The first full moon of winter rose over a landscape made smooth by a cover of crisp white snow. Harsh lines were made gentle, deep colors were made soft, and noises were dampened by the snow. The flakes had fallen until about the time the moon began to rise; then the clouds had parted and drifted away, making room in the night sky for its sovereign. The full disc sailed higher and higher in its jewel-strewn setting, sending down gentle beams of pale light onto the fresh snow.
Its light outlined a set of footprints in the deep smoothness, making them stand out dark and harsh with shadows. The moon followed the prints out from the shelter of the forest and up and down hills, once losing them briefly in an ice-bordered stream before finding and following them once more through the isolated whiteness.
As the moonlight grew closer to the source of the tracks, the crunching of snow underfoot could be heard, and a quiet, desperate sobbing. Desperate indeed, for who else would be out in the bitter cold except one who was desperate – whether desperate to get away from something or desperate to find something, it made no difference. Only one who truly had no choice would be out tonight under the first full moon of winter.
The moon’s beams moved closer. The sound of the footsteps had stopped and only the sound of the sobs remained. Gently, the light from the moon stole over a dark figure sprawled in the white snow. It was barely moving, barely able to make the heart-wrenching sounds issuing from it.
The beams paused and lingered over the form. A girl, or perhaps a young woman, with wild and tangled dark hair flowing out over the snow and a woolen cloak that was not nearly warm enough for the cold of the night, lay front-down in the snow with her head turned to the side. She looked exhausted and nearly frozen, but still her sobs came quietly.
The moonlight stayed on her, trying without success to warm her; the sun had that power but the moon did not. So lovely did she look, and so sad, that the moon was moved. Quietly, it whispered to her.
“Girl, why are you out in this cold night of mine? Why do you cry as though your heart has broken?”
The girl was silent when she heard the voice. She knew there was no one except for her in the winter wilderness and was puzzled.
“Girl, if you do not arise, you will freeze to death and I can do nothing to save you.”
The male voice urging her to get up was a gentle one, full of concern.
The girl had no one left to feel concern for her, and thought that perhaps she was dreaming this in one last dream.
“Girl, there is a cave nearby that I have soared over many scores of times. It will shelter you from the cold. You must rise now and go to it. My light will lead you there.”
The girl slowly moved, climbing from her icy bed of snow and staggering to her numbed feet. The moonlight that had paused on her began to move again slowly.
The girl spoke. “If this is a dream, then I will go along with it. If I have fallen asleep in the snow, I will not awake again in this world, and I might as well go where the dream takes me. It will surely be better than where I am now.” She stumbled after the moonbeams, following the path they made.
The cave they led to was deep, with an autumn’s worth of leaves drifted in it, and sticks near the entrance that could be used for a fire. The girl shook her head, and said, “It is a miraculous dream indeed that leads me to a place where I can get warm and sleep softly in a bed of leaves without freezing.”
The moon’s light hung over the spot while the girl took out a flint and steel and made a small fire to thaw her feet and hands. The moon watched, curious, as she pulled a little tin cup out from under her cloak scooped it full of snow and put it by the fire to melt into water. Finally, it spoke again.
“Girl, you clearly want to live. Why were you out in the cold of the winter’s night, alone? Is there no one who would worry about you?”
“No one. I am alone, lost, and starving. My family died of a plague in the autumn, my fiancée died in an accident, and I was turned out of my home to make way for a strong family with many sons that could work the land and turn a profit for the landowner. He offered me a place in his household, but I knew what happened to young women in his home, and I turned him down. He sent me away with only the clothes on my back just as the first flakes of winter snow began to fall. Since then I have been wandering, looking for somewhere to spend the winter where I might not freeze.” She shrugged. “It seems I was not successful, for it must be my last dream in this life that gives me this shelter.”
She put a few herbs for tea into the cup of snow melt and moved it closer to the little fire. “At least my last dream is of warmth and someone caring about me.” She looked up and around. “Who am I dreaming of – who speaks to me?”
The moon had been watching her carefully as she spoke, and she had captured his heart with her strength and her beauty and her spirit.
“Take my hand and pull,” he said. There was the faint outline of a hand in the closest beam of moonlight. Amused at her dream, she reached up, took the hand and pulled.
As she pulled, the man in the moon stepped down from his throne, down through the heavens spattered with bright stars, down into the snow and cold of the winter’s night to stand before the young woman.
