She is the beauty, he is the beast. She is the girl in the red cloak, wandering the lane at sunset; he lurks in the shadows, branches crackling under his bent and wolfish form. He looks at her warmth and brightness, and he hates her. He hates her with everything he has. He has no hunger, even, for her flesh…it would bring him no satisfaction. She is too weak to kill, to beautiful not to hate, to sweet to savor. Beast, he thinks of her, with her pale curls and her milk-white skin. Monster. You are no thing of Nature. There are no things in Nature that he cannot understand or at least accept, no defenseless animal that it would be wrong to eat. Yet he knows that the taste of her would poison him, leaving him curled up in a dark corner to shiver and whine.
…
Niffa sees the wolf in the woods. She sees the wolf, in the woods. The sight of him left her breathless at first, and she ran into her humble cottage to cower by the fire. Her mother had scolded her, had demanded to know what had frightened her. Niffa never told. Her father had nailed a wolf's ear to the door to ward off demons. Niffa knows that at word of a wolf, the menfolk would seize their weapons and hunt it to its cave, like tracing a plant to its roots. They would kill him, all at once, more than ten to one. They would bloody his silken black pelt and finally hang his sodden skin on a wall, where it would torture her as a reminder of her treachery.
"Oh, wolf," she sighs, as she hangs a grey dress out to dry. "I never told." She glances quickly at the forest beyond her village's homely clearing. Yellow eyes watch her. "Beware, wolf," she whispers to the wind, "beware the men in their furs, with their arrows and knives. Don't be snared and caught, don't leave me here all alone." Her hair is almost the color of the snow, she is so fair, and she sometimes thinks she fears the men almost as much as he does. She wonders if someday they will come to hunt her, with their knives and white smiles full of teeth and threat. She likes to believe that if they did, she would run to the woods, to the cave, to the embrace of the wolf.
…
The wolf smells the fire before he sees it. Men with torches come marching towards the hated cottage. The girl is a witch, they say now. This almost makes him bark with laughter, for a wolf can speak to a witch. If she were so, they would have met in moonlit trysts ages ago. Men call her a witch because she does not smile at them, because she speaks seldom and wears red. The wolf hears the flames and smells the smoke from the torches. He knows that she does, too, because from the back door she comes running, running to the woods.
She runs though the tree roots make her stumble and the branches raise welts on her arms and legs. When she falls, the wolf is there.
No one ever heard tell how things ended between the two when they met. Stories only say that, perhaps because the night was cold and his breath was hot, perhaps because she was a witch, when yellow eyes looked into grey the two shared a single moon-frozen kiss.