He rested, with a full belly, and they drank steaming tea and a little vodka. Old Nikolaev and son Ivan talked their craft, where they should cut in the spring to come; and grandfather Orlov and his son, carpenters, talked of the porch they were going to repair down the street on the city hall. Grandmother Orlov sat in her chair which was always near the fire, tucked up with flowered pillows and quilts; the children—there were seven, among the prolific Orlovs— played by the warm hearth; and the women talked and stitched and invented patterns. "Tell stories," the children begged of any who would; drink passed about again, and it was that pleasant hour. The young would begin the tale-telling, and the elders would finish, for they had always seen deeper snows and stranger sights and colder winters.
"Tell us," little Ivan asked, bouncing against Andrei's knee, "ah, tell us about the hunt today." Andrei sighed, taking his arm from about Anna's waist, and smiled at the round little face and bounced Ivan on his foot, holding two small hands, joked with him, and drew squeals. He told the tale with flair and flourish, warmed to the telling while the children settled in a half-ring about his feet; his friend Ilya picked up a fresh block of pine and his favorite knife, a blade very fine and keen. . . . Most of all Anna listened, looked up at him when he looked down, her eyes very bright and soft. The wind still howled outside, but they were all warmed by each other, while the timbers cracked and boomed now and again with the cold. He told of the wild ride home, of the wolves. . . wolves, for something in him flinched at telling of the Wolf, and of the lost arrow. Little Ivan's eyes grew round as buttons, and when he came to the part about the closed gate, and how it had opened, the children all clapped their hands but Ivan, who sat with his eyes still round and his mouth wide agape.
"For shame," said his grandmother, sweeping the child against her quilt-wrapped knees. "You've frightened him, Andrei."
"I'm not afraid," the child exclaimed, and shrugged free to mime a bowshot. "I shall grow up and be a hunter outside the walls, like Andrei."
"What, not a carpenter?" his grandfather asked.
"No, I shall be brave," the little boy said, and there was a sudden silence in the room, a hurt, a loneliness that Andrei felt to the heart—alone of Gorodins, of hunters in this house, and a guest, living on parents' ancient friendship. He had never meant to steal a son's heart away. Then a timber cracked quite loudly, and the roof shed a few icicles and everyone laughed at the silence, to drive it away.
"That you shall be," said Ilya, and reached to ruffle the little boy's hair. "Braver than I. I shall make you a wolf, how will you like that?"
The child's eyes danced, and quickly he deserted to Ilya's knee, and hung there watching Ilya's deft blade peel fragrant curls from the pine—Hya, who was Anna's very likeness, woman-beautiful, whose delicate hands likewise had no aptitude for his father's work, but who made beauty in wood, most skilled in all Moskva. Andrei watched as the child did, and with amazing swiftness the wood took on a wolfs dire shape. "I remember wolves," grandfather Orlov began, and childish eyes diverted again, traveled back and forth from Ilya's fingers to the old man's face, delightfully frightened.
Andrei held Anna's hand, and drew her against him, a bundle of furs and skirts beside the crackling fire. He listened to this tale he had heard before, and grandfather Orlov's voice seemed far from him; even Anna, against his side, seemed distant from him. He watched Ilya's razor-edged blade winking in the firelight and more and more surely saw the wolf emerge from the wood. He heard the snow fall; he had never truly heardit before: it needed silence, and the sense of the night outside, as the flakes settled thicker and thicker like goose down upon the roof, and their voices went up against the wind and fled away into the cold.
They spoke each of wolves that evening, and he did not hear with all his heart, nor even shiver now. He watched at last as the stories ended, and Hya handed the wolf to the boy Ivan, with all the children crowded jealously about, a clamor swiftly dismissed for bed, blanket-heaped cots in the farthest room of the loft, and deep down mattresses and coziness and the rush of the wind at the shutters.
"Good night," he bade mother Katya and father Ivan, and "Good night," he kissed Anna. Then he and Ilya sought their room in the loft as well, bedded down together as they had slept since they were boys like Ivan, snugged down in piles of quilts and a deep down mattress.
"I was afraid," he confessed to Hya when they had been some time settled, side by side in the dark. "I should have told the boy."
"Boys grow up," Ilya said. "And boys grow wiser. Do not we all?" He thought of that, and lay there awake, staring at the beams and listening, hearing the wind above them, very close. It seemed to him that the down beneath him was like the snowdrifts, endlessly deep and soft; and if he shut his eyes he could see the blue darkness of the night and a ghost-white form which loped over the snows, with beauty in its running. Deep soft drifts, and lupine eyes full of night. . . a triangular face and blowing snow, and wolf-eyes holding secrets—a shape which coursed the winds, drifts which became other wolves, snow-cold and coursing down upon his hapless dreams like hunters upon prey.
Then he was afraid with a deep fear, remembering the arrow, for the foremost wolf bore a wound which dropped blood from its heart, and the droplets became ruby ice, which fell without a sound.
He woke the next morning in an inner silence deeper than the day before, though the timbers groaned, and snow had slid upon the roof, tumbling down the eaves, and this had wakened him and Ilya. "No hunting this day," said Ilya, hearing the wind. He said nothing, but listened to the storm.