She gasped, started by his sudden appearance. He was as pale and fair as the moon itself, dressed in silver and palest of golds, handsome and gentle and smiling at her. He reached out a careful hand and touched her face. His hand felt warm and real, and she was startled, and said, “OH! You’re real!”
“I am the moon,” he replied, “I am indeed real. You have seen me for all of your life, sailing my disc through the heavens. I have not seen you until today, for the world is full of things to see, and I think that is my loss.”
He took her hand, and pulled her down to sit again by the fire. They talked long into the night, as the disc overhead moved along its usual path without its master, so accustomed was it to its course.
As it hovered on one horizon and the sun pushed impatiently at the opposite one, the moon looked up at the sky and said, “I must take my leave now, or my ship will sail on without me. Over the next big rise, about a day’s walk in the direction you were going, lies an abandoned house. No one has lived there in many a year that I have seen as I look over the area in my travels. Go there, make a home for yourself. I will come and see you again if I may, when my disc is full again.”
The girl smiled at him, and said, “I will, and thank you for your kindness, man of the moon,”
He smiled back at her, kissed her hand, and as the last light from the disc he rode left the sky, he stepped up onto it and was gone.
When the sun rose and tried to warm the chilly landscape, the girl left the cave and followed the path the moon had told her to take. Sure enough, just as dusk filled the sky, she came upon a little abandoned cabin made of stone with a sturdy roof of slate that, while clearly abandoned for some time, had withstood the elements well. The door was hanging off its hinges and there had been four-legged residents over the years, but the fireplace still worked and soon the girl was once more huddled by a small fire, drinking her thin herb tea and eating the few crumbs of food she had left.
When the moon rose, she went out and looked up at it.
“I see you have found the place. Good.” The man in the moon spoke to her.
Although she had been expecting it, she was still started by the voice which came from no where.
“I did, but now I must ask another favor. I will need food to live. I have nothing left – I ate the last bits tonight. Is there anything nearby to eat?”
The moon cast his gaze over the landscape. It was truly isolated, with no houses or humans for scores of miles. Finally he spied something that might help – a goose that had been injured and could not fly away with the rest of the flock. The moon told the girl where to find it, and that night she ate roast goose and collected the first feathers for a bed.
Each night the moon spoke with the girl, and helped her, although she was very self-sufficient and needed little. He grew to enjoy her company. Since it was winter and the land was resting, his duties were small and he spent more and more time speaking with the young woman.
On the night of the second full moon of winter, he stepped down once again from his sailing throne and joined the girl by her fire. She was making the little place into a home with the help of the axe and saw and hammer she had found, left behind by the previous occupants. They talked all night, and she was as sad as he was when he told her he must go and stepped up into the sky once more.
The third full moon he was there again. He told her of grains growing nearby that she might glean seed from to plant, and some vegetables that remained, tough and half-wild, in the remains of the old garden. Spring was coming, and she must be ready.
“I will not see you again, for winter is nearly done and I am the winter’s moon,” he said. “Spring, summer, and autumn are busy times for the earth and I must help with much. I will come and visit you again with the first full moon of winter when the earth rests once more. Fare you well.” He smiled, and kissed her gently on the cheek, and stepped back up into the sky, leaving her with tears streaming down her face and her heart aching.
The young woman busied herself with making a life for herself in the little cabin. With the melting of the snow, she found growing things to eat and a few wild descendants of the previous owner’s livestock to tame. She was busy all spring and summer and autumn, and while she missed her man from the moon, she was so tired at night that she fell asleep before the sun had fully set most nights.
The moon glanced down at her once in a while, but he too was busy helping the earth which was burgeoning with new life in the growing seasons.
When the first snows of winter drifted down, the young woman smiled, and when the first full moon of winter rose in a deep dark sky full of twinkling stars, she stood waiting.
The man stepped down from the moon and into her arms, each with eyes only for the other. They clung to each other, and he told her, “What life you have brought to this place. It is beautiful and bountiful where once it was sad and barren.”
“Like me,” she answered, “I had nothing, but thanks to you, I have a life and a home.”
That night the man in the moon did not return to his pale throne, and it placidly sailed on without him, following its well worn path through the heavens.
