Caleb awoke with the musky scent of a late summer morning rain melting through his open window. For several moments, he remained there in bed, enjoying the warmth of the covers and the sweet smell of damp earth, with the faintest aroma of hydrangeas. He could faintly see the edged silver clouds through the window, slowly acquiring a shadow of gold and peach.

Sunrise was his favorite time of day.

At last he rose, stretching heartily, brushing a curled-up dead spider from the old blanket, and swung his legs to the floor. He took his time, favoring the left knee. After the stroke last year, his knee would go numb at random, buzzing like elderly mosquitos, before slowly reacquiring its feeling. He was lucky a bum knee was all the injury he suffered from a stroke that severe.

Slowly and methodically, as he did every morning, he got himself showered, dressed, and breakfasted. He ate stale oats in a bowl just barely soaked with water mixed with powdered milk; real milk was a luxury out in the woods, and spoiled too quickly. He read another chapter of his partner Frankie’s book before laying it down and preparing for the day’s work.

Officially, he was listed as a lumberjack, a woodsman, though it was hardly his sole mode of income. He scrounged the woods and brought back anything he could find that was useful, anything that the city folk in nearby Froδi could use. Frankie picked it up at night and dropped off food, fuel, and other supplies that Caleb could use for the next week or so. They’d arranged it eight years ago. System had worked fine since, with the only interruption being Caleb’s stroke last September.

He wandered to the drop point as the clouds finally grew to their full luster with the rise of the sun and inspected the bulletin posted with the lockbox. Frankie insisted on locking up the supplies, as a precaution against anyone who might be wandering the woods and stealing Caleb’s wages. Caleb was of the opinion that anyone who’d steal from the stash would be the sort needing it more than him, but Frankie could be incorrigible at times.

He smiled. Incorrigible. Frankie had put that word in his book. He’d have to leave a mark for him. It was a great word.

There were a few special requests on the bulletin. Nothing particularly rare; a few herbs and grasses that were overcharged at the pharmacy, a few select pieces of wood for Darla the whittler, a piece of bone for a handmade knife, and a woven rope for Ståle, along with his regular tithe of firewood. He could get the rope started that night after everything had been brought in; the others should be no trouble. He left the list where it was on the bulletin with a note on when he expected the goods to be ready - he didn’t need to bring the list with him as a reminder. He’d remember.

He set out immediately to find the herbs requested of him from the groves he knew they grew in. Never anything illegal - Frankie kept a running tally of how often he was asked for marijuana, and a separate tally for the number of times the asker had defended their request with “it’s for medicinal purposes, I swear!” Caleb wanted no trouble, however unlikely it would have come calling even if he had supplied the drug. The most he was willing to risk was the ire of Stacy the pharmacist.

Hours later, he returned with a light heart and a far heavier pack than that he’d brought in. Not only had he found the materials to make the rope for Ståle and the whittling wood, he’d come across a sharp piece of bone for the knife request. And he’d come across a new bush of huckleberry to boot. He hadn’t the room for the firewood, but he had a stack at home to make up the shortfall for just a fortuitous occasion as this.

As he came back within sight of his cabin, he heard, off in the distance, the low melodic tones of a wolf call in the forest. He paused and listened with a worried ear, his good mood fading. It had been many years since a pack had taken up residence in the woods of Froδi, and the last time had proven very dangerous for the town, and for Caleb in particular.

He strode inside and laid out his labors on the rickety dining table, a gift from Darla back when she was still an apprentice to the carpentry career and before she’d decided to work the wood for the sake of art rather than industry. He’d given her seeds for a fine herb garden in return, near immediate after the gift had been given. Caleb never liked the feeling of a thing hanging over him.

The lockbox, on the table after he’d received it that morning, laid empty and demanding. He packed away all the bulletin requests and went outside briefly for a handful of his set-against firewood, against the wall. He paused and focused his eyes through the twilight slurry. Was there something moving among the trees? Lurching in fits and starts. A wounded member of the wolf pack, perhaps - at the least, a creature Caleb had no desire to tangle with.

He had to drop off the lockbox soon, before full night fell. He’d not be a walking target for the wolf pack if he could manage it. Sealing the box shut, shouldering it on his right and carrying the firewood under his left, he angled to make it through the door and paused only to bar the door and lock the bar. A simple deadbolt wouldn’t bar a wolf or, woe betide him, a bear, but the bar would prove at least a slight obstacle.

