“You think he’s eaten our horses?” We’d heard nothing from them since we’d staked them perhaps a mile away and left them to graze—but that was not surprising, considering how close we were to the waterfall and the distance between us.
“No idea,” I replied. There was nothing to do but wait and wonder if we’d perish from blood loss or from jaws at our throat.
Our answers came at dawn. When the sun outshone the pale glow of the moon, the wolf writhed and howled on the ground, suddenly overcome by a series of snapping bones and popping tendons and shifting, sliding skin. During this grisly metamorphosis, he could not pursue us, and Rannveig thought it a good opportunity to flee. She gathered her clothes, rose to her feet, and said, “Come on, I’m well enough to run,” and I saw that her calves had healed very well in the hours before dawn. I looked down and realized my hamstrings were likewise remarkably restored, and this, coupled with the evidence of the transformation in front of me, explained the wolf’s odd behavior.
“He’s a werewolf!” I cried. “And he bit us during a full moon!” The stories of werewolves today vary greatly in their details, but at that time it was clear that they could add to their numbers only by biting someone during a full moon. The evidence pointed to a horrifying conclusion, but Rannveig had yet to realize it.
“Come on, Gunnar! Let’s go now!” Rannveig said, already yards away.
“No, look, do you not see? He is a man!” I pointed at the twitching form on the ground, now clearly recognizable as human. He was a bit shorter than me but thicker and more muscled. His blond hair was cropped closely around his skull, but his beard was full. The twitching stopped even as I spoke and he stood before us, naked and unashamed.
“You said you wanted to truly live,” he called to Rannveig in a mocking baritone. “So now I’ve given you the opportunity. Tonight, the moon will not be completely full, but it will be more than enough to trigger the transformation. You will become werewolves like me or die in the attempt. We will be Pack, and together we will live in the worlds of men and of nature.”
“But I don’t want to be a wolf!” Rannveig protested.
The man scoffed at this objection. “It’s necessary only once a month after you establish control. Think of it as a menstruation, except you won’t be the one bleeding.”
“Why didn’t you ask us first?” I said. “This is not a life I would choose.”
“It’s a life that chooses you,” he corrected me. “I could hardly ask you while in wolf form. And you cannot appreciate what you’re refusing until you’ve tried it. You will like being a wolf. Trust me.”
“Why should I trust you?” Rannveig demanded. “You bloody bit me!”
“And you’re welcome,” Úlfur replied. “I know you’ll get around to thanking me later.”
“Thank you? For what? Turning me into a monster? For condemning me to hell?”
“You are concerned about hell?” He waved a hand at me and laughed. “This man is not your husband, am I right?”
Rannveig’s face turned red. “God forgives weakness. He does not forgive … abomination!” She shouted the last word and then hurriedly began to dress herself. I should probably pause to explain at this point that Rannveig was a Lutheran—as was I, at the time, along with most of the rest of Iceland. But throughout Scandinavia, the Old Norse religion persisted among some individuals, as I believe it still does today. Úlfur, a Danish transplant, was one of those who still followed the old gods. (We had a steady trickle of Danish immigrants because Iceland was under Danish rule then, but Frederik IV largely ignored us, occupied as he was in the Great Northern War with Sweden.)
“It all depends on which god you’re talking about,” Úlfur said. “The Æsir are perfectly content with dual natures.”
“You see?” Rannveig said to me. “He spouts pagan nonsense. He is damned, and now so are we.”
Úlfur threw his head back and laughed heartily. “You are blessed, not damned. You will come to know this in time. Run with me under the moon and hunt, taste hot blood on your tongue—”
“Gah!” Rannveig covered her ears and ran away. She did not want to hear about hot blood on her tongue. I grabbed my clothes and chased after her. Úlfur laughed again and called after us.
“Run now if you wish! But don’t be near any men when night falls, or the hot blood you taste will be human!”
Rannveig didn’t slow down for half a mile. She hurtled as fast as she could to where we had left the horses, and I couldn’t close the gap between us until we were nearly there. She was gasping and crying by the time we reached the spot where we’d staked them, and when we got there only one remained. The other was a mess of blood and bones and bits of skin and flesh.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” Rannveig cried. “He ate my horse! Gunnar, he ate my horse!”
“Well, if it kept him from eating us, I’m grateful to the horse,” I said.
