There’s no sound more haunting or stirring to the Siberian soul than the clear call of the wolf hunter’s horn, which the women make out of caribou antlers. At night, the wolves leave their mountain lairs and roam the plains in search of caribou. The Siberian wolf hunters put caribou blankets on their horses and ride out with arrows and knives, and everyone else stands high on the city walls to watch the hunt by the light of the full moon.
It’s so cold in Siberia that the Siberians wear fur head to toe, including underwear, socks, and hats. If you were to pee outside in Siberia, the pee would freeze before it hit the ground. If you had a slow-motion camera and someone who was willing to tape you peeing, you’d see exactly how close to the ground the pee was when it froze and that’s how you’d know how cold it was.
Siberia is much colder than Bismarck, North Dakota. My brother-in-law lives there—my ex-wife’s brother—and we went once for a week in January, which was a mistake. He took us ice fishing, and ice fishing—if you’ve never done it—is where you cut a round hole in the ice—which you’re standing on top of, by the way!—with this turny, drill thing and then you put a lure on a line and drop the line in the hole. Then you sit there until the hole starts to close up and you cut a new hole and sit at that one. I didn’t like ice fishing very much. I didn’t like my brother-in-law very much either, to be honest. The second morning he said, “So, who’s up for more ice fishing!” in this cheery tone people get in their voices when they live in a really cold place and they want to show off just how cold it can be—as if that’s an accomplishment—and they aren’t happy unless you talk all day long about how cold it is. I said I didn’t want to go, that I’d been ice fishing in much colder places where the holes froze up so quickly that you just laid the line on the ice and stared at it. My wife—ex-wife—kicked me under the table and said we’d love to go and don’t listen to me because I have an over-active imagination. Which is not a reason I should go ice fishing.
We spent seven days watching holes in the ice freeze up. On the eighth morning, we had to be at the airport by noon, so he said, “Gee, we’ll only be able to get in a couple hours on the lake today,” and I pretended to have frostbite by smearing chocolate on my ear. He was really happy to hear it, because that meant I’d really gotten a sense for how cold it could get in Bismarck. But then my wife said, “Jesus, Bill, that’s only chocolate on your ear,” and we had to go ice fishing until we almost missed our flight.
It is a dark and stormy night in Siberia. The wolves are howling deep in the mountains. In between flurries of snow, the city is alive with the scraping sound of wolf hunters sharpening their knives and arrowheads. The wind reaches through my furs, chilling the bones in my chest, but the wet grit of the sharpening stone is warm against my hands. Tonight, we ride. Around me, last minute preparations: rawhide straps on fur boots tightened until they squeak, horns slung over shoulders, the tinkling, shattering sound of hunters relieving themselves in the shadows. I have no name, no need of a name. I am the only vlabarian to have ever ridden against the wolves.
On the day I arrived in the city, women stared and children ran to touch my skin, to see if I was real. They tried to ask questions, but I had no time. “My business is with wolves tonight,” I told them, and they ran back to their mothers. That night, I dismounted in the snow and lay my bow and arrows on the ground. The hunters circled their horses around me, the breath-steam rising toward the cold Siberian stars. Tall in their saddles, they watched me draw my knife and bow my head in respect for the wolf who faced me, lips drawn back over teeth. He did not growl; he made no sound until I had slain him. As I cut out his liver to give to Vurl—king of the hunters—as if on the wind the faint howl of his spirit passed into me, honoring me for honoring him with death. I had killed my first wolf.
In Siberia, it’s always a dark and stormy night. The distant lightning glimmers in my eyes, eyes that have seen terrible pain, pain that would have killed a lesser man. The women cry when they see the pain in my eyes, but the pain turns to compassion as I comfort them, saying, “Do not cry for me.” I usually spend the darkening hours of twilight standing on top of the wall, looking out toward the mountains where the wolves took Virena, the woman I loved. She was beautiful, tender and pure and she loved me for the suffering my eyes showed. She was the daughter of Vurl and by the time she confessed her secret love to her father, he had already come to consider me a brother. We had killed wolves together and stood watching a wolf’s organ-blood decorate the snow as we held his liver high and ate it to honor him. We had shared all that two men could share, and he approved his daughter’s choice. In Siberia, the women choose their husbands and the men are grateful because all the Siberian women are beautiful and noble and spirited.
I stand on the wall, looking out over the snowy plains and the craggy mountain reaches where the wolves have their lairs. I spent months alone after they took her, searching every forest and cave and keep for the woman who had chosen to love me. When I found her bones, I wept without shame and gathered them in a wolf skin to take back to her father.
Sometimes I wish that my ex-wife had died instead of just leaving me. God, it feels good to say it out loud, because it makes me feel so guilty to wish that she were dead. What if she did die? How would I feel then? Maybe that by wishing for it I had somehow made it happen? She would be alive if it weren’t for me, and the whole thing ends with me wishing desperately for her not to die so that I won’t think that I killed her. But I do wish that she’d died sometimes, because there’s no shame in being a widower. Nobody knows if she loved you or not. In fact, being a widower is something you can be proud of—you stood by her to the end, when her breath came only in raggedy whispers and you felt your love in all your bones right until the moment she died and after, and you were grateful to feel such pain because it meant that you’d loved her in the way a man was supposed to love a woman.
But she didn’t die. And she didn’t cheat on me and I never caught her with some other guy or anything like that. She just left. Said she didn’t love me anymore and she knew she shouldn’t say this but maybe I should look at myself and think about why she didn’t love me and why nobody else ever would either. That’s what she did. And then she left and she wouldn’t even take alimony from me because she said I needed that money more than she did and she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took it. And then she put her hand on my shoulder and looked really intently into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Bill. I hope that things get better for you. I really do.”
On a dark and stormy Siberian night, I turn away from the mountains, my lost Virena just a dark place in my eyes. I slide down the ladder, the sidepieces hot against my bare hands and buskined feet. Tonight, I ride to the wolves, but not out of vengeance. It is the nature of wolves to kill; I do not blame them, and my wife’s spirit is at rest. I ride because it is my nature: I hunt the wolf.
