of the grove.
Rigg stepped carefully over fallen branches, tree limbs that had been cast down by winter storms and were mired now in mud and frosty leaves. He walked warily, blinking at the glitter of the ice on the white bark, sensitive to everything — to the branches gleaming in the sunshine, to the crunch of their footsteps, to distant birdsong, to the intermittent silence.
As they approached the inmost circle of the grove, he touched Ari’s arm and pointed. The nine birch trees that formed the central circle of the place had been trimmed of all but a few stout branches. These inter-locked in a kind of ring or hoop, and from this hung nine thick leather strands. Six of these displayed a ghastly array of skeletons, bits of dried, frozen carcasses, and what might have been the remains of very old garlands and flower offerings. From one of the six hung an assemblage of bones, parts of a large skeleton that eight or nine harsh winters had not obliterated. It was clearly human. Three of the hanging thong bindings had been stripped bare by time or scavengers.
The two young men stopped and contemplated the offerings. For a moment they were silent, a little overwhelmed by the solemn place.
“Avert the spectre, avert the walking dead, avert the sending, the ghost of every shape,” murmured Rigg, using the traditional words. He shuddered as he pronounced the formula, but after a few minutes he felt much more secure. The dead man’s ghost, he hoped, would not haunt them now.
The young men bowed their heads and offered their silent prayers for the long-dead victim.
“Our farmers will be happy to know that the human victim’s remains are still visible,” Ari murmured. “They’ll say our harvests have benefited because of it. Those pigs and goats — or whatever it was they hung up there — haven’t fared so well. But who was the victim, I wonder?”
Rigg looked blank and then responded, “Now I remember — your family came from Iceland after the sacrifice. Well, I once asked my mother about it. She told me he was a man who cheated Erik, a relative of the warrior Thrand who died in Vinland.”
“I don’t think I’ll be cheating Erik,” Ari declared. “Although I know the poor hanged man was honoured by being chosen for the sacrifice.”
Ari was quite serious, Rigg saw, and he started to comment, but before he could get the words out, a cry arose, a deep-voiced, mournful cry, repeated once, twice, three times, until the whole valley resounded with its sad, persistent wailing.
Ari turned to his friend, white-faced and staring. Rigg felt his fingers grow cold, the back of his neck tingle.
“Wolf?” Ari whispered.
“I hope it’s only that,” Rigg said, peering at the far cliffs through the tangle of birch boughs and trunks. “But I don’t see a thing as yet.”
The cry sounded again. It began as a low-pitched complaint, then climbed painfully upward, through a series of changes of pitch, only to climax in a long-drawn-out howl, in which all the misery of loneliness, all the sorrow of isolation, seemed to fill the valley.
Rigg recognized the cry of the solitary wolf seeking companionship and the strength of the pack. It was a cry sometimes heard on the edges of the settlements.
Ari called out suddenly: “Over there, on the cliffside!” He had bent down and was peering underneath the maze of tree branches, pointing and moving forward.
Rigg caught a glimpse of a flashing white form outlined for a moment against the dark rocks.
“Let’s go after him!” he cried.
The two young men scrambled out from underneath the branches, found a path through the birch grove, and after some dodging and sidestepping, emerged in the open valley.
There they stopped to listen, as once again the wolf cry filled the valley.
Ari smiled knowingly. “He can’t be far away. Perhaps we can get him now.”
They distanced themselves from the birch grove, advancing, rather warily, into the centre of the valley. There they found a shallow ditch, where they searched the ground for tracks, but among the partially melted patches of ice and snow, and the litter of lichen-covered rocks and stones, they found nothing.
Moving slowly, they crossed the level space separating them from the high cliffs opposite. The wolf cries had made them more sensitive to the silence, to the intermittent whispers of wind, to the tramp of their own boots on the spring earth. The sunlight blazed down steadily, and the morning’s flurry of snow was nearly forgotten.
They were still some twenty yards from the cliffs, watchful and a little tense, when they saw it.
Without a word, they stooped, kneeled, and slipped their longbows off their shoulders.
Something had moved on the cliff above them — not a white-coated wolf or bear this time, but something dark-skinned and agile — slipping from rock to rock and turning to stare at them with what might well have been a human face.
“Did you see it, Ari?” Rigg whispered. The plaintive howling, the mixed human and animal tracks, first a white creature and now suddenly a brown one. Could this be their werewolf?
But in his mind Rigg was still unsure. He remembered from his Vinland adventure how hard it was to look at the living world and read the truth there.
Ari stood transfixed, staring at the high cliffs. “That wasn’t any ordinary wolf,” he muttered. “Greenland wolves all have white coats, like the first creature we saw. And if it’s a werewolf our longbows are useless.”
Rigg nodded, and Ari continued, his voice both tense and eager: “Those tracks we found earlier, and now these two sightings — it seems that creature can turn in an instant from wolf into man! This is a powerful shape-shifter, or else something right out of our ken. I don’t know what to think. Maybe we should go back and talk to Tyrkir and the others.”
Rigg shook his head. “It’s too soon — we’ve learned nothing so far. You know that.”
“You’re right. But there’s another thing. That wolf cry — I recognized it, and you did too. It sounded like a very real wolf, didn’t it? Remember, years ago, Vikar the Hunter taught us to read that sound. It was the cry of a solitary wolf seeking the pack. Now just suppose the pack arrives. What then, Rigg — what do we do then?”
“Then we get out of here — if we can.”
Ari nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s search the cliffs first. If we find our killer wolf, we take home a trophy. If the arrows don’t harm it, or it turns into that brown creature, it must be a werewolf — and we run. In any case, we get out of this valley and back to the settlement before sunset, when the whole pack may arrive.”
“A good plan! I’ll work my way up that slope by the alder scrub; you take the terraced rock where those boulders are. Anything could be hiding in there! If either of us needs help, he can shout!”
Each of the young Vikings selected an arrow from the small bundle on his back, each held both the arrow and the longbow loosely but at the ready, in his left hand, and cautiously advanced in the agreed direction.
As Rigg tramped through the scrub bush, he breathed a short prayer to Odin, who had hung nine days on a tree to learn the secret of the runes. He asked the wise god to show