He set off on the well-trodden path to the road, a two-and-a-half mile walk, a road that, thankfully, was driven by no other than Frankie on his nightly drops. The only other soul that had once driven it had been Martin, the old, withered-hair grandfather who had sold to Caleb the cabin, and his wildfire daughter Stacy, who had come once to demand the cabin back. She claimed hotly that Caleb had tricked her father into enacting the sale, a loss so painful to him that he had left Froδi in his pickup and never returned; Caleb could only say that Martin had looked more tired than a week of sleep could fix, and had had to be reminded to take the money in return. Caleb remained devoutly respectful to Stacy thereafter, despite her outburst, out of respect to the man that had given him his now beloved home.

He received a surprise as he neared the bulletin; Frankie’s van, silver-and-rust-colored, parked on the end of the road with the headlights brightly on. He saw Frankie’s hand waving out the window as soon as the headlights illuminated his approaching form. With a bemused smile, Caleb set down his burden next to the bulletin and went to the back, where the doors were opened before he could even knock.

There was Frankie - old, bald, black, sharply muscled, half his face taken up by a smile that Caleb alone ever saw. “My woodsman!” Frankie exclaimed as he jumped out the back of the van, and the two shared an embrace.

“My courier,” Caleb returned when they broke apart, with a crooked smile of his own.

Frankie burst into husky laughter. “Another good word, yes? You learned it from my book, don’t deny it!”

“I’d’n’t dream of it,” Caleb chuckled, a rare sound out of him - though he had to admit, any voice was a rare sound from him. “You brought beer with you?”

“You think I drive without it?” came the retort, and belying his age, Frankie hopped onto the back of the van, sitting with his legs dangling, and pulled out a pack.

Caleb gratefully accepted the offered bottle, but paused before taking his own seat. The sky was darkening to an abyssal ocean blue, and the howls of the wolves were deep on his mind. “We’ll have to inside,” he said, inclining his head to the living quarters Frankie had set up within the van. “There’s a wolf pack hereabouts. Heard their song tonight.”

Frankie’s smile was replaced with worry as he glanced out at the gloom. “Aye, good thought,” he agreed, and climbed to his knees to take a seat inside. Once Caleb climbed up, he shut the doors behind them and clicked on the bare bulb bolted to the ceiling, wired to a car battery. There were enough batteries wired to various amenities in Frankie’s truck to power a whole fleet of cars.

“You best stay the night, then,” Frankie said after another glance outside through the van window, peering through the coffee-colored curtains like a worried neighbor. “Help me unfold the bed, then.”

Caleb set down his beer and the two of them wrestled the rusty iron fold-out bed from the forest-leaf couch, occasionally brushing away cobwebs and the indignant spiders that came out of them. “Hope you don’t mind sleeping with some extra company,” Frankie grinned at him as they flattened the foldout and chased away the eight-legged friends.

“I can’t be counting on it?” Caleb asked, slightly surprised.

His shoulders brushed Frankie’s, and the other man leaned into the contact. Something in his face had changed - a sad kind of weariness that alarmed Caleb more than the wolfsong.

“Have a beer,” Frankie said, and pushed his belayed bottle back into his hands. He made to sit on the other seat in the camper van, but Caleb sat on half of the foldout, his back against the wall, giving Frankie a very determined look. Frankie knew the look well enough to sigh and climb onto the bed next to him.

The two popped open the bottles and drank, though Caleb took only a sip and Frankie downed half the bottle before setting it upright. Caleb rarely liked the taste of beer and only ever drank to be sociable, but something about Frankie’s demeanor made the bitter water all the more sour on his tongue.

He put the bottle aside and sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the wall. Beside him, Frankie took another swig, not as deep a draught as before.

“I’m glad to see you tonight,” Caleb said.

“‘Sbeen a while,” Frankie replied.

“Any news?”

In the corner of his eye, Caleb saw Frankie tilt and then slightly shake his head. “Not much,” he delayed. “Alda ain’t given birth yet. Probably all the better, since Einar hasn’t come back from the city yet. Last they heard of him, he was in Oslo trying to round up some family members for ‘help.’ Seems he hasn’t rounded up enough ‘help’ to support the family yet.”

Caleb grunted.