Around me, the sharp, earthy scent of blades being sharpened. Vurl and I exchange nods: the hunters are nearly ready. On the plains outside the city walls, the first long, solemn wail pierces the snow. Wolves are on the prowl. Another cry, another, a great building chorus that sets the Adam’s apples bobbing in the throats of the younger hunters. I place my hand on the shoulder of one who will kill his first wolf tonight. “You have nothing to fear,” I say. Vurl turns to me, his forehead creased with worry, and says, “Why is it that after you finally tell your wife that she’s been emasculating you, you feel more emasculated and not less?”
This is not right. Vurl should not be asking me this question. This is where Vurl is supposed to say, “The wolves are hungry. Will you lead us tonight?”
But that’s not what Vurl said, and he’s waiting for an answer.
“Maybe…maybe it’s because by telling her that she’s emasculating you, you’re asking her to stop. If you really wanted to not be emasculated, you just wouldn’t let her.”
Vurl ponders this, his massive, weatherbeaten hand stroking his black beard. “So by telling her she is emasculating you, you merely acknowledge her power to do so?”
“Something like that,” I say, and he nods sharply now, once, as if he’s come to a conclusion he can live with.
“So that must be why she left you then,” he says, and I can’t argue with him about that.
I hate it when this happens during the dark and stormy night. Sometimes it’s Vurl, sometimes it’s a wolf I’ve just killed, and one terrible time it was my own horse whose head spun comically around to face me and his big horse lips moved but his teeth didn’t as he said, “Bill, I can tell by the way you ride me that you’ve been emasculated by your ex-wife.”
Sometimes though, I can get through the whole thing without my ex-wife coming up at all. I lead the hunters onto the plain, and more wolves range from the mountains than Vurl has ever seen. They have tasted human flesh and they are hungry for more. Arrows fly, horses plunge whinnying to the ground, and all around me there is the heat of battle melting the snow and the joyous, rough splendor of men fighting for their lives and for the women who love them. On the city walls, Virella—the second daughter of Vurl—watches and prepares to choose me to be her husband. “On me!” I cry, and the men gather and we face the wolves, knives drawn, ready for battle.
And on the good nights, not a single one of the wolves facing us looks like my ex-wife. On the good nights, I don’t even wish she could see me like this—bloody and terrible and unafraid—because I don’t care what she thinks. It’s as if she doesn’t even exist.
At night, the wolves leave their mountain lairs in search of caribou. The Siberian wolf hunters put caribou blankets on their horses and ride out onto the plains. Everyone else stands up on the city walls on moonlit nights to watch the hunt. There’s no sound more haunting or stirring to the Siberian soul than the clear call of the wolf hunter’s horn, which the women make out of caribou antlers.
I would tell you that Siberians make clothes out of living animals because they’re warmer, but that’s not really true. They do wear a lot of fur though—head to toe, including underwear. If you’re walking around Siberia and you stop to take a pee, the pee freezes before it hits the ground. If you had a slow motion camera and someone who was willing to tape you peeing, you’d see exactly how close to the ground the pee was when it froze and that’s how you’d tell how cold it was.
Siberia is much colder than Bismarck, North Dakota, which—unlike Siberia—I’ve actually been to. My brother-in-law lived there—my ex-wife’s brother—and we went for a week in January, which was a mistake. He took us ice fishing, and ice fishing—if you’ve never done it—is where you cut a round hole in the ice—which you’re standing on top of, by the way!—with this turny drill thing, and then you put a lure on a line and drop the line in the hole. Then you sit there until the hole starts to close up, and you cut a new hole and sit at that one. I didn’t like ice fishing very much. I didn’t like my brother-in-law very much either, to be honest. The second morning he said, “So who’s up for more ice fishing!” in this cheery tone that people get in their voices when they live in a really cold place and they want to show off just how cold it can be—as if that’s an accomplishment—and they aren’t happy unless you remark all day long about how cold it is. I said I didn’t want to go, I’d been ice fishing in much colder places where the holes froze up so quickly that you just laid the line on the ice and stared at it. My wife kicked me under the table and said we’d love to go and don’t listen to me because I have an over-active imagination. Which is not a reason to go ice fishing, by the way.
We spent seven days watching holes in the ice freeze up. On the morning of the eighth day, we had to be at the airport by noon, so he said, “Gee, we’ll only be able to get in a couple hours on the lake today,” and I pretended to have frostbit by smearing chocolate on my ear. He was really happy to hear it, because that meant I’d really gotten a sense for how cold it could get in Bismarck. But then my wife said, “Jesus, Bill, that’s only chocolate on your ear,” and we had to go ice fishing until it was time to catch our plane.
It is a dark and stormy night in Siberia. The wolves are howling in the mountains. In between flurries of rain, the city is alive with the scraping sounds of wolf hunters sharpening their knives and arrowheads. The wind reaches through my furs, chilling the bones in my chest, but the wet grit of the sharpening stone is warm against my hands. Tonight, we ride. Around me, last minute preparations: rawhide straps on fur boots tightened until they squeak, horns slung over shoulders, hunters relieving themselves in the shadows where it is warm. I have no name, and no need of one. I am the only vlabarian to have ever ridden to the wolves.
On the day I arrived in the city, women stared and children ran up to touch my skin, to see if I was real. They tried to ask me questions, but I had no time. “My business is with wolves tonight,” I told them, and they ran back to their mothers in the shadows. That night, I dismounted in the snow and lay my bow and arrows on the ground. The breath-steam from the horses rose in a ring toward the cold Siberian stars. The hunters sat tall in their saddles, looking toward the center of the circle where I drew my knife and bowed my head once in respect for the wolf who faced me, lips drawn back over his teeth. He did not growl; he didn’t make a sound until I had slain him. As I cut out his liver to give to Vurl—king of the hunters—there was a sound as if on the wind that only I could hear: the faint howl of his spirit passing into me, honoring me for honoring him with death. I had killed my first wolf.
