Two brothers

“Lord, don’t leave me alone. Shocked to have uttered this request aloud and realising that his voice had lost all strength, the charcoal maker from Walpersdorf looked up into the heavens and wiped the tears from his face. Shaken by crying fits, he had had to interrupt his work again and again, but now it was done. His kiln was no more.

Despair and grief had plunged him into a deep darkness. “For whom else, Michl?” But his question, probably addressed to God, remained unanswered.

One of the Bayers’ carts would come by one of these days and take the last sacks of coal. He was not worried about his wages because August Bayer had always treated him decently and paid him on time.

With tears in his eyes, he shouldered the last sack and looking back, remembered last summer when his wife Mathilde and little Trudel were still alive before he lost them to lung fever during the winter. After he had balanced the sack onto the pile, he shouldered the axe and other tools and made his way home, robbed of all joy in life.

Hopeful and hungry at the same time, he felt with his free, soot-blackened hand for the bag of provisions hanging from his belt; perhaps he had missed something. No, nothing… empty, as empty as his heart.

To reach his now lonely home before nightfall, he decided to take a shortcut through the forest.

At some point a few years ago, he had discovered the dried-up stream bed and identified an easily accessible path in it. Cautious as he was, however, he had never summoned the courage to follow the dried-up bed further than necessary because the deep forests in which it was lost had always held something sinister for him.

Every now and then, a stream pebble would break away under his footstep clattering against others, and finally disappear in the increasing darkness. In the blink of an eye, he thought he heard a long-drawn-out howl. Irritated, he stopped and listened to the imminent darkness.

“Wolves! Make your way home!” He quietly urged himself to greater haste. Not much longer and the dense forest would disappear under a cloak of impenetrable darkness.

Driven by fear and loneliness, his steps became more hurried. Sensing rather than seeing the parched course, he realised that fate had not been merciful to him at all, for it had kept the memory of the day of his loved ones’ deaths alive like a poisonous thorn deep in his flesh. Trapped in this infinite emptiness more and more often since that day, his thoughts returned even now to those hours when his little family was wiped out.

Suddenly, an unnatural silence fell over the forest; it seemed to him to symbolise his current situation. There was nothing left to live for, only the love of his charcoal kiln had kept him going, but that no longer existed either. At that moment, he decided that enough was enough.

“TAKE ME ALREADY!” he shouted, breaking the silence in the direction he suspected the white-grey hunters were.

Something moved towards him in the darkness. “Come here, I’m not resisting.” Sinking to his knees, resigned to his fate, in the hope of soon being reunited with his wife and daughter. He dropped his tools from his shoulder which fell to the ground with a metallic clang. A moment later, addressing the shadow, he muttered, “Get it over with.”

Only a few steps away from him he could make out the wolf, a huge animal! Slowly approaching, the long-legged hunter never took his eyes off him and stopped a hand’s breadth from his face. Finished with his life, Michl looked fearlessly into the yellow glowing eyes.

Without warning, a deep, inhuman growl reached his ear. Hypnotised, he gazed at the bared teeth of the superior hunter. Then something jolted him out of his mental rigidity− the beast did not attack him! In the amber eyes of his counterpart, he read a message he would never have thought possible or forgotten: Get out of here! Now!