During a severe storm, a woman let four wolves into her house, thinking she was saving them from the cold, but in the morning a scene awaited her in her own house that horrified her.
After my husband died, I sold my apartment and moved to my parents’ old house, which I inherited. The house stood on the edge of the village, almost next to the forest. During the day it was quiet there. I stoked the stove, unpacked things, went out into the yard and got used to the silence.
But in the evening everything changed. The forest darkened too quickly. The wind came straight from the field and beat against the walls, as if testing the strength of the house. At night I heard sounds I couldn’t get used to: the cracking of branches, a long howl, sharp screams, as if someone was arguing in the dark. Frost creaked in the windows, the door trembled from gusts of wind. More than once I caught myself just sitting and listening, as if waiting for something.
One night the howling was different. Closer. Muffled and long. I went to the window and saw them – wolves standing right at the door. Four of them. They didn’t fuss, they didn’t growl, they didn’t circle around the house. They just stood there and looked at the light in the window.
I didn’t dare open it for a long time. But there was no hunting in their behavior. They looked exhausted, their fur was frosty, their movements were slow. It seemed that a storm had driven them here. I opened the door and stepped back, not turning my back on them.
The wolves entered the house cautiously, one by one. They did not rush to the table, did not overturn the furniture. First they sniffed the floor, then the walls and the stove. One lay down near the entrance, the second – by the window, the third – closer to the stove. The fourth walked around the room for a long time, as if looking for something, and then also lay down.
They hardly looked at me, they behaved calmly, but wary. At night I heard them quietly scratching the floor. I decided that they were just cramped or everything was unusual for them.
In the morning I woke up to a strange silence. And when I saw what had happened in my house during the night and what exactly the wild animals had done, I was horrified.
There were no wolves in the room. The door was closed. But the floor in the hallway was torn up. The boards had been torn up, the ground under them had been dug up.
At first I was afraid of the destruction. And then I saw something sticking out from under the boards – an old, sturdy bag tied with faded rope.
I untied it right on the floor. Inside were jewelry: gold chains, rings, earrings with stones, old brooches. Everything was dark, but heavy, real.
And then I remembered the conversations I had heard as a child. For years, my relatives had been looking for the gold that my great-grandmother had hidden during World War II.
They said that she had buried it somewhere in the house when the Germans came. Then she was gone, and the secret went with her. Everyone was looking – breaking down walls, checking the attic, digging in the yard. But no one had thought to check the floor in the hallway.
I stood among the broken boards and looked at the gold. The scariest thing wasn’t that the wolves had destroyed the floor, but that they seemed to know exactly where to dig.
