When three days were up he sallied to explain to her that he would be absent but there was no telling if she understood. Tramping through the snow, Peter found himself suddenly yearning for the comparable warmth and talkativeness of Buchard's demeanor.
That day they were unusually busy: Many neighbors seemed to need tools for breaking ice and clearing snow repaired or replaced. The forge was a white-hot hell but the outdoors were frigid, and Peter felt tossed back and forth between extremes like some sinner out of Dante, doomed to never find solace. He remembered the pile of warm, comfortable furs laid out by the chapel hearth with envy. At the end of the day, as Peter prepared to head back into the forest, Buchard asked, "Eat well?"
Without thinking Peter said, "Yes, we did."
Buchard looked at him. Peter stammered. "That is to say...someone broke into the chapel while I was gone. Not someone, I mean, an animal. A wolf."
"A wolf?" Buchard said. "You fed it?"
"A little."
"What happened to it?"
"It was gone the next morning."
Buchard seemed lost in thought for a moment.
"Are there a lot of wolves in this country?" Peter said.
"Not so many," Buchard said. "It's not good if there's one now. Come inside."
Peter was surprised, but followed. Buchard's wife seemed not to be home, so he stirred up the fire himself. Buchard began to whittle in a careless fashion, and as he did he spoke without looking at Peter:
"In my grandfather's day there were many wolves," he said. "They stole our hunts and sometimes came right into our homes in the night to eat more. But the worst thing about the wolves was that they were not always wolves; sometimes they were men or women. A person may put on the skin of a wolf and become one, and in that way steal his neighbor's meat or even carry away his children, and so live through a season when he or she might otherwise starve instead. And when one becomes a wolf there is no way to tell which man or woman is really underneath.
"Once, my grandfather came on a huge wolf while hunting and wounded it in the neck. When he followed the trail of its blood it led to the charcoal burner's hut, and my grandfather saw that the charcoal burner had a bleeding wound just like the one he'd given the wolf. After my grandfather killed him he found the wolf skin and he threw it into the fire, but it jumped back out again. Three times my grandfather tried to burn the wolf skin and three times it jumped out, and in the end he had to hold it in with his spear, and it took all night to burn."
Peter saw the glow of the hearth embers in Buchard's eyes. "We killed the natural wolves so that no man or woman could become one of them ever again. It's a bad omen to see a wolf anymore. Don't tell anyone else that you saw one. It would not be safe for you."
The story troubled Peter all the way home.
Eve was waiting for him and—his greatest surprise of the day—it seemed she'd cooked. The meat (pheasant) was a bit overdone but he did not think to complain. She'd fed the fire while he was out too, he saw. When they finished he thanked her and then felt foolish for it.
They spent some time at the chapel door looking out at the forest together. The moonlight on the twisting, snow-covered beech trees was beautiful and eerie. Peter was warm so long as he stood close to Eve. Part of him had expected her to leave while he was out and he realized he was relieved she had not. He understood her presence to mean that she had made a decision to truly stay, for better or for ill.
They slept side by side that night, using one wolf skin as a mattress and the other as a blanket. Some form of modesty Peter had no name for forced him to try sleeping with clothes on, but Eve's unnatural heat made this impossible and he ended up naked as she. She slept with her back to him and the curve of one bare shoulder visible between the blanket and her hair (both the exact same shade). And how did Adam feel when he woke to find his Eve, naked and whole beside him one morning, he wondered again? Did he blush to think what they were meant to do together? Did he wonder at it?
Something of his old priestly oaths nagged at him still. True, he'd never paid much attention to those, but somehow this seemed different. Surely there would be a whole new class of sin in it? He recited the verses in his mind: "Cursed is he who lies with an animal. If any man lies with an animal, they must both be destroyed.