“Ståle’s still hung up on his fool contraption,” Frankie continued stubbornly. “The rope you’ve been making has helped, but now he’s been asking me to skip on up to Byunsberg for some pulleys and levers and whatnot. Startin’ to look like a half-melted cake made of wood struts in his backyard, now. Not even his wife knows what he’s planning with it.”

Again, Caleb only grunted.

Frankie pursed his lips before doggedly plowing on, “Stacy’s been after my case for all the herbs you’ve been sending to town. She wants folk to come down and buy her pills for their headaches and whatnot, when a cup of your willow tea soothes them just fine. She’s been tryin’ to get folk to stop asking me for supplies, but no one’s listenin’. Be careful of her, she’s on a warpath.”

Another good word Caleb would likely read in Frankie’s book. But still he said nothing.

“Alda, and Einar, and, ah, well,” Frankie cast about for his next tale. “Eva’s still goin’ on about Anne, it’s a wonder the rest of town ain’t cottoned on to them. Her mother talks about how they’re such ‘good friends’ and it makes me want to hurl sometimes, after what she said about us, you remember?”

“What’s the news, Frankie?” Caleb asked again, gently.

“Ain’t no news in a nothing town like Froδi, you know that.”

Caleb turned and looked Frankie in the eye. “What’s your news?” he asked. His voice, always rough from disuse, was quiet.

Frankie sighed again and passed the beer bottle from finger to finger. “Went to Byunsberg not long ago,” he mumbled, glancing at Caleb and away again like he was confessing something shameful. “Had this rash on my chest that looked pretty nasty. Well, turns out it’s nastier than I thought.”

“What kind of nasty?” Caleb’s voice was a whisper.

Frankie sighed. “A cancer kind of nasty.”

Silence grabbed at the camper van then, a silence where Caleb tried to remember how to breathe through suffocating shock.

Frankie stared down at his beer bottle. “Melanoma. All over my chest and creepin’ up my left hand.” He paused, then lifted the hand to show Caleb. Dark splotches patterned his palm.

“You ain’t gonna die, Frankie?” Caleb’s voice shook.

Frankie stared down at the floor. “Dunno. It’s treatable, they said. I gotta go to their clinic for a while. They wanted to keep me there when they found it, but I said I had to scrape up the money and came back to get s’more jobs done. ‘V’been mustering up the guts to tell you for a week now.”

Caleb felt like pins and needles were pricking the edges of his brain, waiting for some feeling to come back. “You ain’t gonna die?” he asked again.

“Dunno, Cal.” Frankie’s voice was tired. “But I’ll have to go away. Can’t get treated nowhere else than Byunsberg, maybe even all the way in Oslo. And it won’t be a day-trip, neither. I’ve no idea how long I’ll be away, Cal.”

He turned his face to the side, leaning away from Caleb as though reaching for a beer bottle, though he could have been aiming to slide off the foldout with the same motion. “That’s why I…” his voice broke. “Why I don’t wanna sleep here. Maybe it’ll make it easier. I might as well be gone already. Maybe we’ll have an easier time…”

Caleb’s breath returned, and he leaned forward to put a gentle, but imperturbable hand on Frankie’s shoulder.

“You ain’t gone yet,” he said hoarsely. “You’re here.”

Frankie flinched under his hand and turned a broken gaze to Caleb. “Not much longer, now,” he whispered. “Won’t be back for a year, or maybe forever.”

“But now, you’re here,” Caleb insisted, and wrapped his partner in a hug.

Frankie returned the embrace after only a moment of hesitation, clinging like a drowning man. Caleb felt as though his grasp was just as desperate, as tears leaked out of his eyes and onto Frankie’s flannel. He thought he felt his own shoulder growing heavy with dampness. “You’re here,” he whispered hoarsely, and buried his face into Frankie’s shoulder, inhaling his cinnamon-and-fresh-dirt scent, the woolen bristles of the old flannel, and clung to him the tighter. They fell back onto the bed, still clutching each other, shaking with sobs, until they found what sleep they could.

Caleb awoke at dawn with his hands still entwined with Frankie, who was sleeping limply before him. He could see the rise of the sun through the gap in the curtains above them, crowning the evergreens and scattering a flock of crows before it like heralds. He looked down at his partner with the gold light of morning, and he seemed - not stronger, still fragile, still shaking at the approach of the beast he’d have to fight, but more substantial now, more solid. The light made him glow, and Caleb’s love for him made him look sacred.

