Red - Jack Ketchum [1]
She is immune to none of these.
The sea has always been her ally.
On a quiet night at low tide she can hear the world breathing.
She loosens her belt and drops it to her hips, careful not to lose the knife.
She goes to her knees and gently bathes her wounds until the mud is gone and her blood weeps down across her loincloth into the water. Then stands and walks to shore. She stoops and pulls some of the leaves free of their rocky trap, washes them of sand and crabshell and presses them to her wounds.
They sting. And this too is the sea.
The sea sails through her like a poison now, like a gift. Slowly the pain subsides. She gathers more leaves thick as leather and washes them and presses them to her side, lifts and rebuckles her belt around them to hold them in place.
She walks the shingle beach, eyeing tidepools for food and the cliffs above for shelter. It isn’t long before she finds both. A small cache of mussels. A pair of tiny crabs. And perhaps forty feet above her fifteen yards away a narrow slit in the granite rockface, barely visible, draped in sphagnum moss — the opening to a cave. The crabs she crunches with her teeth and swallows nearly whole. The mussels she palms in her hand two at a time and pummels against the rocks, flicks away the shells with her fingertips and laps the meat inside.
When she’s finished she heads across the beach and climbs a narrow path to the cave.
Some ten feet from the entrance she stops. She scents the air. Pulls the knife from her belt. The knife still bears the dark brown stains of her own blood from the night before — the Cow, in an unexpected bit of treachery from the last of her lost family, has stabbed her just above the hip. And paid for that with his life.
But she has caught the scent of another life.
A familiar one.
Of urine. Of wolf. The cave is marked with wolf-scent. And recent.
She knows the wolf is not normally the enemy. That most will run from her, from any human, rather than confront such an unpredictable opponent. But wolves do not tend to seek a cave unless to whelp and whelping season is over so that with this one care is necessary. She steps softly, stops, listens. Steps closer, the knife poised beside her at shoulder height, her grip firm and ready.
She stops again when she hears the scrabble of paw on rock. The wolf rising. It is less than ten feet away.
Then she hears the growling. Low and raw with intent.
This one is the enemy.
She can picture the wolf clearly. It stands facing her. Its ears are erect. The fur bristles along its massive arched back, its long legs bent for the leap. In its powerful muzzle the lips are curled into a snarl, pulled back away from the six sharp incisors used for cutting and two fangs curved inward for the ripping kill.
It tenses. She can feel it in the dark.
Knows that it can feel her too. Can smell her blood on the knife.
Inside the cave, a sudden rough movement and then the flash of yellow eyes and a hurtling grey-brown body and she leans into its rush, its dive for her throat, leans down and into and off to one side and plunges the knife down and under in a single liquid arc so that the wolf falls crashing back on its spine into the mouth of the cave, thrashing on the blade of the knife thrust up through its neck, paws uselessly tearing through emptiness while she presses her advantage, takes the knife in both her hands and heaves with shoulders, back and forearms, rips upward through muscled neck and bone into the very skull of the wolf, who whimpers once like a small kicked dog and dies.
She inspects her kill.
The wolf is old. White hair along the muzzle, eyes and lower chin. He is male. And large, the height of a deer at the shoulder. His right front paw is mangled. So are