hears rustling on the line as Clive digs through the office paperwork. “It just says it’s a high-density polyethylene.”
Tom hangs up. The water not only looks toxic, it smells it, too. He cups some of it in his palm and lifts it to his nose. It smells like plastic. Later, a Google search of the contents of the foam will tell him that he has just dumped a hundred pounds of butane, benzene, vinyl acetate, and other cancer-causing toxins into a river source that is certified as a Sustainable Destination by the Norwegian government and which nourishes thousands of plant, aquatic, and animal species.
To think he wanted this project to be eco-friendly.
When he rises from the river, something near the trees catches his eye. A woman. Not Maren, Derry, or Aurelia, either. Someone else. The same woman he saw before. But when he looks again she’s gone.
“Hello?” he shouts, glancing through the trees. “Anyone there?”
He stares into the empty space where he’s sure he saw her just before. His skin crawls.
As he walks back to Granhus he has the distinct feeling that he is being watched.
* * *
—
It’s evening, and Aurelia’s reading Gaia stories from her father’s old journal of Norse folktales. Tonight Gaia has chosen the story about the man who transforms into a wolf, and despite her best efforts to direct Gaia to a less Gothic, child-friendlier story, Gaia won’t be placated. “The wolf story, Mumma,” she insists. Aurelia sighs and tries to scan the story for the passage she needs to rephrase.
Once upon a time, there was a carpenter who suffered many losses. Many say his losses were caused by a curse put upon him by a witch; others declared his losses a consequence of his father’s tyranny, for his father ruled over many lands.
In time the carpenter took a wife, who bore him children, and he was happy. He would rise before the sun and venture into the fields, tending to his crops, feeding his flocks, and taking his ax and saw and crafting the treasures of the forest into thrones, cradles, and fine tables that villagers and sometimes princes came to buy. At night, he would return to his cottage long after the moon had risen high above the trees, where he would find his wife and children asleep in the beds he had made for them.
One night, however, he returned home to find his wife and children—
“Find his wife and children what, Mumma?” Gaia asks, straining to see the words on the screen. The story has it that the poor guy returned home to find his wife and children mauled to death by a brown bear, their blood strewn across the walls and their faceless remains on the floor. She scrolls quickly past that part.
—to find his wife and children gone. He had no idea where they had gone, but he knew they would never return.
“But why, Mumma? Why would they leave him?” Gaia asks tearfully.
“It’s just a story, darling,” she answers.
The carpenter went to work the next day, and the day after that, but his heart was heavier than the moon. His tears flowed from his cheeks to the earth and turned into a glacier. His sorrow became a new wind that swept across the earth. And then, anger seized him, and because anger is twinned by no element, it changed his blood and bones. One day, he awoke to find his hands had become paws, his face had elongated into a long snout with pointed ears, and behind him swept a thick bushy tail. He had become a wolf.
No longer able to use his tools, the carpenter had to flee his home and roam the wilds of Scandinavia. It is said that, even now, on a full moon, he howls for his wife and children, wishing they might return home.
Once both girls are fast asleep, Aurelia heads outside to lay bowls of water near the river. When Tom told her about the dead animals that had drunk from the toxic river she was horrified. Tom had already looked into ways that they might undo any further damage to the wildlife, such as adding purifiers to the river to counter the effects of the foam compound, but there was little they could do immediately. The contractors had been notified, and a new culvert had been ordered—for now, she can only make these small supplications of water outside in the hope that some animals may be spared an agonizing death.