Something then, a wisp of brightness out of the sky and down on the hillside, caused him to turn and look.
The hunter drew his breath hard. His hand reached for the knife in his belt. He made no other move.
Three things were picking a way along the hill just below him, one was a shadow, two were lights. A pair of wolves, a black one, and a white, both spectacular in their coloring and their size. And between them, something else. It was a child, a maiden child, he could see as much from here, for the little breasts had blossomed on her. A child also of the Plains People, for she was whiter than the albino wolf, and the hair that sprayed behind her, so fine it fluttered out even at her steps, was pale yet golden as a sunrise.
The hunter stared. He had heard of such things, children of the wild whose kin were beasts. It was not so much wonder as ordinary fear that stayed him. The huge wolves might attack him, if they should scent the kill he carried. The child would then attack him too, sister to them, no longer to his kind.
The black wolf halted. Its head swung about, and he saw the jetty nostrils widen. At once the white wolf hesitated, turned, looked at him. The girl-child looked last of all.
As soon as she did so, the hunter’s fear increased—and diminished—both at once. It became rather another fear. Though naked, there was a diadem of flowers on her head. He squinted at these, because her gaze filled him with some peculiar sensation he seemed never to have felt before.
The dying light trembled. One further new feeling slid through his mind, easy as water over a stone. And his fear went out. Confronted by the great wolves, the fey, unhuman child, he stood unafraid. He watched them until they turned again and went across the hill, into the mantle of the dusk.
His wife was at her loom when he came in, but started up with a glad cry. He prepared the meat and she cooked it, and later took some in a covered dish to the nearby cot where the husband, laid up for a while, had not been able to fend for them.
Later still, under the lamp hanging from the beam, the hunter played a board game with his wife, using pieces of bone he himself had carved to intricate and beautiful shapes. His wife won, as she often did, and they laughed.
And even later still, as they lay on their bed in the warm darkness, he said, “I saw a wolf child on the hill.”
“I thought there was something,” said the hunter’s wife. “All evening, I thought so.”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
“You’d tell me in your own good time.”
So he told her.
They slept till sunrise, when the little red sheep they kept in the yard began to bleat, wanting the pasture.
The hunter’s wife rose and dressed. She kissed her husband.
“You sleep. I’ll see to Babbya.”
Smiling, he turned on his side, and smiling the girl sought the door, combing her black hair as she went. She loved her man well, though he was some twelve years older than she. But then she had cause. He was a fine man, and besides, her father.
Outside, the sun stood on a hill. The red sheep frolicked. Between the two, the wolf child waited on the slope, her face to the hunter’s door.
The hunter’s wife took in her breath, as the hunter had done. In her case, it was purely awe. The figure on the slope, perhaps ten years old, looked like one of the exquisite bone figures from the board game.
There was no sign of the wolves, only the wolf child, with flowers in her sunrise hair.
The hunter’s wife slipped back into the house. She put a bread cake and some fruit into a dish, wine from the village vine-stocks into another. She re-emerged, bowed, then carried the offerings out beyond the yard, beyond the village, but not far up the slope, and left them there. The child watched her. The hunter’s wife came down again, went through the gate in the stockade and into the yard, and kissed the red sheep on its nose. “You must stay here. Or her brothers may come and eat you.”
The child could not possibly hear what the woman said, but the child suddenly curved her mouth—a smile. She stepped down the slope to the dishes. She did not comport herself like a wolf child, and she seemed to know what a dish was for. Gracefully, she took a berry from one and put it in her mouth. Then she raised and took a sip of wine from the second dish. She left the dishes neatly, turned, and ran away like a ghost of the wind.
The hunter’s wife laughed with joy at the beauty of her movements.
When her husband woke again she said to him, “Not a wolf child. A banaz.” Which in the mythos of Lan was a rural deity.
“A Lowland banaz, then.”
“Why not? Since their king made them lords, they walk all Vis where they will, and their sprites would do likewise.”
About noon there was an outcry. The sons of the fourth and fifth houses had seen a wolf sitting on the slope looking at the village. Men ran on to the street made only by footfalls.
The hunter went out, too, and beheld it was the black wolf, its tongue lolling like a ribbon.
“Fetch your spears!”
“No, no. It’s the familiar of a banaz.”
“Rubbish. It’s a wolf and we must kill it before it comes for the livestock, or for us.”
One of the younger sons unwisely hurled a broken pot at the wolf. It missed. The wolf panted in the heat. Or laughed.
Just then the hunter’s wife went up the slope toward the wolf, carrying a dish of meat from yesterday’s kill. The men shouted, but the hunter said, “Wait. My daughter-wife is clever in these things.” Nevertheless he put his hand to his knife, as he had in the evening on the hill.
A few feet away, the woman bowed to the wolf and set down the dish. The wolf came to the dish and began to eat. The woman walked down the hill again.
When the black wolf had finished, it rolled on its back in the early dust and rose up a gray wolf, and ran away.
The village muttered.
For a month, almost until Zastis, this kind of thing went on. A wolf would be seen on the periphery of the village, or the wolf child herself. None of the village animals were harmed, or the young infants or girls. Offerings came to be made, not only by the hunter’s wife, and were either partaken of or spurned. Women working among the vines became accustomed to the wolves, as to a couple of large dogs. The men would leave them portions of a kill, and began to say such phrases as: “The white wolf didn’t come today. I missed the shape of him on the slope.”
They were more innocent and more knowing in the hills. They could accept such things.
To the child they put up a small altar, and left there items which might please, flowers, honey, beads. These were not touched.
Then, one morning, the hunter’s wife opened her door and the wolf child was the other side of it. She did not speak, and maybe was unable to, having spent her formative years with wild beasts. Yet she smiled, and her smile was lovely. The girl stood back, and the wolf child came into the cot.
The hunter’s wife made no opposition, but she was unsure now of what to do. She watched the wolf child, who was a banaz, pause by the curtain of the sleeping-place, turn away, put one finger, so white it seemed luminous, on the rim of an iron cauldron.
“Let me learn from you,” said the wolf child.
The girl started. She was deeply shocked that the child had spoken to her. Then the shock lessened. She realized with a sweet delight the banaz had not spoken in words at all, but by impression only, in the way of the Lowland People, from inside her skull.
She stayed with them in the house only a few days and nights. She learned swiftly how to be human. It was as if she had always known, merely wished to be reminded.