Frankie woke when the bright colors had dropped from the edge of the clouds. He didn’t smile at the sight of Caleb, but his spruce-bark eyes filled themselves with the sight of him. “Ain’t we fools,” he whispered, not taking his eyes off him.

“Ain’t we fools,” Caleb hushed back, “an’ the better for it.”

Caleb was reluctant to leave Frankie’s van until the afternoon, when his partner insisted on his transportation runs - he only needed a few more before he could afford the week of treatments in Byunsberg. As an afterthought, he grabbed the latest list for the bulletin and gave it to Caleb before pushing him out the door. “Got our livelihoods to scavenge,” he insisted.

“I’ll be leavin’ you cash in the lockbox,” Caleb said. “I got some left over.”

“Prob’ly eaten by squirrels by now.”

“I’ll have ‘em barf it up and send it your way anyway.”

“Would I even want it then?” Frankie laughed.

“Wouldn’t be you gettin’ it, the folks at Byunsberg will.”

“They’ll hold up the little spit-chunks an’ ask, ‘why this smell like chewed nuts?’”

“Tell ‘em it’s a woodsy blessing. The li’l buggers’ll stop chewing their roof for the next month.”

“Only ‘cause they’ll be swarming your house. Every squirrel for a hundred miles’ll come running to avenge their barfing brethren.”

They shared a chuckle, but when Frankie brought his hand up to cover his mouth, Caleb could see the dark blotches on his skin. The laughter died quickly.

Caleb set down the now-empty lockbox and took Frankie’s hand. “You damn van-rat,” he whispered, and kissed his knuckles. “Don’t you leave before lettin’ me know.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Frankie said, and squeezed his hand before retreating into his camper van.

It was a late start to the day, by Caleb’s usual reckoning, but the list was relatively short for today. A few herbs for Alda’s tea and some more for Rakel, Ståle’s wife. How the two of them had come together was as mysterious as anything, with Rakel being the most ground-to-earth person Caleb had ever met and Ståle’s passions swinging like a clock between interest to interest. Word around town said they’d met when one of Ståle’s mechanisms exploded half her apartment wall, and he’d fallen in love with her as she’d screamed him halfway across the country. The two seemed to love each other as much as any couple, but Rakel was always asking for headache relief herbs from Caleb, and he was certain Ståle’s wooden contraption in his backyard wasn’t helping matters.

He tossed the lockbox on his front yard and headed straight into the forest, determined to get his errands done before nightfall. The wolf pack was still out there, and he wanted to be safe in his cabin when they began their hunt.

The herbs he found easily enough, and he stopped by his cabin to drop them off and to pick up his axe. Late in the afternoon, approaching evening, he found a dead tree that he chopped to make firewood, glad he wouldn’t have to put his axe to living wood today. His mind was still full of Frankie. Cut down in his prime… no, no, he’ll pull through...

He was hauling back the wood to his cabin when something made him pause. Something amiss had caught his eye, though he wasn’t certain what it was yet.

Carefully, he set his firewood bundle down as he eyes swept the scene. The lockbox was at the edge of the cabin’s clearing, his fireplace was yet dormant, he was late in setting his evening fire to warm the night, bundle of firewood huddled at the cabin wall, scattered next to the door…

The door. The door he’d barred the night before. The bar was still there, but the bottom had splintered, as though something had forcefully pushed its way through the planks.

Caleb reached for his axe, and approached the door quietly.

A few clicks and springs, and the lock fell away. He unbarred the door and opened it slowly, to keep the hinges from creaking. A trail of twigs led from the splintered opening to his living area, in front of the fireplace. He had a couch there, a dust-colored hand-me-down from Einar and his family, and it was too tall for him to see who or what laid there now. He inched closer, the axe raised in one hand, and craned his neck.

A man laid on the couch. One of the strangest men Caleb had ever seen.

His hair was the color of old grass, and tangled with burrs and twigs, tied back with what looked like a plant stem, tight enough to make his already slanted face appear more angular. In fact, the whole man was made of sharp corners and tight angles, with pointed elbows, knotted knees, and sharp finger- and toenails, like a crows’ beak on each finger. His skin was the color of oak, his garments rags, little better than a hastily sewn bedsheet with holes ripped for the various limbs.

One of those limbs, his right leg, was elevated, bent in a V and leaning against the couch wall, wounded sharply and messily on the outside of the knee. Caleb saw another wound on the man’s hip, bandaged poorly, with a hand overlaying it protectively. He was breathing shallowly and quickly, his eyes closed as sweat trickled over his eyelids.

