Cold Wind Read Free

walls. She was still sleek with Maria, and this was the height of her yearly rite, not to be rushed.
    The sky was almost white now. Against it, bare twigs stood out like black lace. I couldn’t see the water from here but I could smell it. It softened the air, utterly unlike the arid cold of Korea, coarse as salt. Korea, where it was rumored that the Amur leopard was back in the DMZ.
    The snow crunched. Closer, so much closer than I expected; I’d been careless, too. She was not a buffalo calf.
    Moonlight spilled through the cloud and splashed like milk onto the snow and I saw the darker line in the gray-blue shadow of the steel sculpture.
    â€œOnca,” it said. “Come to me.”
    Recklessness burst in me, brilliant as a star. I stood, and left the safety of the trees.
    Moon shadow is steep and sharp. The tracks I made looked like craters. Her scent ripened, rich and round against the keen night air. I swallowed.
    â€œI can’t see you.” My voice was ragged, my breath fast.
    She stepped from the shadow.
    I moved closer. Closer still, until I could see the pulsing ribbon of artery along her neck, the snowflake on a thread of her hair. Strong hair, brown-black.
    â€œKneel,” she said. She wanted me beneath her in the snow. She would fold down on me and crush the breath from my lungs until my heart stopped and she could lap me up and run, run through the trees, safe, strong for another year.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    She went very still. I regarded her. After a moment I stepped to one side so she could see my tracks.
    She took a step backward. It wouldn’t be enough. It would never have been enough, even in the long ago.
    â€œWho are you?”
    â€œOnca.” My newest name, Panthera onca . “B’alam before that. And long, long ago, Viima.” She didn’t understand. I’d been a myth before she was born.
    I waited.
    She looked at the tracks again: a half moon and four circles. Unmistakable.
    She shot away, all deer now, straight for the trees lining Western Avenue. They always go for the trees.
    In the DMZ the water buffalo had been heavier, and horned, but only a buffalo, nothing like my equal. Deer Woman ran like a rumor, like the wind, but I was made for this, and though I hadn’t hunted one of my kind for an age, had thought I had taken the last a lifetime ago, she had never run from one like me. I was older. Much older. And at short range, cats are faster than deer.
    I brought her down with one swipe to the legs and she tumbled into the snow. She panted, tail flickering. Her hind legs tightened as she prepared to scramble up and run again. I stood over her. I could take her throat in my jaws and suffocate her until she was a heartbeat from death, then rip her open and swallow her heart as it struggled to beat, feel its muscular contraction inside me. The lungs next. Rich with blood. Slippery and dense. Then the shoulders.
    But she didn’t move, and I didn’t move, and she was a woman again.
    â€œWhy?” Her hoarse voice seemed more human now. She didn’t know why she was still alive.
    I didn’t, either. “Cold Wind. That was my first name, before people crossed the land bridge and I followed. Or perhaps I crossed and they followed, I forget. You think you’re old…”
    I looked at the steel sculpture: huge, undeniable, but rust would eat it as surely as leaves fall in winter and dawn breaks the night open and spills light afresh on the world, and I would still be here. Alone. I had killed them all, because that was what I did.
    â€œGet up,” I said.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œSo you can run.”
    Surely she wasn’t weary of life, not yet, but she began to lift her jaw, to offer her throat. Cats are faster than deer. I would catch her, and as young as she was, she felt it: this is who we were, this is what we did. It was the old way.
    â€œRun. I won’t kill you. Not this year.”
    Silence. “But