Sheepskin

The flock scattered across the river at the sight of him, and he watched, drooling—a bony shadow in the reeds—as the big rams shielded their wives and tiny lambs, as yearlings offered wobbling elders their strong shoulders.

The wolf had not eaten in a month, but he was not hungry. The snowless brown winter chipped away at him, and he rotted obediently—the earth was too hard to scrape out a den, shot through with hoarfrost and the fossilized roots of frozen weeds.

And so the wolf looked to the sheep, a shuffling, bleating cloud. He envied the naked lambs—how ugly and misshapen they were, their knobbly too-long legs and their floppy ears! Yet they were warm, sheltered from the cutting winds of the moor by their mothers’ wool.

No matter how the wolf shivered and begged, the sheep always fled from him. When he baaed with them, they simply flattened their ears and ran.

And yet, even after the rams’ clashing horns filled the air with bone-rattling thunder and painted the dead grass with gore, the flock never left them. Instead, they grazed together on withered crowsfoot, happily bloodstained.

The wolf watched them gather on the far bank, their cloudy white wool dripping onto the smooth pebbled shore. His matted black fur itched. Perhaps a sheep’s skin was more than warmth—it was softness, the promise of succor.

His wasting body plowed through the icy current. The sheep scattered—his claws sank into the neck of a yearling. It writhed and bleated beneath him, and the wolf saw himself in its wide black eyes—a cold, frightened echo—and he flayed it with maddened claws, swaddled himself in its warm white skin.

“Why did you kill me?” asked the sheep, its pulsing pink flesh.

“I wish for gentleness,” rasped the wolf, weeping bloody tears.