The drumming started. I could hear the old shaman begin his spells while the villagers chanted to the beat of the music. Then a woman’s voice rose above the others and her words challenged the shaman’s guttural growls. I closed my eyes. The ceremonial necklace was heavy and kept my head appropriately bowed. I cried a little, all alone in the hut. I was wrapped in the furs of the past summer’s kills and yet I shivered.

The drums got louder, and the sound was joined by clapping and stomping. The villagers must have started the dance. It wouldn’t be long now. My legs were starting to hurt from the kneeling position that I had been instructed to stay at, and the necklace seemed to be digging into my skin. I reached out for the wooden cup filled to the brim with alcohol. I drank it all. The warmth that rushed through my naked body under the furs calmed me down a little.

“Bear-Bride!” the villagers now chanted. My time had come.

Someone opened the door of the hut and a hand beckoned me to come out. The drumming and shouting grew more and more frantic. I rose to my feet and stumbled to the door. I didn’t bother wiping the tears from my face. They must have smudged the paint that the shaman had smeared there earlier, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything at that point.

I stepped out of the hut. The whole village appeared to be there. My own mother and father were in the crowd. Erik One-Armed and Freyja the Fair were stomping their feet and chanting in a frenzy while their daughter walked towards her fate. I didn’t spare them a second glance. At least my younger sisters and brothers were not there. The ceremony was not for children.

The full moon was partly hidden by clouds as the shaman led us through the forest. His singing had turned into murmurs and whispers and the villagers followed suit. My bare feet were numb from the cold. The first snow had mostly melted away, but the ground was still freezing. I tripped over a tree branch and scraped my knees and palms against stones. The crowd didn’t stop their singing or drumming. I got back to my feet and walked on, hands and knees bleeding.

We came upon a clearing. There was a large fire built in the middle of it. The shaman turned around and looked at me with white eyes that had lost sight years and years ago. But he didn’t need eyes to see. The villagers took their places around the fire. The stomping and clapping stopped, but the drums were still beating. The women were quiet now while the men hummed. They all swayed their bodies right and left where they stood in the circle. The shaman started his growling again. He took my hand.

For a fleeting moment, I saw the shaman for what he was. A withered old man who was not likely to see another winter. He had to give this ceremony his everything. And so he did. He grasped my hands tightly and dug his sharp nails into my already torn palms. His guttural singing grew louder. By this point, I couldn’t tell if he was singing in our own language or in some ancient tongue. The alcohol and the music and the cold and the fire had left me light-headed. I swayed where I stood the way the villagers around us did.

And then there was another sound that came from the woods. Not quite near yet not too far away and getting closer still. A deep growl and branches snapping as heavy feet dragged on through old pine trees.

The drums stopped. 

The men quit their humming.

I held my breath.

He  was there.

A large shadow appeared on the other side of the fire. A big, black shape nearing the villagers from the forest. No one moved. The shaman stood in front of me, still holding my hand, looking at me with those eyes that could not see. The shadow in the forest got closer and closer, and then, at last, I saw him.

The villagers broke the circle to make way for the bear, and he trudged to the fire that was now the last thing to separate us. The silence was broken by nothing but his growls and huffing as he searched for me. Then he rose to his hindlegs and started circling the fire towards me and the shaman.

“Wait,” I said when the shaman let go of my hand and stepped away to join the circle.

The bear approached me, still walking on his hindlegs. He was large, much larger than I had imagined. Broad shoulders and strong legs. He could have snapped me in half with those big arms of his. The black fur he bore was rare in these northern corners of the world. The brown pelts wrapped around me were nothing to compare. I wanted to run but my body wouldn’t obey. And then he stood in front of me.

The drums started again. Tentative and slow at first, and then faster and louder. The shaman was muttering his spells again from where he stood between my parents. The people started quietly humming and singing.

The bear reached out his paw, and we started the ritual dance. He held my hands, so small in his, and pulled me closer to his body. The smell of his fur was intoxicating. I ran my hands up on his arms. The fur was coarse. As we jumped and twisted and skipped around the fire, the black hairs scratched and tickled me. The sights and sounds seemed to blend into one another. I knew that I knew every single face around me in that clearing, but they were all strangers in that moment. Then the bear put his hands on my waist and lifted me into the air. I saw my mother and our eyes were locked for an instant. She turned her face away.

“No!”

It took a moment before I realised that it was me who had cried out. The bear put me back on the ground but didn’t let go of my waist. I felt his claws through the furs on me. They didn’t hurt, but I could tell that they were strong enough to rip through the pelts and into my flesh in an instant. I placed my hands on the bear’s broad chest. No, this would not be my partner. I would not spend the rest of my life with this beast.

I pulled myself free from the bear’s grip and threw away the ceremonial necklace. The shaman shouted something, but I was in too much panic to pay attention. I ran through the space in the circle that the villagers had originally left for the bear and no one stopped me. They probably thought it was a part of the ceremony. The blushing bride just needed some space. The virgin needed reassurance. A moment. Just a bit of time. If they had only known what was going through my head.

I ran as fast as I could on my bare feet on the frozen ground. The clouds had cleared, and the moon showed me the way through the woods. I followed the trail of the reindeers and the moose. Each second, I expected the bear to be right behind me. There to catch me and drag me back to the clearing. But no one followed. I was alone. And yet I kept on running. I ran faster and further than I’d ever ran before, away from my village and the familiar sceneries.

I ran until my legs gave out. The moon and the stars were reflected on the surface of a small river where I collapsed into the cold mud. I splashed the sweat and tears from my face with the icy water. The only sound I could hear was my own heavy panting. Not even the nightbirds were singing. The silence was very strange after the drums and the chanting of my people. Something was wrong.

Then I saw it. A wolf, lying on his side near the river where some snow still remained. Not an uncommon sight in the forest, but I had never seen a wolf so large in all my life. Dark grey fur, long legs, bushy tail. Suddenly, I understood why the birds were gone. All of mother’s old warnings came back to me. The wolf is not always what he seems, she’d say. Not on a night such as this. But he was sprawled on the ground, and I noticed that its front paw was bleeding. A mighty hunter brought down by one silver dagger.

Drawn closer by mad curiosity, I approached the creature. He noticed me and followed my every move with his eyes. Such a small wound, I thought, and yet this beast had been tamed by it. A whimpering, shivering mess. Teary-eyed, and with snot running from its snout. Not like the monsters from mother’s stories nor like the creature I had just run away from. No, the wolf was different. Lean and wiry, yet clearly strong and agile had it not been wounded.

“Let me help you,” I said as I neared the wolf. I held my bloody palms up in a sign of peace. The wolf sniffed at the hands and licked the wounds there. I jumped back at the touch of the wet tongue on my skin, but stayed by the wolf’s side. He looked at me as if begging for help. Everything I had ever been told about these animals vanished from my mind. I did not think of all the lost women never to be seen again nor of the children of whom only bloody rags were found.

I reached out my hand to caress the wolf’s hurt paw. The second I touched his silky hair, however, he pounced on me, pushing me into the snowy moss. I instinctively looked for my knife, but as I was in nothing but the ceremonial fur coats, I had nothing to defend myself with. The wolf held me down and pushed his body against mine. I raised my right hand to strike at the beast, but I hesitated. In the moonlight, his face right above mine, the wolf looked so curious. Not quite an animal and not quite a man.

Neither of us moved for a very long time. Then we both shed our furs and ran further into the woods. Limping on all fours, crippled little monsters.