He stayed until the last full moon of winter fill the sky. “I must leave you now, fairest one, but I shall return once more with the first full moon of winter.” And he stepped up and away, leaving her with tears in her eyes.
But she would not be alone. At the first full moon of autumn, she bore a son, as pale and gentle as his father, and held him up for the moon’s light to fall on him. “This is your son. Come soon and let him know his father.”
The moon had to wait until it was time, but then he hurried down to hold his son, standing on the crisp white snow and laughing with delight. The woman and the infant laughed with him.
And so the years passed. The little cabin was soon bursting with sweet, gentle sons, big and placid like their father. They helped their mother and smiled at the world.
Each of the sons had been born in the autumn under the light of the full moon. One year, the child was late. It stayed within its mother’s belly all through the autumn, growing larger and heavier with each passing day. The first snows of winter began and still the child clung within the mother. Finally, on the night of the first full moon of winter, the woman went to stand beneath the night sky to welcome her husband home. As she stood there, her pains began and as her husband stepped down into the winter night, the child was born. The father caught the infant as she slipped from her mother’s womb. He held his daughter up into the light from the silvery disc over head and said, “Welcome, daughter of the moon.” She was born with a head full of dark thick hair like her mother’s, not pale like her father’s and brother’s, and she howled loudly her indignation at being born. He laughed at his spirited child, and took her and her mother inside.
The girl was a stormy child, wild and spirited. She was bright and beautiful and a torment to her gentle brothers. Her mother sought to tame her wild ways in the spring and summer and fall, but in the winter her father laughed and shook his head and said, “Let her be. She will need her strength of spirit. She is like her mother, and I would not change that.”
Now the daughter was wild but she was also caring and loving and very observant. She saw how sad her mother was when her father stepped back up into the moon each spring. And as the daughter of the moon, born under the first full moon of winter, she felt the pull of the moon each time it was full overhead.
One year, just as she went from girl to young woman and the last of her brothers left to make his way in the world, she had an idea. “I’ll jump up into the moon when my father steps down. Then he can stay with mother and they won’t be sad. They’ll see that I can do it, and everything will be good.”
So on the night of the first full moon of winter, she lay in wait. As her father stepped down from his throne, she jumped up and grabbed the moonbeams, swinging high up into the sky. And as her started parents watched, she went up into the moon, calling back, “Now you can stay together. This will work out. You’ll see!”
As good as her intentions were, the daughter had no idea of what to do. During the winter, all that she needed to do was to ride the moon and look down at the earth below. But she was young and inexperienced, and all winter long the storms raged and the winds blew. When the last full moon of winter came, her father and mother tried to pull her down, but she was afraid and clung to the disc as hard as she could. So she was still there when spring began. Spring and summer were full of violent storms and floods and tides so high they ate away miles of land. The girl saw this happening and cried, and in her grief, there were frost and cold snaps. Crops refused to grow or were washed away. In other places, the rains did not come and plants withered in the fields. Autumn brought a little respite. So worn out was the daughter that she did little, and the earth quieted early. Snows fell, but they were gentle ones, blanketing the ravaged earth and letting it rest.
When the first full moon of winter came and her father and mother reached up to pull her down, she didn’t resist, and fell into their arms sobbing.
They didn’t scold her – they didn’t need to. She had seen for herself the damage she had done. They just held her close and soothed her, pushing back her wild dark hair and telling that her they loved her. She was nearly inconsolable knowing the pain her rashness had caused for so many. “All I wanted to do was be kind to you and mother,” she sobbed. “I didn’t want to hurt things!”
All winter she cried, and just before the last full moon, she came to a decision. “I must go out into the world and work to make right the things I have made wrong. Even if I can help only one person at a time, this must be so.” Resolved, she packed her things.
Then she turned to her mother and said, “I am sorry to be leaving you now, mother, right before father must go back to his throne, but I can waste no more time. I know you will be lonely.” She hung her head.
“No, child,” her father smiled at her, “She will not be lonely. I have waited for this day for many years. I am taking your mother with me. She has been with me so long that she and I are part of one another now, and she can easily come with me. We will not be parted again.”
The girl’s parents smiled at each other and at their daughter. Her mother spoke, “This home is yours now, to do with what you will. Use it to rest when you need to or send it a family to love it as we have. And do not forget that we love you. We will visit you each year, on the first full moon of winter.”
-She Wolf (c) 2007