Caleb lowered the axe as he slowly comprehended the situation. A man had broken into his cabin. A desperately wounded man had burst through his door and flung himself upon Caleb’s couch and passed out.

Filling the lockbox would have to wait.

He kept the axe close as he moved throughout the house, though once he had his bandages and first aid kit assembled, he carried it in the crook of his arm, not terribly worried about defending himself against so sorely wounded a man. Once he had everything together, plus a fire in the fireplace warming up a pot of water, he knelt next to the couch and carefully pulled the wounded knee towards him. It looked quite fresh, with bits of the man’s clothing frayed into the wound and pus leaking out. Messy, like as not to be infected. Dipping a rag into the lukewarm water, Caleb began carefully brushing the wound, trying to clean the debris away.

As soon as the water touched the man, his eyes leaped open and he lurched forward. “Durweard, cur!” He cried like an eagle’s scream. “Pay for thy blood with thy life!” He clawed forward at an imaginary foe and cried out again, this time in pain - the makeshift bandage at his hip stained red.

Caleb pressed his arm against the man’s chest and forced him down. “Quiet now,” he commanded. “No curs here. Quiet down.”

The man was breathing heavily, his eyes flicking fast through all the room and on Caleb’s face. “Who art thou?” he demanded, the force of his question weakened by his hoarse panting. “Where am I?’

“I’m Caleb. You’re in my cabin. You broke in. You’re injured.” Caleb only ever shed his bluntness around Frankie; everyone else always needed things spelled out for them. “Sit down and I’ll tend your wounds.”

The man continued breathing hard, but made no more vocal protest. When Caleb brushed his knee wound with the rag again, he looked back to see he’d passed out again.

It didn’t take long for the wound on the knee to be cleaned, and as Caleb prepared to dress it, he saw the water simmering above the fire. He took out a small cup and poured in some crushed herbs he knew would fight any potential infection. Once he’d dabbed the concoction on the man’s knee, he dressed it with a tight bandage, one of his rare city purchases from back in the day.

Next he turned his attention to the hip wound. Gently, he lifted the man’s hand away from the area and peeled off the makeshift bandage. Blood oozed out from a gash on the hip. Again, Caleb repeated his earlier procedure, cleaning the wound, patting it with the herbal disinfectant, and wrapping it in a new bandage.

When he’d finished, he turned to see the man’s eyes on him. Some of the panic had receded from his face, but his pupils were shrunk in the flickering firelight.

“Who art thou?” he asked again, his voice husky from pain.

“I’m Caleb,” Caleb repeated, wringing out the rag. “You?”

The man blinked, seeming dazed. “Thou hast healed me,” he said, sounding almost disbelieving. “Yet I breached thine abode, without thy allowance.”

Oh boy, Caleb thought. Frankie had written a book once where the characters spoke like this man was speaking now. It’d been a headache to read. “So?” he grunted as he put away his first aid kit. “You needed help. Don’t care that much about the door.”

Caleb’s axe, laid on the floor against the corner of the couch, was in his vision as he put his things away. He saw as the handle of the axe, whittled by Darla and given to him before he’d ever bought this cabin, when it curved like rubber up in the air to meet the man’s weak reaching grasp. He hoisted the axe up, curved handle and all, and brandished it one-handed at Caleb. “How knowest I thee shalt not injure me again? I know thee not. Thou hast no reason to love me.”

Caleb stared at the axe in the man’s hand, answering without taking his eyes off his warped tool. “Put the damn thing down. I ain’t gonna hurt you after I took all the time to bandage you up. Won’t want you bleeding all over my couch, more than you are already.”

The man’s brow creased, as though he was having as much difficulty parsing Caleb’s words as Caleb was with his. His hand was shaking with fatigue. He opened his mouth as though to continue the argument, but a moment later he closed it and laid the axe against the couch.

Caleb took it hesitantly, still staring at the curved handle, before numbly holding it out to the man again. “You mind fixing this?”

The man stared at the axe, and at Caleb. The axe handle twitched a few times before it straightened out. A moment later, the man fell back, unconscious again.

“Oh boy,” Caleb said it out loud this time. It took a long while for him to take his eyes off his guest and his axe before he finally stood up to pack the herbs away in the lockbox.