I jumped down from Altan and flung myself through the door of our ger. Inside was hushed, the only sound the murmuring of Pa’s prayers over my grandma.
‘No,’ I cried. I was too late. That’s what I believed, until I reached Grandma’s bed and saw she was breathing. ‘I’m here, Grandma,’ I said.
Her eyelashes fluttered and in my mind’s eye, she turned midway on her journey to the stars, to wave goodbye.
‘No, Grandma, don’t go! I’ve brought your medicine,’ I told her.
I handed the plants to Pa. He shook his head.
‘Please, Pa! I know you can save her.’
Pa shook his head a second time, but now that I was home surges of adrenalin and hope made me defy him.
‘You’re going to get better,’ I said to Grandma. ‘You’ll see.’
Her eyelids spasmed. She moaned and after what seemed a great effort, opened her eyes.
‘You see,’ I said to Pa, elated. ‘Help her!’
He did as I asked. Perhaps it was Grandma’s smile that stirred him, her raised hand as she reached to touch mine.
Within the hour, he’d produced a concoction of gentian to ease the heat in Grandma’s lungs.
I helped her sip the medicine and then held her hand as she curled into sleep. I watched her, willing her better, willing the gentian to do its healing work. To do it well, do it quickly. I watched and listened. Her breathing was shallow but the colour in her cheeks was better. They weren’t flushed any more. I touched her wrist. Her pulse, though weak, was steady.
I stayed by her side that night. And to keep her warm crawled into her narrow bed and slept with my arm wrapped around her bony shoulder. While Pa worked over the stove in the centre of the ger, making a balm of juniper to ease the pain in Grandma’s joints, I slipped in and out of sleep.
In those moments betwixt and between, when I was not fully awake and yet not quite asleep, my mind revealed images that had eluded me in the day’s drama. That haze of dust on the horizon; dust like a shimmer of silk on the leaves of plants. How could I have missed it?
If it hadn’t been for my grandmother, I would have woken up and mentioned the dust to Pa there and then. I’d have talked about the trucks I’d seen that afternoon and the explosion in the mountains. If I hadn’t been preoccupied, willing Grandma to live and listening for gaps in her breathing, Pa and I would have talked about how best to protect the Sleeping Giant.
I was focused on Grandma alone. Would she survive the night? And if she did, how many more days before her spirit took flight?
I recalled what I’d said to Linet at the prospect of Nana Merrimore’s death. I’d used Grandma’s words, Grandma’s wisdom. Those words came to me again in the voice I knew so well: ‘What a baby chick sees in the nest it repeats when it grows up.’
I understood Linet’s reaction better now. Even though I had family around me and would never be as isolated as she was, I too wanted my grandmother to live. I wanted her here. Present. Always.
Pa often said that every living thing is spirit in earthly form, and in the end each and every one of us returns to the home we came from. I knew this and believed it. And yet the mere thought of Grandma’s death rendered me breathless.
I placed my face close to hers and with my hand on her chest followed the pit-patter of her heart. Our breath mingled, the rise and fall of my lungs moved in rhythm with hers until exhausted, I fell asleep.
*
I dreamed that night that I was a baby swaddled in my grandmother’s arms. Grandma, her dark mane of hair flecked with grey, gently rocked me as she sang a lullaby:
‘Little winter wolf,
Stay warm, grow strong.
When the moon shines in the afternoon sky and wolf-light is nigh,
We turn to wolfish ways and stay in the long grasses of the steppes.
Follow me, my grey-eyed cub,
Come and play with our sister wolves today.’
Grandma sang, and her face held me transfixed. I luxuriated in it, drinking it in. Her head tilted tenderly towards me as the red embers of the stove danced in her eyes. Love radiated from them. Love, which I guzzled like a thirsty horse does water.
Grandma sang her song to me and in the blink of an eyelid we were outside in wolf-light. My hands and feet became paws, the hair on my skin grew matted, enfolding my body in a blanket of fur – the dazzling white fur of a winter wolf. Grandma turned into a huge she-wolf while my ears, nose, mouth and teeth changed into those of a young adult. With her nose nuzzling mine, our bodies lurched and twisted while we danced in the late afternoon sun.
A feather tickled my memory. ‘Grandma, this has happened before, hasn’t it?’ I said.
‘All the time,’ came her reply.
‘I remember fragments as in a dream.’
Grandma licked a space on my forehead just above my eyes in the place Pa says my third eye resides. She touched it with her tongue and all at once I saw and remembered not just snatches of our time together in wolf-light but everything: moonlit summer evenings spent running with the wind; early mornings chasing my tail in dew-drenched grass and hunting – the joy of the pack.
Memories flooded through me and I lapped them up: the deft manoeuvring of the chase, the heady rush of capture, and finally the kill. Fangs in fur, a sharp shake to break the neck, then a feast of meat and blood. My grey eyes flashed diamond at the thrill of it.
‘This is who you are, Zula,’ Grandma said. ‘This is part of the gift you’ve always had: this, and your love for the man in the mountains, the Sleeping Giant. Tell your sisters, my winter wolf, that until the three of you use every morsel of what’s inside you, we shall never defeat today’s skin-walkers.’
Shadows lengthened in the dream, bringing a new scent that Grandma picked up: the odour of a fleet-footed hare. Eager to pursue it, she said: ‘Come with me, Zula, on this my last hunt. Follow me.’
I ran after my grandmother. She rocketed ahead and stopped. When she turned, a hare dangled in her mouth. This she gave me and as I tore its flesh into pieces and wolfed it down, Grandma spoke in the lilting voice I loved:
‘Be brave, Zula. Be fierce and have no mercy on those who would harm us and obliterate the sacred places we revere. I see with my wolf’s eyes that changes are already in motion to destroy you and your sisters. First they will annihilate your mentors, teachers and guides. They’ve done for me, for it is their dust that has hastened my end. They will come for your father. Be vigilant, my winter wolf. Farewell.’
‘Wait, Grandma! Wait.’ I wanted the dream never to end. I wanted her voice to continue talking, singing, laughing. ‘Another lullaby, Grandma,’ I pleaded. ‘Sing to me.’
I tried to keep her with me, tried to grab her and hold her close so that she wouldn’t go. But dreams have their own magic, their own rhythm and purpose. I knew, even as I begged Grandma to stay a while longer, that when I woke, her body next to mine would be cold.