The roaring thunder of a motorcycle sounded outside as Amanda held her dark protectors’ arm and Lisa ate stew almost contentedly with the tall, barrel-chested, long-armed old mountain man, wiggling her adorable nose across the table at her Partner, apparently without jealousy, both of them agreed now that something terrible was happening to the world—or at least this narrow slice of it suffering winter in high summer—and that they were going to have to please these hard men to survive it.

They had both humped Breeders in the past recreationally and enjoyed their annual winter threesome with Seraglio the Underwear Model in Orlando ever January. They were lesbians, but like most of their kind, committed or not, they enjoyed the occasional man.

‘Jerry and Joey are so disgusting. I mean, men are disgusting, unless they are under me trying to hold onto my hips in a hopeless bid to control my orgasms. But two men—yuck!’

‘Why are the good men—except for Seraglio, from San Martin—so old?’

‘Even Seraglio was in his forties when we hired him.’

‘They don’t earn social conscience credit at reliable rates…unless they are otherwise worthless.’

‘They are useful, or they are despicable.’

The roaring of some gigantic motorcycle or monster truck, which remained unseen outside, finally drew her out of her man management reverie. The cute little girl in the pig tails from Romania—unfortunately a Breeder, but hopefully bisexual—was returning with the disgusting Jerry’s Tabasco sauce. As she placed the bottle on the table, the sound of the roaring engine, which had big old Ishmael still standing and flexing his hands in readiness and Old Joe Medicine Crow fatalistically grasping the dream catcher at his breast hanging before his white bone vest, promptly stopped so that the small bottle could be heard to “thunk” onto the table top.

A distant roar was heard and Ishmael, standing like a sentinel, said, “A Grizz—seven-hundred-pounds of attitude, a linebacker with claws and fangs.”

Lisa’s protector lifted a humorous voice, “Dude, relax, drink up, be merry. This is all we dreamed of and more. Wrestle your bear tomorrow and tonight live life one last breath before a good death!”

“True that, Ma Man!” toasted the charcoal hunk under her willowy arm.

Joe Medicine Crow sang a short three bars of some mournful Indian song and The Major passed his bottle across the table as he kissed Lisa on top of her beautiful head.

‘I’m so glad we have selected the two most confident men.’

Ignoring his friend, Ishmael warned, as wolves howled mightily in the distance, seeming to be on the hills all around, “Something big, two-legged, is walking outside.”

Joe solemnly commented, “Wendigo wending.”

The Major joked, “Big Foot, maybe? I hope he can play the fiddle—we’re missing music.”

Ishmael shivered and even Toby stopped eating his stew, they all did, spoons frozen in mid sup, or glasses raised half way…as the door creaked open and a heavy, booted step made the floorboards groan.

Ishmael stood and faced the intruder without apparent worry or animosity, cheering her some, as the shadow of a mountain of a man—elderly like these men, but far more powerful—filled the doorway and the Romanian baby doll hurried to grab a chair from before the counter that faced out into the snow-choked grey winter “day” and said, “Welcome, sir. My brothers will cover your motorcycle against the snow—food and drink is on the table! I’m bringing more.”

The man looked down at her and smiled a wide, hoary smile. He wore a grey wolf fur hat, out from under which long cables of grey hair swept, caked with ice, under which one clear eye gazed like steel down upon the tiny girl, his full, grey, chest-sweeping beard contrasting sharply with the black eye patch. His grey fur vest and cloak made him look less like a biker and more like a wizard.

His pants were made of shaggy white hide and his boots of high white leather were soled with grey horn as were the heavy heels. His belt buckle was cast from steel in the shape of a cloud. He must have stood seven feet tall, and his shoulders were wide enough that he would have had to turn to get through a normal doorway. His bare arms were lean, their skin splotchy from exposure under his feint silvery body hair.

As the seat was placed between Ishmael’s and The Major’s places, the giant old biker, patted Ishmael kindly on his big shoulders with hands the size of dinner plates and rumbled like a drum, “Drink, Son—drink,” and walked easily by, bending the floor boards under his boots, nodding respectfully to The Major and rumbled, “It is good to drink with the Sons of the North again—with our daughters fair.”

The Major rejoined, “Skoal,” reached for Jerry and Joel’s pitcher of beer, poured it into his own, and passed the full pitcher to the giant, “Thirsty work, riding in this wrack—our table is yours, Old Timer.”

With that, the giant old man, by his face 80, but with the body of a giant in middle years, sat gingerly, and took hold of the pitcher and narrowly regarded the Indian and growled with a grudging respect, “Skraeling,” to which the old Indian seemed to shiver, casting his eyes down.

‘So glad I didn’t choose the Indian. He’s weak.’

The giant then looked down over at Punk, her lover for the night, her protector, and smiled awfully with a sardonic approval and raised the pitcher slightly like a salute again and rumbled, “Swart,” [2] and she felt Punk tense under her arm like he was ready to make some violent gesture. So she snuggled to him and kissed his ear, “Think of tonight, Baby. Think of me.”

The barmaid brought in a bowl for the giant and spooned him a helping from the main dishing bowl closest and the old man smiled like gentleness incarnate upon the woman a quarter his size, dwarfing the big men to his either side.

The two creepy male staffers, somehow the brothers of this lovely girl, then went outside with a plastic tarp as Ishmael and Punk hit their bottles and beer glasses hard, draining them, and Toby wolfed slightly at the big man and then returned to his bowl of stew.

Jerry and Joey whined slightly in whispers to each other about being disrespected by the monstrous biker who utterly ignored them, and cast his eye first at Luscious Lisa and then at Amorous Amanda, not like other men did, but like a father proud of his beautiful daughters, and rumbled in the most approving tone—in the only truthfully approving tone ever to reach Amanda’s ears or to touch her awakening heart, “Beautiful Daughters, like two of twelve swans gathering the worthy among the Home of Man.”

And with those cryptic words he drank slowly that entire pitcher of beer and Amanda came aglow, proud of her power among men, confident in her assessments of their quality, dismissive of the vast undeserving mob of their kind, hungry to gather her new man in the tender folds of her gushing beauty.

She smiled like a child up at the mountain of a man and then turned and smiled hungrily and with a budding love into the deep brown eyes of her selection.

For his part, Punk grinned wolfishly up into her welcoming eyes and soothed in an admiring whisper, “You look like Heaven, Baby Girl—like Heaven!”

Notes

-1. Skraeling

-2. Swart