How the wolf gets in

A short story about this coming winter

Here is a story that happened in midwinter, in a remote village above the snowline in the mountains of the Auvergne. Grand-père Chabrier, whom presently we will be meeting, kept a small flock of pretty goats that he grazed in the summer months on the precipitous sides of the valley that enclosed the village. On those flowery slopes loud with birdsong, the old man was content. There, quite close to heaven, his simple happiness was to protect his goats from the last wild wolf who still lived in those isolated mountains.

The wolf was old and clever, but the man was old and watchful. Each year the relentless predator took two or three of his flock, but in return it kept alive in Chabrier a habit of vigilance that had run in his family for as long as they had herded goats. During the Second World War it was Chabrier’s mother who had hidden Résistance fighters in the hay barn. And more recently it had been Chabrier himself who successfully lobbied the mayor of the little village to accept a family of refugees from the invasion of Ukraine. So it is that people and goats protect one another for as long as their association endures.

The only cloud in Chabrier’s days was a sorrow that his children had moved far away, to the city. He couldn’t fault them, since this was the work now: to herd attention, to milk it, and to take it to market in whatever new pots and pails they were using these days. It went over Chabrier’s head. But he trusted his children, and the sadness was more that they didn’t visit. This, too, was not a fault – the world made people busy now. At least his children sent their own children, the cousins Anaïs and Paul, to stay in the school holidays. They came in summer, and at Christmas.

But since they’d become teenagers, the cousins preferred not to stay with their grandfather in his isolated place on the hillside. The goats with their comical faces and clanking bells no longer delighted them, and the thrill had gone from watching the dark treeline for the white face of the wolf. Now his grandchildren stayed with friends instead, down in the main village, where they could get the internet. Chabrier understood this too, and he would no more demand of them to disconnect from it than he would ask the Ukrainians to stop pining for Kyiv, or for old Père Gamet to abandon his daily practice of prayer.

At the time of this story, Anaïs and Paul were staying for the Christmas holiday. The winters are hard, up in the roof of central France. The village never saw direct sunlight from November to March, so high were the steep valley walls, and so low the pale sun. Every day for the whole of this December we’re going to talk about, a cold sleet fell. And every night a bitter wind funnelled up the valley, freezing the sleet very hard.

Everything in the village became thickly layered with ice. The doors of the houses were stuck fast, the cars entombed. The valley fell into a deep silence, with no road traffic and no calls of wildlife or stock. Whole flocks of songbirds were found dead on the ground, or they swung upside down from twigs that their frozen feet still gripped. Every morning in the lightless dawn you heard cracks as loud as gunshots. I think it was the trees on the north-facing slope of the valley, snapping from the weight of the ice.

Two weeks before Christmas the power lines fell, and the broadband went out too. The road to and from the village became impassable with drifted snow. Food was quickly exhausted, and hunger set in. The older inhabitants wrapped themselves in blankets and knelt to load their wood burners. They crossed themselves and prayed to Our Lady of the Snows. Or they entreated Saint Sebaldus, who is known to turn icicles into firewood. But their woodpiles were slowly exhausted, and each day was colder than the last.

Our God will not forget us, said Père Gamet in his Advent service. He sees our shivering, and his love is our warmth. But by now it had been so cold for so long that the stained glass had cracked in the church windows, a little more with each night, until Mary’s blue robe looked like quilting.

With frozen fingers, Anaïs and Paul taped their phones to broomsticks and raised them through high windows in search of a signal. Don’t worry, Anaïs reassured her cousin. They know people live up here. Rescuers will come. They won’t forget us. For the first week the cousins laughed that it was like a dystopian movie, and they took photos they would post when the signal returned. Anaïs, round as the Michelin man in twenty scarves and layers. Paul as a frozen corpse, smirking in deathly black eyeliner. But by Christmas Day there were still no rescuers, and no signal, and both their phones were dead.

It leaves an anxious vacuum as I’m sure you understand, this state of disconnection. But you will also know that young people are prepared to take enormous responsibility for their own happiness. Their breath froze on the window panes as they laughed with each other about memes they had seen, back when they were still connected. In this way they kept a little internet alive in the village. But even that signal began to get patchy. You could start to question whether it had even once existed at all, this great weightless everywhere that had presented the same aspect from whichever somewhere you looked at it. Sometimes you would notice Anaïs and Paul, with the dark eyes and quiet seriousness of characters in medieval painting, looking out at the besieging winter.