Sometimes I wish that my wife had died instead of just leaving me. God, it feels good to say it out loud, because it makes me feel so guilty to wish that someone else was dead. What if she did die? How would I feel then? Maybe that by wishing it I had somehow made it happen? She would be alive if it wasn’t for me, and the whole thing ends up with me wishing desperately for her not to die, so that I won’t have killed her. But I do wish that she’d died sometimes, because there’s no shame in being a widower. In fact, it’s something that you can be proud of—you stood by her to the end, when her breath only came in rattly whispers and you felt your love for her in all your bones right until the very end and after, and you were grateful to feel such pain when she died because it meant that you’d loved her in the way a man was supposed to love a woman. But she didn’t die, and she didn’t cheat on me, and I never caught her with some other guy or anything like that. She just left, said she didn’t love me anymore and she knew she shouldn’t say this but maybe I should look at myself and think about why she didn’t love me and why nobody else ever would either. That’s what she did. And then she left and she wouldn’t even take alimony from me because she said that I needed that money more than she did and she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took it. And then she put her hand on my shoulder and looked really intently into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Bill. I hope that things get better for you. I really do.”
On a dark and stormy Siberian night, I turn away from the mountains, my lost wife now only a dark place in my eyes. I slide down the ladder, the sidepieces hot against my bare hands and buskined feet. Tonight, I ride to the wolves, but not out of vengeance. It is the nature of wolves to kill: I do not blame them, and my wife’s spirit is at rest. I ride because that is my nature: I hunt the wolf.
Around me, the sharp, earthy scent of blades being sharpened. Vurl and I exchange nods: the hunters are nearly ready. On the plains outside the city walls, the first long, solemn wail interrupts the rain. Wolves are on the prowl. Another cry, another, a great building chorus that sets the Adam’s apples bobbing in the throats of the younger hunters. I place my hand on the shoulder of one of them. “You have nothing to fear,” I say. Vurl turns to me, his forehead creased with worry and says, “Why is it that after you finally tell your wife that she’s emasculating you, you feel more emasculated and not less?”
This is not right. Vurl should not be asking me this question. This is where Vurl is supposed to say, “The wolves are hungry. Will you lead us tonight?”
But that’s not what Vurl said, and he’s waiting for an answer. “Maybe…maybe it’s because by saying that she’s emasculating you, you’re asking her to stop. If you really wanted to not be emasculated, you just wouldn’t let her.”
Vurl ponders this, his weatherbeaten, massive hand stroking his black beard. “So by telling her that she is emasculating you, you merely acknowledge her power to do so?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I say, and he nods sharply now, once, as if he’s come to a conclusion he can live with.
“So that must be why she left you then,” he says, and I can’t argue with him about that.
I hate when this happens during the dark and stormy night. Sometimes it’s Vurl, sometimes it’s a wolf I’ve just killed, and one terrible time it was my own horse whose head spun comically around to face me and his big horse lips moved but his teeth didn’t as he said, “Bill, I can tell by the way that you ride me that you’ve been emasculated by your ex-wife.”
Sometimes though, I can get through the whole thing without my ex-wife coming up at all. I lead the hunters out onto the plain, and more wolves range from the mountains than Vurl has ever seen. They have tasted human flesh, and they are hungry for more. Arrows fly, horses plunge whinnying to the ground, and all around me there is the heat of battle and the joyous, rough splendor of men fighting for their lives and for the women who love them. “On me!” I cry, and the men gather and we face the wolves, our knives drawn, ready for battle. And on the good nights, not a single one of the wolves facing us looks like my ex-wife. On the good nights, I don’t even wish she could see me like this—bloody and terrible and unafraid—because I don’t care what she thinks. It’s as if she doesn’t even exist.
First of all, I know nothing of Siberia. It’s somewhere in the north part of Russia, and maybe China, I know that much, and it’s awfully cold there. In my imagination, if you’re walking around Siberia and you stop to take a pee, the pee freezes before it hits the ground and if you had one of those slow-motion cameras and someone who was willing to tape you peeing, you’d see exactly how close to the ground the pee was when it started to freeze and that’s how you’d tell how cold it was.
People wear animals there. I’d like to think that they make clothes out of living animals because they’re warmer, but I don’t think that’s very realistic. They use furs to make hats and coats and socks and earmuffs and underwear and britches and neckties. At night, the Siberian wolves come down out of the mountains in search of elk and caribou, and the Siberian wolf hunters put fur blankets on their horses and ride out from the city. People stand up on top of the city walls—for keeping out wolves and invaders—on moonlit nights so they can watch the hunt. There’s no sound more haunting or stirring to the Siberian soul than the clear call of the wolf hunter’s horn, which the women make out of elk antlers. I know there are places in Siberia where labor camps used to be. The Russians put them there back when they were communists, but they’re not communists anymore so they decided to scrap the whole idea. We had labor camps in this country too, but we put them in hot places like Arizona and California instead of cold places like Bismarck, North Dakota, which—unlike Siberia—I have actually been to. My brother-in-law lived there—my ex-wife’s brother—and we went there for a week in January, which was a mistake. He wanted to take us ice fishing, and ice fishing—if you’ve never done it—is where you cut a round hole in the ice—which you’re standing on top of, by the way!—with this turny drill thing, and then you put a lure on a line and drop the line in the hole. Then you sit there until the hole starts to close up, and you cut out a new hole, and sit at that one. I didn’t like ice fishing very much. I didn’t like my brother-in-law much either, to be honest, but hey, that’s married life. The second morning when he said “So who’s up for more ice fishing!” in this really cheery tone that people get in their voices when they live in a really cold place and they want to show off just how cold it can be—as if that’s an accomplishment—and they aren’t happy unless you remark all day long about how cold it is. I said I didn’t want to go, that I’d been ice fishing in much colder places where the holes froze up so quickly that you just laid your line on the ice and stared at it. My wife kicked me under the table and said that we’d love to go and don’t listen to me because I have a really active imagination. Which is not a reason why I should go ice fishing, by the way. We spent all seven days on the lake, and on the morning of the eighth day, we had to be at the airport by noon, so he said, “Gee, we’ll only be able to get in a couple hours on the lake today” and I pretended to have frostbite by smearing chocolate on my earlobe. He was really happy to hear it, because that meant I’d really gotten a sense for how cold it could get in Bismarck, but my wife said, “Jesus, Bill, that’s only chocolate on your ear,” and we had to go ice fishing again until it was time to catch our plane.
