Oswald woke up with a jolt.
His sweat soaked the bed sheets and the grey hide covering him. His breathe was short and his heart about to explode while his eyes adapted to the morning light.
"Is everything okay sweetie?" Asked Meryl, worried of his sorry state. The mother came on the boy's bed and tilted her head in concern, she brushed his face and hushed his nearly hyperventilating breath.
After a minute scanning his own room, he managed to calm down and reply. "Just a nightmare." His worries were still lingering in his mind and the excruciating sound of his jaw dislocating kept echoing.
He checked his cheeks but there was no blood in his mouth. Still, before his breakfast he rushed to the barn.
There, he discovered with horror a new dead sheep, stuck in the gap of the half-opened door. Its ribs were torn apart and everything that was exposed to danger had been eaten. The poor thing had obviously been grabbed from the outside and attacked by more than one wolf.
The bones of its legs and skull were reduced to crumbs, the brown blood tarnished the white snow around the entrance. As for the inside, no traces of the huge monster, the death of his twelfth sheep blocked the entrance and had protected the others.
A voice interrupted Oswald's train of thoughts. "Why did you not take your shoes? You'll catch a cold!" Meryl was furious. She held her nightcap tightly in one hand and her son's shoes in the other. "Hurry up, it's not important, come back in the house, there's no use checking it twice." She pleaded.
He was thinking. 'Twice? Why twice?'
Stan came out of the house, he was roughly awake and after yawning loudly, he said. "Good morning."
The silence became heavier with each passing seconds. Stan did his best to calm Oswald, the kid was obviously out of his mind.
Now that Meryl paid attention to it, the man was two heads taller than Oswald, the latter spoke. "Don't worry, I'll grant your wishes when I'll come back from my mission. Your safety is worth more than a mere lamb." He said, sighing, and continued. "Come, we'll push the door now and have our breakfast then."
Stan rolled up his sleeves, revealing more marks like the two he had on his forehead. His hosts looked curious anew. Anything that could avert their gaze from the dead lamb was fine. The few neurons that made Oswald's brain work properly had never been so busy.
The marks near his wrists were clear and straight while the ones on his elbow were slightly distorted and in greater number. The more they looked toward his shoulders, the more crowded they became and the darker the skin was.
"It's cultural, chill out!" He said when he saw their bewildered glares. He bent down to grabbed the lower part of the barn's door. One hand in the snow, the other in the blood, he waited for Oswald to give a signal. "Pull!"
The door was three meters tall, one and a half wide and made out of old pine. The lower part of it was rotten mainly because of the rodents that shared their house with the herd coupled with the constant humidity.
Meryl's gaze became complex when she saw how effortlessly the two men lifted the seemingly hardest job of the farm. 'How?' She thought.
'Stan must be of the dense type of men, he's so perfect...'
With the necessary tools at hand, Oswald handcrafted an iron piece to support the door and allow it to serve its purpose until spring, or so he hoped.
Their second lift happened few minutes later, the boy looked at the small bumps on his skin. As someone with a lean body, the smallest difference in muscle mass was easy to spot. He was happy to see his own vigor through his efforts, his happiness was being watched by his mother once again.
He wasn't much of a talkative person and tended to keep everything for himself, but his mother knew every of his nervous tics and translated her son's conduct easily. Oswald was proud to compare himself to a grown-up, he hadn't much opportunities to do so since he rarely saw other people than his mother.
Because of her fatigue and her agitated sleep, Meryl had headaches. She bitterly said goodbye to the traveller before forcing herself back into bed. "Thank you very much sir, I won't forget you."
That day she chose her words with care, the man had significantly changed her life without her noticing it. Oswald gave the man a good handshake while making eye contact, he was impatient to see the man anew and improve his quality of life. 'He'll make us rich. He better come back before we starve to death. Mother will survive his absence... She may be in heat but since she has plenty in her drawer she shouldn't need another mate.'
Lacking people to speak with, their language had noticeable imperfections, as they had a recluse business, no one else than the old merchants from the village paid them visit. Consequently Oswald never had anyone to fall in love with. He knew nothing about love, on the other hand, his hormones kept his mind at bay for any occasion to be alone with the sheep.
He never tried, even though he had pulsations from time to time, telling him to do dirty jobs on the spot.
Looking at the wide back of the traveller, he envied the man's ability to live without a family. He wasn't sure if he was more eager to become a big brother or to leave the family home.
He cleaned the mess next to the barn and led his herd to the mountain base, where the sun had started to melt the snow. Down there, despite the risk of an avalanche, he couldn't allow himself to dig the snow all day with temperatures this low.
Lunch happened as every other lunch, his plate was half empty but nothing tasted better than the stinky cheese.
Because the cold kept the meat of the dead lamb cool, he cut out untouched chunks of meat and had them to dry on a plank set on the roof of the house.
Later, they had their afternoon nap before going back to the herd. Oswald was slowly falling asleep until he heard his mother's voice.
"Since when do you have dimples?" Meryl asked. "Aren't you growing cuter? I wonder from which side of the family you got that, I don't recall your father having any nor do I."
The spot that had been impaled in his nightmare had a detail no one pointed out in his seventeen years of existence. He only checked the inside of his mouth in the morning and now that his mother spoke about the thing that piqued his interest, he asked while double, triple checking his face.
"Mother, when you said to not bother checking twice when we went to the barn, what did you mean by twice? Have you heard anything last night?"
Meryl was dumbfounded. "Did you hit your head or something?"