She looks like she was pulled off Bloodborne’s cutting room floor. I presume this is meant to conceal her blind eyes, to telegraph some vague notion that her remaining senses extend beyond my own. The crackling light of the nearby fireplace dances across her as it reaches out against the darkness of the night.Ī red scarf is tied around her head. She sits eerily still in her rocking chair, rifle in her lap.
It’s been days–days of scavenging on the old woman’s behalf, braving prowling wolves and whipping winds, expending nearly every available resource just to keep the icy tendrils of death at bay in the post-catastrophe arctic hellscape of Great Bear Island.
The story is a melancholy song of solitude and snow, of love and perilousness, but it is sung against the vengeful, screaming winds of Mother Nature, lost to the ears of those who would listen. It’s Yevtushenko’s “People”, read to an audience of frozen corpses. Wintermute is Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet in a Cormac McCarthy universe.