It is a dark and stormy night in Siberia. The wolves are howling in the hills, and in between flurries of rain, the city is alive with the scraping sounds of wolf hunters sharpening their knives and arrowheads. The wind reaches into my furs, chilling the bones in my chest, but the wet grit of the sharpening stone is warm against my hands. Tonight, I ride with the wolf hunters. Around me, the last minute preparations: rawhide straps on fur boots are tightened until they squeak, horns are slung over shoulders, and hunters relieve themselves in the shadows where it is warm. No vlabarian ever rode with the hunters before I came. On the day I arrived in the city, women stared and children ran up to me just to touch my skin, to see if I was real. The children tried to ask me questions, but I had no time. “My business is with wolves tonight,” I told them, and they ran back to their mothers. That night, I dismounted in the snow, and lay my bow and arrows on the ground. The breath-steam from the horses around me rose toward the cold Siberian stars, and the hunters sat tall in their saddles, looking toward the center of their circle where I drew my knife and bowed my head once in respect for the wolf who faced me, his lips curled back over his teeth. He did not growl; he didn’t make a sound until I had slain him. As I cut out his liver to give to Vurl—the leader of the hunters—there was a sound that only I could hear: the faint howl of his spirit passing into me, honoring me for honoring him with death. I had killed my first wolf.
As you might expect, things get a little hazy for a while after that. I skip over big chunks of the boring stuff: how I bought my first house in the city, what it’s like to try to insulate a place with wolf parts, how refreshing that first cup of caribou tea is in the morning… I like to jump right to the dramatic parts, and that dark and stormy Siberian night is my favorite. I always skip over the story of how I got to Siberia, where I came from, what my life had been like before. It’s much better for it to be a mystery, to have ridden into the city from God knows where, and only the distant, fractured look that sometimes came into my eyes let people know that I had seen some terrible pain in my life, pain that would have killed lesser men. The women sometimes cried when they saw that look, and then my eyes glinted with compassion as I comforted them and told them “Do not cry for me.”
So anyway, in Siberia it is a dark, stormy night. I have spent the darkening hours of twilight standing on the top of the wall, looking out toward the mountains where the wolves took the woman I loved. She was beautiful, tender and pure and she loved me for the suffering she could see in my eyes. She was the daughter of Vurl—king of the hunters—and by the time she confessed her secret love to her father, he had already come to consider me a brother. We had killed wolves together and stood together watching a wolf’s organ-blood decorate the snow as we held his liver high and ate it to honor him. We had shared all that men could share, and he approved of his daughter’s choice. (In Siberia, women choose their husbands and the men are grateful for the love the women give them, because all the Siberian women are beautiful and noble and spirited.) I stood on the wall, looking out over the snowy plains and the craggy reaches of the mountains where the wolves had their lairs. I’d spent months alone after they took her, searching every forest and cave and hillside for the woman who had been too alive to ever die. When I found her bones, I wept without shame, gathered them up in a wolfskin and took them back to her father.
Sometimes I wish that my wife had died instead of just leaving me. God, it feels good to say it out loud, because it makes me feel so guilty to wish that someone else was dead. What if she did die? How would I feel then? Maybe that by wishing it I had somehow made it happen? She would be alive if it wasn’t for me, and the whole thing ends up with me wishing desperately for her not to die, so that I won’t have killed her. But I do wish that she’d died sometimes, because there’s no shame in being a widower. In fact, it’s something that you can be proud of—you stood by her to the end, when her breath only came in rattly whispers and you felt your love for her in all your bones right until the very end and after, and you were grateful to feel such pain when she died because it meant that you’d loved her in the way a man was supposed to love a woman. But she didn’t die, and she didn’t cheat on me, and I never caught her with some other guy or anything like that. She just left, said she didn’t love me anymore and she knew she shouldn’t say this but maybe I should look at myself and think about why she didn’t love me and why nobody else ever would either. That’s what she did. And then she left and she wouldn’t even take alimony from me because she said that I needed that money more than she did and she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took it. And then she put her hand on my shoulder and looked really intently into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Bill. I hope that things get better for you. I really do.”
On a dark and stormy Siberian night, I turn away from the mountains, my lost wife now only a dark place in my eyes. I slide down the ladder, the sidepieces hot against my bare hands and buskined feet. Tonight, I ride to the wolves, but not out of vengeance. It is the nature of wolves to kill: I do not blame them, and my wife’s spirit is at rest. I ride because that is my nature: I hunt the wolf.
Around me, the sharp, earthy scent of blades being sharpened. Vurl and I exchange nods: the hunters are nearly ready. On the plains outside the city walls, the first long, solemn wail interrupts the rain. Wolves are on the prowl. Another cry, another, a great building chorus that sets the Adam’s apples bobbing in the throats of the younger hunters. I place my hand on the shoulder of one of them. “You have nothing to fear,” I say. Vurl turns to me, his forehead creased with worry and says, “Why is it that after you finally tell your wife that she’s emasculating you, you feel more emasculated and not less?”
This is not right. Vurl should not be asking me this question. This is where Vurl is supposed to say, “The wolves are hungry. Will you lead us tonight?”
But that’s not what Vurl said, and he’s waiting for an answer. “Maybe…maybe it’s because by saying that she’s emasculating you, you’re asking her to stop. If you really wanted to not be emasculated, you just wouldn’t let her.”
Vurl ponders this, his weatherbeaten, massive hand stroking his black beard. “So by telling her that she is emasculating you, you merely acknowledge her power to do so?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I say, and he nods sharply now, once, as if he’s come to a conclusion he can live with.
“So that must be why she left you then,” he says, and I can’t argue with him about that.
I hate when this happens during the dark and stormy night. Sometimes it’s Vurl, sometimes it’s a wolf I’ve just killed, and one terrible time it was my own horse whose head spun comically around to face me and his big horse lips moved but his teeth didn’t as he said, “Bill, I can tell by the way that you ride me that you’ve been emasculated by your ex-wife.”
Sometimes though, I can get through the whole thing without my ex-wife coming up at all. I lead the hunters out onto the plain, and more wolves range from the mountains than Vurl has ever seen. They have tasted human flesh, and they are hungry for more. Arrows fly, horses plunge whinnying to the ground, and all around me there is the heat of battle and the joyous, rough splendor of men fighting for their lives and for the women who love them. “On me!” I cry, and the men gather and we face the wolves, our knives drawn, ready for battle. And on the good nights, not a single one of the wolves facing us looks like my ex-wife. On the good nights, I don’t even wish she could see me like this—bloody and terrible and unafraid—because I don’t care what she thinks. It’s as if she doesn’t even exist.
