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 f**ked! 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.
"Good. You have eaten human flesh. Your wolf will be powerful now. It will be more difficult to control at first, but ultimately you will be strong members of the Pack."
"What? Who said that?" 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.
"You know me. I am your alpha. We are Pack."
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. "Nooo! It’s Sigurd! We killed my brother! Gunnar, we ate my brother!"
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 am sorry. Is that someone you know as well?" 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.
"You are right, Gunnar," Úlfur said, clearly able to hear my thoughts. "You did not do this. Your wolves did. Rannveig? Rannveig. Calm down." 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, "Listen to me, both of you. We will head north, to the other side of Iceland, and settle there. We will grow the Pack slowly and create a territory for ourselves, and we will prosper. When you turn back into humans in the morning, you will feel better. Stronger. You will never be sick again. And I will teach you to control the wolf so that, if you wish, he can be free only one night a month, instead of the three he wants, and you will never lose yourself in the wolf so completely again as long as we have the pack link."
"We are damned, Gunnar," Rannveig said.
"Perhaps," I conceded. "But perhaps we may find a path back to salvation." 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. "Who’s the other man over there?" I asked again, now that she’d settled down a bit.
She padded over and looked at what was left of the face. "It’s Einar. My grandfather. He was the owner of the farm. Oh, God, I can’t believe this is happening." She threw her head back and howled.
"It’s not happening, Rannveig. It happened. And we didn’t do it. It was an accident."
"Don’t act like no one is responsible! We fornicated out of wedlock, and God sent this thing to curse us. Now we’ve killed my brother and my grandfather!"
"I don’t feel cursed," I said.
"And you’re one of those “things” now," 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.
"Listen to me, Rannveig," I said, my mind grasping the possibilities before us. "You told me you wished to truly live. Now you can. You don’t need a husband or a brother to look after you. There will be the Pack, you see?"
"That’s right," Úlfur said. "We will go to Húsavík and you can work in whatever way you wish. And when the moon comes, we will leave town and hunt the seals or the puffins or whatever suits us. In the summers we can go to the lake at Mývatn and enjoy the ducks." 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.
"We need to go," Úlfur said. "Come. We can make Kirkjubæjarklaustur by tomorrow and get you some clothes. We will say you were robbed by brigands." 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.
"Brigands in Iceland?" 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.
"Why not? Simply look miserable and they will believe you."
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 may 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?”