She whirled upon me and started pounding my chest with her fists. They weren’t weak punches either. She was letting loose with everything she had, fury erupting from her like a volcano. “How! Can! You! Be! Grateful!” she yelled, landing a blow with each word. “We are fucked! Fucked, you hear me? We heal like demons! We are no longer human! Our salvation is gone! Gone!” She dissolved into sobs and sank to the ground, clutching me. I knelt to hold her, but I did not know what to say. I could not tell her everything would be all right. She was going to have a hard time explaining to the men at the farm what happened to the horse. And if she truly turned into a wolf that night, everyone there would be in mortal peril. Rather than expose them to such danger—and to give us more time to concoct a tale if we found we could return—we decided to continue on my westerly path to Kirkjubæjarklaustur. That proved enormously difficult, because the remaining horse would not suffer our touch. It neighed in fear and reared up defensively whenever either of us approached, and we finally had to cut it loose and let it run away. It ran back in the direction of the Hnappavellir farm.
Seeing no other choice, we began trudging after it. A day without food or water we figured we could survive, and then we would make the farm by early the next morning. We did not see or hear from Úlfur all that day.
Rannveig and I were exhausted. We had not slept at all through the previous night and had been traveling all day. By mutual agreement, we collapsed together underneath a tree as the sun set. We both feared what was to come but no longer had the energy to waste worrying about it. I actually managed to take a short nap.
My awakening was the rudest possible. My skeleton snapped in a hundred places and knitted together again in alien shapes, organs squished and remade themselves, and you know those headaches you get between your eyes? They are worse than excruciating when there’s a snout growing out of that spot. Being confined in human clothes didn’t help the process along either.
Rannveig was enduring a similar transformation. Her cries and snarls of pain were even louder than mine, and I wasn’t holding back. Our clothes eventually tore and the shifting stopped. The pain faded as we lay still under the tree, whimpering. I turned my head and saw much better than I ever had before. Where Rannveig had been, there was a light-gray wolf with white socks surrounded by shreds of Rannveig’s clothes.
I got to my feet—all four of them—and took a deep breath. Smells I’d never known or perceived before flooded my mind. There was a burrow of wood mice somewhere nearby; their droppings littered the small stand of timber in which we stood. I could smell the lingering traces of my horse’s fear on the trail back to Hnappavellir. Thinking of the horse made me realize how hungry I was. I needed to hunt.
Rannveig was up now, and she looked hungry too. She smelled the horse, and we set off after it together. I do not know how we communicated; there must have been something happening on an instinctive level, because as of yet we had no pack link.
Running felt good. It wasn’t an all-out run but rather an easy lope. Rannveig ran beside me, and she seemed to be enjoying herself as well. I could
tell we were getting closer to the horse. It was either slowing down or had stopped altogether with nightfall, unsure of the path. But as we grew nearer, we smelled and heard other horses and another smell on top of them: humans. I began to drool, and what was left of my own human thought drifted away as the wolf took over not only my body but the remainder of my mind. The next thing I remember is coming back to awareness with someone else’s voice in my head.
I asked. I looked around and saw Rannveig nearby, her muzzle bloody. I could feel the blood on my own muzzle and smell the coppery scent of it. Another wolf sat calmly a short distance away. It was a wolf I recognized: Úlfur.
Rannveig came back to herself and processed what was going on. I didn’t recognize the body we’d torn apart, but she did. She leapt back from it and yipped in alarm. Through the pack link, she screamed.
He must have come looking for her. I turned to survey the scene; there was another body back along the trail. I didn’t know who it was, because I’d never seen anyone at the farm besides Rannveig, but I suspected she would recognize him.
I asked. She wasn’t paying attention. She was hung up on eating her brother and trying to vomit. I felt sorry for the men but didn’t hate myself; I saw already that I had done nothing. These men were literally killed by wolves, not murdered.
Úlfur said, clearly able to hear my thoughts. I expected she would ignore him as she’d ignored me, but she calmed down right away. His influence as alpha was strong, and she tucked her tail between her legs and confined herself to soft whimpers.
Úlfur said,
Rannveig said.
I conceded. I wasn’t sure I’d spend much effort looking for that path. I could tell already I would like being a wolf, and I wasn’t feeling any of the horror she felt. I asked again, now that she’d settled down a bit.
She padded over and looked at what was left of the face. She threw her head back and howled.
I said.
Úlfur added. Rannveig whined and lay down, covering her eyes with her paws in a very human gesture. Her ears were flattened and her tail tucked underneath her.
I said, my mind grasping the possibilities before us.
Úlfur said. There was little else to hunt in Iceland at the time. The reindeer herds from Norway didn’t establish themselves until the mid-nineteenth century.
By the same token, there were no large land predators in Iceland. The most ferocious was the Arctic fox. No one would believe these men were taken down and savaged by Arctic foxes. When they were found, people would start hunting for whatever had killed them.
Úlfur said. Úlfur was far better prepared for the change to wolf. He had a cache of clothes waiting for him, along with a pack of valuables.
