The Empress' Grand Master of the Hunt always catches his prey. As winter returns to St Petersburg, wolves prowl the streets - as does Count Kuritsa, who has his eye on seducing a shy yet alluring new arrival at court...
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When the savage north wind returned each winter, so did the wolves. From their forest dens their dark snouts could smell the feasting in the city, and they would emerge at night to prowl the frozen streets of St Petersburg. Ruthless and half-starved, they rarely left empty-bellied, filling their stomachs with whatever they could find. Sometimes they found bones left outside a busy kitchen – sticky with frayed meat and marrow – and sometimes they chanced upon meat that was still warm; a drunk sleeping in a doorway, a well-stocked stable perhaps, or even a small child.
When the winter sun lumbered over the horizon and the cathedral bells moaned, the city stirred from one nightmare only to find another. Guards who had risen early to relieve the night-watchmen of their shift found nothing more to relieve than bloodied boot prints and shashka half-submerged in the snow. Gentlemen left the balls and the brothels at dawn in sleighs pulled by one less horse than the night before. And mothers awoke to find the cradles beside their beds silent, and empty.
There was one man however, who feasted on the fear that came with the stars at dusk. As Grand Master of the Hunt, Count Kuritsa passed fluidly from ballroom to birch forest and back again; hunting sable to delight the Empress, deer to feed the feast, and brawling with bears and stalking wolves purely for his own pleasure. Whilst some men liked to gamble or attend the opera, the Count liked to kill. He anticipated the arrival of winter and its wolves like a starving man at a banquet; hungry and eager to gorge.
The reap of the previous winter had been good. He'd picked off an entire pack of grey wolves one by one, and had sold on their frosty pelts for an excellent price. Even the meat had not been waisted; with it, he'd baited and brought down a female brown bear which now warmed the floorboards at the foot of his bed.
Although hunting wolves had earned him enough gold to maintain a small blue palace on the Fontanka and favour with the Empress, nothing satisfied the Count more than spilling blood and claiming the pelt of an animal as violent and as calculating as he was.
But one wolf had escaped him that winter; a lone wolf – stray from the pack – with a slashed paw. The Count had never seen it, but its mark and its scent were all over the city. It snubbed the rotting scraps the other wolves sought for fresher meat; meat that still moved.
Savage and smart, this wolf posed an irresistible challenge. The Count had stalked it for miles and miles across the snowy fields, following its distinctive slashed tracks as they led him on playful loops around the forest. He'd pluck soft, brown and grey clumps of its coat that he found snagged on the trunks of trees and would chuckle whenever he discovered that one of the traps that he'd set for the wolf had been purposely tripped or even destroyed.
But eventually Spring came, and when the snow melted away, so did the tracks. The wolf had disappeared.
To the Count it was more than just a missed opportunity. It was a failure. Being outsmarted by a wild animal had dealt a frustrating knock to his ego. And so, he'd waited all year for winter to return, just so he could settle the score.