It’s so cold in Siberia that the Siberians wear fur head to toe, including underwear, socks, and hats. If you were to pee outside in Siberia, the pee would freeze before it hit the ground. If you had a slow-motion camera and someone who was willing to tape you peeing, you’d see exactly how close to the ground the pee was when it froze and that’s how you’d know how cold it was.
Siberia is much colder than Bismarck, North Dakota. My brother-in-law lives there—my ex-wife’s brother—and we went once for a week in January, which was a mistake. He took us ice fishing, and ice fishing—if you’ve never done it—is where you cut a round hole in the ice—which you’re standing on top of, by the way!—with this turny, drill thing and then you put a lure on a line and drop the line in the hole. Then you sit there until the hole starts to close up and you cut a new hole and sit at that one. I didn’t like ice fishing very much. I didn’t like my brother-in-law very much either, to be honest. The second morning he said, “So, who’s up for more ice fishing!” in this cheery tone people get in their voices when they live in a really cold place and they want to show off just how cold it can be—as if that’s an accomplishment—and they aren’t happy unless you talk all day long about how cold it is. I said I didn’t want to go, that I’d been ice fishing in much colder places where the holes froze up so quickly that you just laid the line on the ice and stared at it. My wife—ex-wife—kicked me under the table and said we’d love to go and don’t listen to me because I have an over-active imagination. Which is not a reason I should go ice fishing.
We spent seven days watching holes in the ice freeze up. On the eighth morning, we had to be at the airport by noon, so he said, “Gee, we’ll only be able to get in a couple hours on the lake today,” and I pretended to have frostbite by smearing chocolate on my ear. He was really happy to hear it, because that meant I’d really gotten a sense for how cold it could get in Bismarck. But then my wife said, “Jesus, Bill, that’s only chocolate on your ear,” and we had to go ice fishing until we almost missed our flight.
It is a dark and stormy night in Siberia. The wolves are howling deep in the mountains. In between flurries of snow, the city is alive with the scraping sound of wolf hunters sharpening their knives and arrowheads. The wind reaches through my furs, chilling the bones in my chest, but the wet grit of the sharpening stone is warm against my hands. Tonight, we ride. Around me, last minute preparations: rawhide straps on fur boots tightened until they squeak, horns slung over shoulders, the tinkling, shattering sound of hunters relieving themselves in the shadows. I have no name, no need of a name. I am the only vlabarian to have ever ridden against the wolves.
On the day I arrived in the city, women stared and children ran to touch my skin, to see if I was real. They tried to ask questions, but I had no time. “My business is with wolves tonight,” I told them, and they ran back to their mothers. That night, I dismounted in the snow and lay my bow and arrows on the ground. The hunters circled their horses around me, the breath-steam rising toward the cold Siberian stars. Tall in their saddles, they watched me draw my knife and bow my head in respect for the wolf who faced me, lips drawn back over teeth. He did not growl; he made no sound until I had slain him. As I cut out his liver to give to Vurl—king of the hunters—as if on the wind the faint howl of his spirit passed into me, honoring me for honoring him with death. I had killed my first wolf.
In Siberia, it’s always a dark and stormy night. The distant lightning glimmers in my eyes, eyes that have seen terrible pain, pain that would have killed a lesser man. The women cry when they see the pain in my eyes, but the pain turns to compassion as I comfort them, saying, “Do not cry for me.” I usually spend the darkening hours of twilight standing on top of the wall, looking out toward the mountains where the wolves took Virena, the woman I loved. She was beautiful, tender and pure and she loved me for the suffering my eyes showed. She was the daughter of Vurl and by the time she confessed her secret love to her father, he had already come to consider me a brother. We had killed wolves together and stood watching a wolf’s organ-blood decorate the snow as we held his liver high and ate it to honor him. We had shared all that two men could share, and he approved his daughter’s choice. In Siberia, the women choose their husbands and the men are grateful because all the Siberian women are beautiful and noble and spirited.
I stand on the wall, looking out over the snowy plains and the craggy mountain reaches where the wolves have their lairs. I spent months alone after they took her, searching every forest and cave and keep for the woman who had chosen to love me. When I found her bones, I wept without shame and gathered them in a wolf skin to take back to her father.
Sometimes I wish that my ex-wife had died instead of just leaving me. God, it feels good to say it out loud, because it makes me feel so guilty to wish that she were dead. What if she did die? How would I feel then? Maybe that by wishing for it I had somehow made it happen? She would be alive if it weren’t for me, and the whole thing ends with me wishing desperately for her not to die so that I won’t think that I killed her. But I do wish that she’d died sometimes, because there’s no shame in being a widower. Nobody knows if she loved you or not. In fact, being a widower is something you can be proud of—you stood by her to the end, when her breath came only in raggedy whispers and you felt your love in all your bones right until the moment she died and after, and you were grateful to feel such pain because it meant that you’d loved her in the way a man was supposed to love a woman.
But she didn’t die. And she didn’t cheat on me and I never caught her with some other guy or anything like that. She just left. Said she didn’t love me anymore and she knew she shouldn’t say this but maybe I should look at myself and think about why she didn’t love me and why nobody else ever would either. That’s what she did. And then she left and she wouldn’t even take alimony from me because she said I needed that money more than she did and she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took it. And then she put her hand on my shoulder and looked really intently into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Bill. I hope that things get better for you. I really do.”
On a dark and stormy Siberian night, I turn away from the mountains, my lost Virena just a dark place in my eyes. I slide down the ladder, the sidepieces hot against my bare hands and buskined feet. Tonight, I ride to the wolves, but not out of vengeance. It is the nature of wolves to kill; I do not blame them, and my wife’s spirit is at rest. I ride because it is my nature: I hunt the wolf.
Around me, the sharp, earthy scent of blades being sharpened. Vurl and I exchange nods: the hunters are nearly ready. On the plains outside the city walls, the first long, solemn wail pierces the snow. Wolves are on the prowl. Another cry, another, a great building chorus that sets the Adam’s apples bobbing in the throats of the younger hunters. I place my hand on the shoulder of one who will kill his first wolf tonight. “You have nothing to fear,” I say. Vurl turns to me, his forehead creased with worry, and says, “Why is it that after you finally tell your wife that she’s been emasculating you, you feel more emasculated and not less?”
