arms ached, trembling with strain, and the axe fell from her little fingers. She stared at the remnants of the wolf with wide eyes in disbelief of her own strength. 

As she looked on, a smell wafted past her, warm and gamey and inviting. With a sinking feeling she realized it was the fresh meat she was smelling, raw and bloody. Her stomach churned with hunger. The sensation bubbled past her ribs, her throat, her mouth, consuming the whole of her body. She dropped to the ground.

In a mad frenzy Tove took handfuls of bloodied muscle, tearing into it with her baby teeth. It was tough and ugly and yet she carried on until she was stained deep crimson from her chin to her fingertips. She licked clean the bones, picked pieces of flesh from fur, breathed in the remaining smell as if it would fill her belly all the same. When the meat had all gone, and still her stomach rumbled, Tove looked down at the tarnished snow. Before her lay two coats; that of the wolf and that of her grandmother, side by side. 

Her eyes flickered between the two as the gravity of her deed began to settle in her mind. She conjured the image of her father, staring blankly into the fire, her sister scraping a fork along an empty plate, the baby crying out in its crib. She would not allow them to starve down to nothing. 

With a final lick of her lips, Tove shirked her clothes, but the cold hardly registered. Over her head, she draped the silvery pelt of the wolf, and as it enveloped her twiggy limbs she felt it grow heavy. The fur seemed to expand as if it were breathing, each silvery hair lifting and falling, its color shifting from dull gray to a deep dark black. The edges of the pelt knit together with some invisible thread, stretching across Tove’s slight frame. She closed her eyes and breathed in the winter’s air, but no longer felt its sting, no longer hungered, no longer starved for rest. 

Tove opened her eyes.

The wolf stalked away. 

The house at the edge of the woods held one less soul in it that night and a great and terrible emptiness was felt at the meager dinner table. For hours, the Woodsman wandered the forest in frantic search of his eldest child. He turned every stone, marked every tree, kicked up any patch of leaves or snow which her little body might be buried beneath. In the late hours of the day, as the sun drew itself into the earth and set the forest floor ablaze, the father knelt in the snow at the sight of something familiar. But as he looked upon the ground, what was born as hope swiftly twisted itself into a horrible and all-encompassing grief. Laid before him in the snow was the coat of his mother, passed down to his daughter, stained rusty red and stinking with old blood. 

When the Woodsman returned to his children at the house at the edge of the woods, there sat on the stoop of the door a bundle of meat. Great hunks of venison, still bloody-fresh and wrapped in twine stained the ground. And every seven days, exactly when the last of the meat ran out, the Woodsman would find another fresh bundle at the door.