I was incredulous. The reason I was able to travel alone as a courier and trader across the island was precisely because brigands couldn’t make a living on the anemic commerce between settlements.
Looking miserable wasn’t difficult, since the transformation back to human was every bit as painful as it had been to wolf. The good people of Kirkjubæjarklaustur gave us clothes and food, and Úlfur bought us packs to carry supplies in for our long trek. We hiked cross-country between two glaciers to the north side of the island, sleeping in the open at night and fearing nothing. Rannveig spoke little to either of us and often wept at night. She did not want to be comforted.
We broke our journey for a time at Mývatn before continuing on to Húsavík. There we secured jobs on the coast; we could not join the fishermen or whalers for fear of being at sea when the full moon came around, so we found work elsewhere. We slowly became accustomed to being werewolves and added two more to our pack in Húsavík, another male and another female.
The plague hit Iceland two years later, in 1707. A quarter of the population died. I suggested to Úlfur that we grow the Pack a little bit more quickly than he intended, for every wolf would be safe from the plague and we would be saving lives as well as changing them. This was the first time I became aware of his deep-seated racism and outright bigotry. Úlfur agreed that saving lives while expanding the Pack was a good idea, but only for those of Scandinavian descent. Celts weren’t allowed, nor was any other ethnic stock, and he’d prefer they be pagan as well. I did not understand the preference or the decree that consigned all other ethnic groups in Húsavík to a gruesome death.
When I tried to question him about it, Úlfur bristled and asked if I was questioning his leadership. I was second in the hierarchy, but the three other wolves in the Pack would often talk to me rather than to him. Rannveig, in particular, didn’t talk to Úlfur unless she absolutely had to.
“Not your leadership,” I replied, “only the reasoning behind your decision to exclude Celts from joining the Pack. I know of two sturdy men we could save from the plague at the next full moon.” It was only three days hence.
“Celts would disturb the harmony of the Pack and sow dissension among us,” he said, though I wasn’t quite sure of what harmony he spoke. There was plenty of unrest and dissension as it was, even though our numbers were still in single digits at the time.
When we returned from our run under the full moon, those Celtic men were either dead or dying of the plague. It was a waste and a poor decision in my view, and it was the beginning of my discord with Úlfur.
“We could have saved those men,” I said, and he snarled and cuffed me, sending me sprawling and turning my eyes yellow.
“The purity of species is pack law,” he growled. “Never suggest again that we alter it.” I thought he had a poor understanding of the difference between races and species, but I quelled the response in my throat and broke eye contact.
“As you wish, alpha,” I said.
The next week I met a werewolf from another pack. His name was Hallbjörn Hauk. “I am the second in Reykjavík,” he said, “under the leadership of Ketill Grímsson. You are the second for Úlfur Dalsgaard, are you not?”
“I am.”
“I wonder if we ma
y speak privately for a time?” he asked.
“There are few places we could go without the Pack knowing about it,” I said. We were a small pack, but Húsavík was also a very small town.
Hallbjörn smiled. “I understand. I will be brief, then. Were you aware that Úlfur Dalsgaard used to be a part of the Reykjavík Pack and was cast out a little more than two years ago?”
“No, I was not. Why was he cast out?”
“He had ideas about racial purity that Ketill and others found distasteful. He would constantly denigrate or taunt pack members of differing backgrounds, including myself. I’m Anglo–Saxon on my father’s side. Ketill told him to take his racial crusade elsewhere and banished him from Reykjavík.”
“Why are you here?”
“To let you and the rest of your wolves know there is another pack in Iceland if you ever feel like moving elsewhere. You’re welcome so long as you leave Úlfur’s ideas behind. We are a motley crew.”
“That’s it? You came all the way here for that?”
“No. I’m also curious what you know about pack law.”
“Úlfur makes it. The alpha’s word is law.”
“Of course. But what mechanism exists for a change of leadership?”
“I … what?”
“Say that someone in your pack disagrees with the alpha’s word. It may be someone lower in the Pack, or it might be you. There might even be a majority of the Pack that agrees there should be a new alpha. What happens next?”
“I don’t know.”
Hauk snorted and shook his head, as if he’d expected such an answer. “Anyone may challenge the alpha for leadership at anytime. There’s a fight. The winner is the alpha.”
“What kind of fight?”
“The bloody kind. One wolf either yields or is wounded past the ability to heal.”
“Interesting. Úlfur neglected to mention this particular pack dynamic to me.”
“Guard your thoughts,” Hauk warned. “If he hears what you’re thinking through the pack link, you’ll have a fight before you’re ready.”