This is not right. Vurl should not be asking me this question. This is where Vurl is supposed to say, “The wolves are hungry. Will you lead us tonight?”
But that’s not what Vurl said, and he’s waiting for an answer.
“Maybe…maybe it’s because by telling her that she’s emasculating you, you’re asking her to stop. If you really wanted to not be emasculated, you just wouldn’t let her.”
Vurl ponders this, his massive, weatherbeaten hand stroking his black beard. “So by telling her she is emasculating you, you merely acknowledge her power to do so?”
“Something like that,” I say, and he nods sharply now, once, as if he’s come to a conclusion he can live with.
“So that must be why she left you then,” he says, and I can’t argue with him about that.
I hate it when this happens during the dark and stormy night. Sometimes it’s Vurl, sometimes it’s a wolf I’ve just killed, and one terrible time it was my own horse whose head spun comically around to face me and his big horse lips moved but his teeth didn’t as he said, “Bill, I can tell by the way you ride me that you’ve been emasculated by your ex-wife.”
Sometimes though, I can get through the whole thing without my ex-wife coming up at all. I lead the hunters onto the plain, and more wolves range from the mountains than Vurl has ever seen. They have tasted human flesh and they are hungry for more. Arrows fly, horses plunge whinnying to the ground, and all around me there is the heat of battle melting the snow and the joyous, rough splendor of men fighting for their lives and for the women who love them. On the city walls, Virella—the second daughter of Vurl—watches and prepares to choose me to be her husband. “On me!” I cry, and the men gather and we face the wolves, knives drawn, ready for battle.
And on the good nights, not a single one of the wolves facing us looks like my ex-wife. On the good nights, I don’t even wish she could see me like this—bloody and terrible and unafraid—because I don’t care what she thinks. It’s as if she doesn’t even exist.
At night, the wolves leave their mountain lairs in search of caribou. The Siberian wolf hunters put caribou blankets on their horses and ride out onto the plains. Everyone else stands up on the city walls on moonlit nights to watch the hunt. There’s no sound more haunting or stirring to the Siberian soul than the clear call of the wolf hunter’s horn, which the women make out of caribou antlers.
I would tell you that Siberians make clothes out of living animals because they’re warmer, but that’s not really true. They do wear a lot of fur though—head to toe, including underwear. If you’re walking around Siberia and you stop to take a pee, the pee freezes before it hits the ground. If you had a slow motion camera and someone who was willing to tape you peeing, you’d see exactly how close to the ground the pee was when it froze and that’s how you’d tell how cold it was.
Siberia is much colder than Bismarck, North Dakota, which—unlike Siberia—I’ve actually been to. My brother-in-law lived there—my ex-wife’s brother—and we went for a week in January, which was a mistake. He took us ice fishing, and ice fishing—if you’ve never done it—is where you cut a round hole in the ice—which you’re standing on top of, by the way!—with this turny drill thing, and then you put a lure on a line and drop the line in the hole. Then you sit there until the hole starts to close up, and you cut a new hole and sit at that one. I didn’t like ice fishing very much. I didn’t like my brother-in-law very much either, to be honest. The second morning he said, “So who’s up for more ice fishing!” in this cheery tone that people get in their voices when they live in a really cold place and they want to show off just how cold it can be—as if that’s an accomplishment—and they aren’t happy unless you remark all day long about how cold it is. I said I didn’t want to go, I’d been ice fishing in much colder places where the holes froze up so quickly that you just laid the line on the ice and stared at it. My wife kicked me under the table and said we’d love to go and don’t listen to me because I have an over-active imagination. Which is not a reason to go ice fishing, by the way.
We spent seven days watching holes in the ice freeze up. On the morning of the eighth day, we had to be at the airport by noon, so he said, “Gee, we’ll only be able to get in a couple hours on the lake today,” and I pretended to have frostbit by smearing chocolate on my ear. He was really happy to hear it, because that meant I’d really gotten a sense for how cold it could get in Bismarck. But then my wife said, “Jesus, Bill, that’s only chocolate on your ear,” and we had to go ice fishing until it was time to catch our plane.
It is a dark and stormy night in Siberia. The wolves are howling in the mountains. In between flurries of rain, the city is alive with the scraping sounds of wolf hunters sharpening their knives and arrowheads. The wind reaches through my furs, chilling the bones in my chest, but the wet grit of the sharpening stone is warm against my hands. Tonight, we ride. Around me, last minute preparations: rawhide straps on fur boots tightened until they squeak, horns slung over shoulders, hunters relieving themselves in the shadows where it is warm. I have no name, and no need of one. I am the only vlabarian to have ever ridden to the wolves.
On the day I arrived in the city, women stared and children ran up to touch my skin, to see if I was real. They tried to ask me questions, but I had no time. “My business is with wolves tonight,” I told them, and they ran back to their mothers in the shadows. That night, I dismounted in the snow and lay my bow and arrows on the ground. The breath-steam from the horses rose in a ring toward the cold Siberian stars. The hunters sat tall in their saddles, looking toward the center of the circle where I drew my knife and bowed my head once in respect for the wolf who faced me, lips drawn back over his teeth. He did not growl; he didn’t make a sound until I had slain him. As I cut out his liver to give to Vurl—king of the hunters—there was a sound as if on the wind that only I could hear: the faint howl of his spirit passing into me, honoring me for honoring him with death. I had killed my first wolf.
Sometimes I wish that my wife had died instead of just leaving me. God, it feels good to say it out loud, because it makes me feel so guilty to wish that someone else was dead. What if she did die? How would I feel then? Maybe that by wishing it I had somehow made it happen? She would be alive if it wasn’t for me, and the whole thing ends up with me wishing desperately for her not to die, so that I won’t have killed her. But I do wish that she’d died sometimes, because there’s no shame in being a widower. In fact, it’s something that you can be proud of—you stood by her to the end, when her breath only came in rattly whispers and you felt your love for her in all your bones right until the very end and after, and you were grateful to feel such pain when she died because it meant that you’d loved her in the way a man was supposed to love a woman. But she didn’t die, and she didn’t cheat on me, and I never caught her with some other guy or anything like that. She just left, said she didn’t love me anymore and she knew she shouldn’t say this but maybe I should look at myself and think about why she didn’t love me and why nobody else ever would either. That’s what she did. And then she left and she wouldn’t even take alimony from me because she said that I needed that money more than she did and she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took it. And then she put her hand on my shoulder and looked really intently into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Bill. I hope that things get better for you. I really do.”
