“Seeing Red (Dispersal)” by Cecilia Feilla
The irony is that wolves do not perceive red as humans do. The girl’s cape was not the lure, merely a diverting morsel for parlor room and fireside tales fashioned for her own kind.
No, it was the basket her mother had packed that morning with care that caught the wolf’s notice. A pungent cheese, fresh-baked oatcakes. Their fragrance trailed the child as she made her way through the forest to Granny’s in winter. The wolf followed the scent, his four legs moving faster in the snow than her two on the needled path.
Soon he spied her through the trees. Slowly now, patiently, he tracked the red cloak, a yellowy gray to his eyes against blue snow.
A branch cracked underfoot. The girl stopped. He stopped.
She took down the hood to hear and see better. Sweet-smelling steam rose from golden hair; she would be a woman come spring.
He kept a ball of snow in his mouth to keep his breath invisible in the cold.
Hearing and seeing nothing, the girl replaced the hood and continued. He continued.
In times of scarcity, wolves are known to force their weakest member out of the pack—usually a runt reaching sexual maturity or an aged alpha past its prime. Dispersal, it is called.
It is not infrequent, after great storms, for a desperate outcast to show itself at the foot of the mountains, ravenous and reckless with hunger.
This wolf was young, like the girl, and far from home like her, too. Cautious not to trespass on the terrain of other packs, it had been starving these weeks, floating between the dwindling wolf lands. Hunger prodded him now to fly at the girl’s bundle and fasten his teeth upon it, but experience had made him wary of gunshot and steel. He circled at a distance, awaiting opportunity, cautious of other predators, running ahead, then back again, then ahead.
Then he saw it. A cottage.
He had taken a short path through the brush and snow and had emerged upon a hillside. From there he could see both the girl on the path below and the solitary abode in the valley ahead.
In no time, he was at the cottage door, searching the perimeter for a way in, a door left ajar, a latch left loose.
A careful voice called from within.
Several slow steps across the boards and the door opened a crack.
Wolves are quick about their work and thorough. The woman was strong but also old and caught unawares. The flesh had been meager, with no tender sweetness of youth; such delicacies were the joy of springtime. Still, the blood and marrow did him good, and the young wolf grew sleepy. He piled the bones and hair in a corner, as wolves do, then curled up on the woman’s clothes near the fire until a draft from the open door chased him from the ground to the bed. He nestled under the animal scents of down and wool and human and closed his eyes.
A screech startled him awake.
The girl.
He knew her by her scent.
Hunger flared unsated. He leapt at her, eyes on her throat. But in the seconds before he reached her, he saw, as the basket fell and the gifts for Granny tumbled out, a hunter’s knife clutched in the girl’s hand.
His speed was ferocious, but the girl’s instincts, and the commotion of objects, helped her evade his open maw. She struck with the hilt then planted the blade, as her father had taught her, in the creature’s distended belly. The wolf barked in pain and anger. Swiftly, he turned on the child and tore at her hand, then eyed her throat again.
The fire was long out when the mother found both bled out on the cottage floor. Hand to her mouth, she teetered between the cold world without and red-dispersed darkness within.
The old woman’s bones were neatly laid in the pantry. She washed and swept the house clean, and when she was done, she ate the rolls and cheese her kin were meant to share.
Restored, the mother collected the good things and the canned goods. She cut a paw from the animal–proof of the daughter’s deed, the end of fear–and wrapped it in a remnant of the red cape. She placed these with the scrubbed-clean knife in the basket she’d packed that morning, carefully.
Everything in its intended place, the woman locked the door behind her. Winters were growing colder, they said, the forests barer, and the endangered beasts more dangerous. She pulled her coat tighter around herself and returned to the safety of numbers in town to wait out the rest of the savage season.
Cecilia Feilla is a writer and scholar based in Brooklyn. Her fiction has appeared in Calyx Magazine online and been awarded runner-up of the Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing (2021). She has published two books of literary criticism and numerous articles and book reviews. She is currently working on a short story collection and teaches Theatre Arts and World Literature at Marymount Manhattan College.
