"The trick," the wolf told him, "is to accept the cold. Shivering is natural, but don't fight the cold, huddle against it, shrinking in on yourself to try to stay warm. Don't separate yourself from the cold air, making a mental barrier between your body and the frigid surroundings you fear and resent. Just let yourself feel it all, just let go..."
The man had been lost two days now, ate the last of his food yesterday, and he couldn't help wondering if he were hallucinating. Still, the wolf looked particularly real, as real as anything else in the blinding, whirling snowstorm around him. And the wolf certainly wasn't shivering. What the hell did he have to lose? His mind was turning against him, too, begging him, telling him over and over, to lie down in the snow, just for a rest. Just a tiny, short little rest...
"Relax," the wolf said. "Let yourself feel the cold air. Accept it into yourself, like a part of you. Then your energy will talk with the cold, interact with it, rising to the challenge of keeping you warm. This way your consciousness will extend, too, accepting its environment, becoming part of it. And when you look back at the way you were before, you will realize how much smaller you were then, when you were drawing inward, hiding from the air itself.
"When you grow larger than yourself," said the wolf, "you have more energy. And the Wind and the Earth and even the Trees have energy you can share..
"And just keep walking," the wolf said. "If you lie down now, you'll never get up again."
So the man walked. One foot in front of the other, leaving cavernous tracks in the knee-deep snow.
The next day the man woke on a cot in the shack of the person who'd found him outside his door. When the man had eaten and drank a little and rested some more, he told his story.
"So you reckon you're alive because of something a talking wolf said?" his host asked, cocking an eyebrow. He laughed a little and, in a kidding voice, added, "How did you know the wolf wasn't lying to you?"
"Because," said the man. "I asked a raven, and he said the same damned thing."
Originally published in the Shore (paper) magazine, issue #1.