Culain stood in the snow outside the bar, in a patch of slush half-melted by the flickering light above.  The bar was the only building still lit at this hour, but Culain could see down the street in either direction clear as day, the scene lit a pale orange by street lights reflecting off the snow.  The blacktop was patchy with ice, a mottled dark strip between high banks of brown, soiled snow.

It was a late winter here in upstate New York, and the ground felt like it might never thaw.  Old trees bent and broke beneath accumulations of snow.  Flocks of migrating birds returned too soon.  In the woods, deer starved for want of new growth.  People went about bowed by heavy winter clothing, brought together by the lingering freeze.  Everywhere you went - the register at the local grocery, the post office, this small bar - people were talking about the late winter and what it might mean.

Culain delighted in the freeze, in the wide-open spaces and the abundance of dead flesh in the forest, but with none of his fellows beside him to share in his joy, he grew melancholy.  He alone ran between the winter-bare trees, scenting his still-living prey on the snow-clean air.  He alone fell upon the frozen carcasses, to tear the ice-bound hide with his sharp, sharp teeth.

The man stubbed a cigarette out on the frosty windowsill and tossed it away.  Inside the bar, someone was belting a terrible rendition of some new country song, and Culain scowled.  The howls of half-breed coyotes sounded sweeter to his ears.  Still, there was noplace better for company than this bar, and Culain chose drunken kareoke over aching loneliness.  He was a rough man, grizzled as an ash tree in winter, and a big man at that, but despite the imposing largeness and fierceness of him, he made friends easily.

The winter had been so long, so lonely, that he would have almost welcomed the presence of a sly, smiling Fox.