On a dark and stormy Siberian night, I turn away from the mountains, my lost wife now only a dark place in my eyes. I slide down the ladder, the sidepieces hot against my bare hands and buskined feet. Tonight, I ride to the wolves, but not out of vengeance. It is the nature of wolves to kill: I do not blame them, and my wife’s spirit is at rest. I ride because that is my nature: I hunt the wolf.
Around me, the sharp, earthy scent of blades being sharpened. Vurl and I exchange nods: the hunters are nearly ready. On the plains outside the city walls, the first long, solemn wail interrupts the rain. Wolves are on the prowl. Another cry, another, a great building chorus that sets the Adam’s apples bobbing in the throats of the younger hunters. I place my hand on the shoulder of one of them. “You have nothing to fear,” I say. Vurl turns to me, his forehead creased with worry and says, “Why is it that after you finally tell your wife that she’s emasculating you, you feel more emasculated and not less?”
This is not right. Vurl should not be asking me this question. This is where Vurl is supposed to say, “The wolves are hungry. Will you lead us tonight?”
But that’s not what Vurl said, and he’s waiting for an answer. “Maybe…maybe it’s because by saying that she’s emasculating you, you’re asking her to stop. If you really wanted to not be emasculated, you just wouldn’t let her.”
Vurl ponders this, his weatherbeaten, massive hand stroking his black beard. “So by telling her that she is emasculating you, you merely acknowledge her power to do so?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I say, and he nods sharply now, once, as if he’s come to a conclusion he can live with.
“So that must be why she left you then,” he says, and I can’t argue with him about that.
I hate when this happens during the dark and stormy night. Sometimes it’s Vurl, sometimes it’s a wolf I’ve just killed, and one terrible time it was my own horse whose head spun comically around to face me and his big horse lips moved but his teeth didn’t as he said, “Bill, I can tell by the way that you ride me that you’ve been emasculated by your ex-wife.”
Sometimes though, I can get through the whole thing without my ex-wife coming up at all. I lead the hunters out onto the plain, and more wolves range from the mountains than Vurl has ever seen. They have tasted human flesh, and they are hungry for more. Arrows fly, horses plunge whinnying to the ground, and all around me there is the heat of battle and the joyous, rough splendor of men fighting for their lives and for the women who love them. “On me!” I cry, and the men gather and we face the wolves, our knives drawn, ready for battle. And on the good nights, not a single one of the wolves facing us looks like my ex-wife. On the good nights, I don’t even wish she could see me like this—bloody and terrible and unafraid—because I don’t care what she thinks. It’s as if she doesn’t even exist.
First of all, I know nothing of Siberia. It’s somewhere in the north part of Russia, and maybe China, I know that much, and it’s awfully cold there. In my imagination, if you’re walking around Siberia and you stop to take a pee, the pee freezes before it hits the ground and if you had one of those slow-motion cameras and someone who was willing to tape you peeing, you’d see exactly how close to the ground the pee was when it started to freeze and that’s how you’d tell how cold it was.
People wear animals there. I’d like to think that they make clothes out of living animals because they’re warmer, but I don’t think that’s very realistic. They use furs to make hats and coats and socks and earmuffs and underwear and britches and neckties. At night, the Siberian wolves come down out of the mountains in search of elk and caribou, and the Siberian wolf hunters put fur blankets on their horses and ride out from the city. People stand up on top of the city walls—for keeping out wolves and invaders—on moonlit nights so they can watch the hunt. There’s no sound more haunting or stirring to the Siberian soul than the clear call of the wolf hunter’s horn, which the women make out of elk antlers. I know there are places in Siberia where labor camps used to be. The Russians put them there back when they were communists, but they’re not communists anymore so they decided to scrap the whole idea. We had labor camps in this country too, but we put them in hot places like Arizona and California instead of cold places like Bismarck, North Dakota, which—unlike Siberia—I have actually been to. My brother-in-law lived there—my ex-wife’s brother—and we went there for a week in January, which was a mistake. He wanted to take us ice fishing, and ice fishing—if you’ve never done it—is where you cut a round hole in the ice—which you’re standing on top of, by the way!—with this turny drill thing, and then you put a lure on a line and drop the line in the hole. Then you sit there until the hole starts to close up, and you cut out a new hole, and sit at that one. I didn’t like ice fishing very much. I didn’t like my brother-in-law much either, to be honest, but hey, that’s married life. The second morning when he said “So who’s up for more ice fishing!” in this really cheery tone that people get in their voices when they live in a really cold place and they want to show off just how cold it can be—as if that’s an accomplishment—and they aren’t happy unless you remark all day long about how cold it is. I said I didn’t want to go, that I’d been ice fishing in much colder places where the holes froze up so quickly that you just laid your line on the ice and stared at it. My wife kicked me under the table and said that we’d love to go and don’t listen to me because I have a really active imagination. Which is not a reason why I should go ice fishing, by the way. We spent all seven days on the lake, and on the morning of the eighth day, we had to be at the airport by noon, so he said, “Gee, we’ll only be able to get in a couple hours on the lake today” and I pretended to have frostbite by smearing chocolate on my earlobe. He was really happy to hear it, because that meant I’d really gotten a sense for how cold it could get in Bismarck, but my wife said, “Jesus, Bill, that’s only chocolate on your ear,” and we had to go ice fishing again until it was time to catch our plane.