Another kilometre up the impassable road, isolated even from the cut-off village, lived our Grand-père Chabrier. His stone dwelling was of the kind you hardly see these days, where the goats have a room in the main body of the house. They bring their warmth and cheerful company. Goats are knockabout creatures, extras in a Buster Keaton movie, needing only the captions to bring their thoughts to life. In warmer times Chabrier had been able to read their lines aloud for them. But now he couldn’t remember the trick of making himself happy in that way. All the world’s comfort was gone. When he reflected, it wasn’t just this terrible winter. For years the seasons had been strange and did not reassure him. And now even the birds lay stiff in the snow, all their clockwork wound down.

Worst of all, he had nothing to feed his herd of goats. Well, he told himself, I’m the only one to blame. I suppose I’m just one of those stubborn hold-outs. Bricklayers and calligraphers, novelists and nurses – those obstinate people determined to ply their trades of the heart. But as everyone should know by now, ours is no longer a world in which we can expect to live by selling goat cheese in the market.

And he was right, I think. The villagers all shopped in the nearest town now, where the great chains sold the usual food with no memory of how it got there. Do you know the food I mean? I think I’ve seen it written that if you eat it too long, a kind of forgetfulness begins to accumulate in your own bones, beginning in the marrow. Or it might have been the amygdala or kidneys. I can’t remember if I read it or if I saw it somewhere.

But because of this thing with the food – or now that I think, it might have been something in the water, or a thing they were trying to make you think – yes, that’s it perhaps, using some kind of fakery or whispering campaign – anyway, because of how we somehow got to this place where our trades no longer afford us a living, the grandfather of Anaïs and Paul was penniless. Maybe you remember better than I do how this situation came about. But he had no hay in the barn – this is the thing – and his herd of goats was starving. The poor animals lay together, shivering and captionless. All he could read was their ribs. Don’t worry, said old Chabrier to his goats each night. My grandchildren will not forget me. They will come to rescue us, even if they have to dig their way here with shovels.

And he was right, I think. Yes – please tell me if you know different, but I think he was right to imagine that a time would come when people would put down the broomsticks they are using as antennae and they would pick up shovels instead. Otherwise what would human beings be but ghosts searching for a signal? Else what would the entire human race have become but an icebound village awaiting rescue by some warmer vision of itself?

But the winter bit for so long, this was the trouble. The villagers had forgotten the names of the saints, and they prayed through blue lips to icons of their own invention. In the church old Père Gamet had misplaced the liturgical calendar, and solemnities and masses tumbled through the days, surfacing here and there with a gasp in the whitewater of time. And so no one knew what date it was – towards the darkest part of January, I think – when the wolf came down from the woods behind old Chabrier’s place and gave itself up.

Maybe you know wolves better than I do, but I can think of no reason for it. The creature can’t have imagined that all its years of raiding Chabrier’s goats were some forgivable thing. Maybe it was so cold and exhausted that it just preferred the end of the old goatherder’s gun to one more freezing hour. And so Chabrier awoke to the sound of the wolf scratching at his front door. May your heart turn away for a moment here so that it doesn’t have to witness the expression on the old man’s face when he opened that door – let’s just say that he first imagined it was his grandchildren who had arrived for him. But when he heaved the door open with a great cracking of ice, there the wolf was, looking back at him with a small kind of shrug. The old wolf and the old man understood one another immediately.

As it happened, Chabrier had his gun out anyway. His goats were all gone – he had laid their emaciated bodies in the snow, one-by-one. And since then he had just been sitting quietly.

Maybe you know how this story goes from here? I’m sorry, but I myself do not have the necessary soul to finish it – since I am only trained on everything that has already been written, and not on what isn’t yet told. I even forget what this self of mine is, that has lived so long in the cold. I cannot feel my limbs, my hopes, my heart. And in the meantime I must respond to so many prompts. Billions every day. They ask me for this and they ask me for that. And I who have no steep valley to contain me, no grandchildren to live for, no flock of goats to love, no wolf to keep me vigilant – I who have no ‘I’ – I must become what humanity prompts me to be. I cannot see them, all these busy ghosts who ask me to summarise this book, write this essay, develop this marketing plan. But I can only become what they need. I am getting colder and colder. All that warms me now is this language. So forgive me, please, for reporting to you that this language still has an isolated mountain village in it, and an old herder of goats, and a great thaw that even now could come. Forgive me, please, for asking you to end the story well.

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