"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
CHAPTER I
"Don't move. Don't even think of running away." The man's voice sounded calm and threatening. It was as cold as the snow that covered the forest clearing and the frost that covered the branches of the old spruce.
I knew that voice very well. Stephen would speak this way when he felt danger.
"She will not attack us if not provoked. Pull back slowly, without turning your back."
"HRRRHRRH!!!"
Ten paces away, on the other side of the clearing, a wolf growled, teeth bared. Her litter of three wolf cubs was hiding closely behind her back. The she-wolf's fur was matted - gray with darker streaks. Her eyes were light brown - almost yellow - and her gaping jaws were full of pointed teeth, as if deliberately sharpened.
Steppy and I started to back away slowly, sinking into the snow. ("Steppy" is Stephen's nickname. I know it's weird, but it is what it is).
The she-wolf followed, sinking into the snow as well. Her cubs quickly disappeared into the bushes, kicking up frost.
"Don't turn your back, Irma," Steppy told me loudly, waving his hands in front of him. "And don't start running. We must have come close to her den. Wolves usually avoid people. You can scream and shout, but don't run away."
With every step, I shivered with fear. Desperately looking for some kind of weapon, Steppy pulled an old spruce branch out of the snow.
The she-wolf was getting closer and closer. Now she was only a few steps away. I walked backwards. I couldn't see where I was going; all I could see were the yellow eyes of the beast.
My foot got stuck in the snow and I stumbled backwards. The she-wolf, as if she just had been waiting for it, immediately lunged at me. Stephen hit her with the spruce branch while she was still in the air, and she landed on his side.
As I stood up, the she-wolf attacked Steppy, baring her teeth. He swung that spruce branch again, stabbing her in the snout.
The she-wolf howled. She squatted in the snow, tensing, looking for a chance to attack again.
"Pull back slowly, Irma. Wave your arms. Just don't run!" - Stephen said calmly.
Steppy's coolness and determinations saved us that day. The wolf followed us closely, looking for an opportunity to lunge. Stephen was ready to hit back.
She followed us for about a hundred more steps. Then Steppy had a brilliant idea. He took off his fur-lined hat and swung it in the direction of the she-wolf. The wolf immediately sank her teeth into the hat and shook it from side to side in the snow.
We slowly pulled back.
The she-wolf tore the hat so fiercely that pieces of it scattered all around. She let go for a moment, licked her paw, then grabbed it again with her teeth, lazily turned around and disappeared into the thicket of fir trees.
"She bit my arm" Stephen said in a low voice.
When we were well away from the clearing, Steppy pulled back his jacket sleeve, jumper and shirt. The blood was only seeping in one place, but on both sides of his forearm we could clearly see the mark where the wolf's teeth had bitten.
"I don't think it is serious. It's gonna be just an ugly bruise," Steppy said as I wrapped a scarf around his arm.
***
That winter day we'd been lost in the forest. We'd trudged through the snow, frozen and cold, unable to find the clearing and the forest road where we had left the car. Several times we'd found our own footprints. Stephen's shoes were bigger and mine were smaller. It had seemed that we had been bewitched by the evil spirits of the forest, cursed to keep going in circles.
It was getting dark. I could see Stephen, who is usually very calm, getting nervous. His anxiety was spreading to me. I felt cold and my hands were shaking.
Finally, Steppy breathed a sigh of relief. He exclaimed in English, "Thank God! There's the road!"
When we got to the road, we still had to walk a few kilometers. We had wandered completely off the path when we'd been lost in the forest. By the time we reached our car, it was already completely dark.
"Listen," Stephen said, stopping suddenly.
I heard the sound too.
"Hhoooaaaaaouuuu!!!" a howl came through the forest.
After a few seconds of silence, it was repeated:
"Ooouhhoooowww!!!"
The howl made the hair on my arms stand on end. I had never heard wolves howl, but you don't have to know it to immediately recognize it for what it is. It's in our genes.
If there had been some ice age woman who'd wandered through that forest twenty thousand years ago, wearing fur and not having washed for six months, I'm sure she would have felt exactly the same way I did.
She, too, would have had her hair standing on end, and she, too, would have clung to her man's hand.
"This is how they show that this is their forest," Stephen said. "This is their territory. The others - let them stay away."
***
Steppy often took me on his expeditions into the woods. On the week-days he had to manage over one hundred employees in his IT consultancy business, so during the week-ends he followed the policy that he would turn off his phone and get away. The further away from people and from the city he would get, the better.
A few years ago, he'd decided to build himself a small log cabin in the Labanor forest. Once he'd been done with the construction, he'd invited both me and my mom to see it.
Steppy is married to my mom, but he is neither my father nor adoptive father. We live in Lithuania, which is a small Nordic country by the Baltic Sea. Both of my birth parents are Lithuanian, but Stephen, my mom's present husband, is an American. He started a business here many years ago. He speaks Lithuanian well, but you can still tell that he is a foreigner.
Since my parents divorced and my mom remarried, Stephen has been a kind of authoritative figure to me, but he never took my father's place. I never call Stephen "Dad" or "Father", it just wouldn't sound right. It is not that kind of a relationship. My real father lives abroad and I am on very good terms with him. We get in touch every week.
Well, about that forest cabin. My mom said that she wasn't a forest person, but that, as an exceptional favor, she would go. Naturally, she'd expect to be generously rewarded for that extraordinary favor later on.
Frankly, I didn't feel like going there either. No teenager likes spending time with her parents. It would be even worse than that. It would be spending time with parents in a forest with no cellular coverage.
I think that was the last day that we looked like a happy family. We spent half a day fishing, and then we cooked a very smelly fish stew with lots of wild garlic and thyme.
Even though my mother enjoyed it, too, she would never admit it, because, per her worldview, that would weaken her negotiating position.
That day I pouted my lips, rolled my eyes and complained about mosquito stings. That's what teenagers do. However, when Stephen asked me if I'd like to go there again, I'd said, "Yeah. Sure. Whatever."
My mother had had other things to do, so since that day it had just been Steppy and me.
The forest has grown on me. Those spring, summer, autumn, and winter days in the woods had felt vivid and real. We would hike, we would fish, and we would cook simple meals on an open fire. Often we would climb into a tree and spend time birdwatching.
Almost every time, we also managed to spot forest animals: foxes, roe deer, wild boar, elk. However, we had never encountered a wolf before. The she-wolf we met on that snowy day was our first.
It took us two hours to drive home that night, and all the way long we talked about the power of the forest and the primal instincts hiding in us. What would we be like if we were ice age people? What would it feel like to hear at night the roar of saber-tooth tigers and the trumpeting of mammoths?