It is a dark and stormy night in Siberia. The wolves are howling in the hills, and in between flurries of rain, the city is alive with the scraping sounds of wolf hunters sharpening their knives and arrowheads. The wind reaches into my furs, chilling the bones in my chest, but the wet grit of the sharpening stone is warm against my hands. Tonight, I ride with the wolf hunters. Around me, the last minute preparations: rawhide straps on fur boots are tightened until they squeak, horns are slung over shoulders, and hunters relieve themselves in the shadows where it is warm. No vlabarian ever rode with the hunters before I came. On the day I arrived in the city, women stared and children ran up to me just to touch my skin, to see if I was real. The children tried to ask me questions, but I had no time. “My business is with wolves tonight,” I told them, and they ran back to their mothers. That night, I dismounted in the snow, and lay my bow and arrows on the ground. The breath-steam from the horses around me rose toward the cold Siberian stars, and the hunters sat tall in their saddles, looking toward the center of their circle where I drew my knife and bowed my head once in respect for the wolf who faced me, his lips curled back over his teeth. He did not growl; he didn’t make a sound until I had slain him. As I cut out his liver to give to Vurl—the leader of the hunters—there was a sound that only I could hear: the faint howl of his spirit passing into me, honoring me for honoring him with death. I had killed my first wolf.
As you might expect, things get a little hazy for a while after that. I skip over big chunks of the boring stuff: how I bought my first house in the city, what it’s like to try to insulate a place with wolf parts, how refreshing that first cup of caribou tea is in the morning… I like to jump right to the dramatic parts, and that dark and stormy Siberian night is my favorite. I always skip over the story of how I got to Siberia, where I came from, what my life had been like before. It’s much better for it to be a mystery, to have ridden into the city from God knows where, and only the distant, fractured look that sometimes came into my eyes let people know that I had seen some terrible pain in my life, pain that would have killed lesser men. The women sometimes cried when they saw that look, and then my eyes glinted with compassion as I comforted them and told them “Do not cry for me.”
So anyway, in Siberia it is a dark, stormy night. I have spent the darkening hours of twilight standing on the top of the wall, looking out toward the mountains where the wolves took the woman I loved. She was beautiful, tender and pure and she loved me for the suffering she could see in my eyes. She was the daughter of Vurl—king of the hunters—and by the time she confessed her secret love to her father, he had already come to consider me a brother. We had killed wolves together and stood together watching a wolf’s organ-blood decorate the snow as we held his liver high and ate it to honor him. We had shared all that men could share, and he approved of his daughter’s choice. (In Siberia, women choose their husbands and the men are grateful for the love the women give them, because all the Siberian women are beautiful and noble and spirited.) I stood on the wall, looking out over the snowy plains and the craggy reaches of the mountains where the wolves had their lairs. I’d spent months alone after they took her, searching every forest and cave and hillside for the woman who had been too alive to ever die. When I found her bones, I wept without shame, gathered them up in a wolfskin and took them back to her father.
Sometimes I wish that my wife had died instead of just leaving me. God, it feels good to say it out loud, because it makes me feel so guilty to wish that someone else was dead. What if she did die? How would I feel then? Maybe that by wishing it I had somehow made it happen? She would be alive if it wasn’t for me, and the whole thing ends up with me wishing desperately for her not to die, so that I won’t have killed her. But I do wish that she’d died sometimes, because there’s no shame in being a widower. In fact, it’s something that you can be proud of—you stood by her to the end, when her breath only came in rattly whispers and you felt your love for her in all your bones right until the very end and after, and you were grateful to feel such pain when she died because it meant that you’d loved her in the way a man was supposed to love a woman. But she didn’t die, and she didn’t cheat on me, and I never caught her with some other guy or anything like that. She just left, said she didn’t love me anymore and she knew she shouldn’t say this but maybe I should look at myself and think about why she didn’t love me and why nobody else ever would either. That’s what she did. And then she left and she wouldn’t even take alimony from me because she said that I needed that money more than she did and she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she took it. And then she put her hand on my shoulder and looked really intently into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Bill. I hope that things get better for you. I really do.”
On a dark and stormy Siberian night, I turn away from the mountains, my lost wife now only a dark place in my eyes. I slide down the ladder, the sidepieces hot against my bare hands and buskined feet. Tonight, I ride to the wolves, but not out of vengeance. It is the nature of wolves to kill: I do not blame them, and my wife’s spirit is at rest. I ride because that is my nature: I hunt the wolf.
Around me, the sharp, earthy scent of blades being sharpened. Vurl and I exchange nods: the hunters are nearly ready. On the plains outside the city walls, the first long, solemn wail interrupts the rain. Wolves are on the prowl. Another cry, another, a great building chorus that sets the Adam’s apples bobbing in the throats of the younger hunters. I place my hand on the shoulder of one of them. “You have nothing to fear,” I say. Vurl turns to me, his forehead creased with worry and says, “Why is it that after you finally tell your wife that she’s emasculating you, you feel more emasculated and not less?”
This is not right. Vurl should not be asking me this question. This is where Vurl is supposed to say, “The wolves are hungry. Will you lead us tonight?”
But that’s not what Vurl said, and he’s waiting for an answer. “Maybe…maybe it’s because by saying that she’s emasculating you, you’re asking her to stop. If you really wanted to not be emasculated, you just wouldn’t let her.”
Vurl ponders this, his weatherbeaten, massive hand stroking his black beard. “So by telling her that she is emasculating you, you merely acknowledge her power to do so?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I say, and he nods sharply now, once, as if he’s come to a conclusion he can live with.
“So that must be why she left you then,” he says, and I can’t argue with him about that.
I hate when this happens during the dark and stormy night. Sometimes it’s Vurl, sometimes it’s a wolf I’ve just killed, and one terrible time it was my own horse whose head spun comically around to face me and his big horse lips moved but his teeth didn’t as he said, “Bill, I can tell by the way that you ride me that you’ve been emasculated by your ex-wife.”
Sometimes though, I can get through the whole thing without my ex-wife coming up at all. I lead the hunters out onto the plain, and more wolves range from the mountains than Vurl has ever seen. They have tasted human flesh, and they are hungry for more. Arrows fly, horses plunge whinnying to the ground, and all around me there is the heat of battle and the joyous, rough splendor of men fighting for their lives and for the women who love them. “On me!” I cry, and the men gather and we face the wolves, our knives drawn, ready for battle. And on the good nights, not a single one of the wolves facing us looks like my ex-wife. On the good nights, I don’t even wish she could see me like this—bloody and terrible and unafraid—because I don’t care what she thinks. It’s as if she doesn’t even exist.