She wasted most of a day sulking. Eventually she sought out Powell. Her need to talk to somebody about her new… condition was just that overpowering.

He started lecturing before she’d even said hello. Maybe he needed to talk, too. “You have to start thinking differently,” he told her. “You’ll learn to be very conscious of moonrise and moonset. Most places that’s easy but up here, in the Arctic, nothing is simple. This is the land of the midnight sun, right? And the moon cycle’s crazy too. We’re moving through a phase of longer moons, when the moon rises earlier each night and sets later the next day. In a couple of weeks we’re going to have a very long moon—it’ll stay above the horizon for five days before it sets again.”

“I’ll be a—I’ll be that creature—for five days?” she gasped.

“No. Not the part of you that’s really you,” he said. “We share our bodies with them, but not our minds. They think their own animal thoughts. We don’t ever remember completely what happens when we change back. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why. My best guess is it’s just because the wolf’s memories don’t make any sense when they’re picked over by a human brain. It’s as if you dreamed in a foreign language, and when you woke you couldn’t translate what you’d said in your dream.”

Powell clambered up onto a boulder overlooking a stretch of muskeg, a half-frozen bog that looked like a patchy meadow to Chey. If she’d tried to walk on it, however, she would have been in for a surprise—under a thin layer of vegetation it was frigid water maybe dozens of meters deep. She climbed up onto the rock next to him and had a seat. She’d forced herself to accept her situation, at least enough that she could talk to him about what she’d become. She desperately needed to understand her new life and her new limitations if she wanted to survive.

“We can influence them a little. Whatever we were doing when we change they seem to try to complete, whether they understand it or not. They can help us, too, in their way. There are some things they do better than us. They can survive here much better because they know how to get food in ways we can’t. Whatever they eat, we get the nourishment.” he frowned. “I’ll try to remember to teach you how to hunt tonight,” he said. When the moon came up, she realized. He meant he would try to teach her how to hunt when they were wolves. She shuddered at the thought of transforming again. “This land belongs to them. For hundreds of thousands of years before people came they hunted the caribou here. You may have noticed they aren’t like other wolves.”

“The teeth,” Chey said with a gulp of horror. When she’d been up in her tree, looking down at Powell’s wolf, she’d noticed the teeth most of all.

He nodded. “The curse was cast ten thousand years ago, right at the end of the last ice age. There were timber wolves here then but they were smaller and not so fearsome. The shamans who created this curse wanted to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, really mess with them. So they picked an animal they knew would scare anyone—the dire wolf. They had huge teeth for crunching bones and enormous paws for walking on top of snow. That made them look like monsters to your average Paleoindian. Dire wolves are extinct now but in their day they used to bring down wooly mammoths and giant sloths. Everything was bigger back then. And nastier.”

“Dzo said a wolf would never attack a human being,” Chey suggested. “He said we don’t look like their food.”

Powell nodded. “Yeah. Unless you provoke a wolf—poking it with a stick would do, I guess—it’ll leave you alone. The same was true of dire wolves. The curse changes that, though. It makes our wolves resent us. They want to be wolves all the time—you probably felt that.”

Chey nodded. She remembered exactly how good it had felt to change. It sickened her, offended her humanity. But she remembered how bad she’d felt when she changed back, too.

“They grow to hate us. I don’t know if it’s just natural antipathy or if the curse includes some kind of evil twist but our kind of wolves will attack a human being. They’ll go out of their way to destroy anything human. There have been times when I changed back and found that I had busted all the windows out of my house because my wolf thought maybe I was sleeping inside.”

“Jesus,” she said. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop it?”

“There are ways to contain the wolf, by which I mean you can literally lock yourself up when the moon is out. I’ve tried that and found I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t take waking up in a locked room, having Dzo bring me food. I needed to be free.”

She wondered if she could handle being locked up. It might be better than running around like an animal.

He glanced down at his watch and his face fell. “I guess I’ve forgotten how nice it is to have somebody new to talk to about this stuff,” he told her. “The time just flew.”

Chey knew what he meant. She closed her eyes and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. As monstrous as he was, as much as he had hurt her, she didn’t shrug it away, not immediately. It was some small measure of comfort, something she needed very badly. Without warning the hand got heavier and started to sink through her skin. She looked over in horror and saw it melting through her, even as her own body grew translucent. She glanced over her shoulder to see the moon—

Silver light blossomed inside her head. Her clothes fell away and her body trembled with the joy of renewal. Wolf once more.

She tasted him on the wind, felt the leathery pads of his paw on her own leg. He drew back and bounded into the forest, leaves and branches swinging wildly where he’d disappeared. She was supposed to follow him, she knew. She’d gotten as much from his smell, from the angle of his tail.

Something held her back for a moment, though. She felt something trembling under her feet as if some tiny animal were hiding down there. She looked and saw human clothes lying beneath her. Her immediate urge was to tear them apart but instead she looked closer. There was something inside the clothes, something hard and round like a river-washed stone. It vibrated with a noise like bees buzzing. Once, twice. Then it stopped.

Enough. She turned toward the forest and jumped up to follow him. She still had much to learn.