Re: The New Year
Santa hadn't been careful to evade wolfish sensibilities. He (because Santa was male and assuredly so) was in good health. The sweat traces were clean, absent the fatty traces of a poor diet or the tinge of alcoholic burn that would have been a drunk's fingerprint. He was in condition. Perhaps not peak condition, because Santa's age was well past thirty and balanced somewhat precariously between late thirties and early forties. It was not a scent that would have been familiar to the wolf stood sniffing around the truck. There had been no physical encounter between Santa and the wolf but Santa was also not a man who adopted strong scents and markers. There was a tracing of expensive soap. The kind bought in individual paper packages with bland, lengthy titles of what they contained. This was distinct because it was scented as opposed to the muddled, plain smell of drugstore purchases, but Santa clearly didn't want to smell like berry anything, or an outlandish combination of spices and herbs because the smell was clean and thin. Lemons perhaps or something astringent like mint.
The soap was layered under lasting notes of something clear and cleanly scented that was a mixture of notes, some green, some lemon and verbena and something woody blooming underneath. If there was anything left from what clothes had been washed in, it was the sharp tinge of dry-cleaning fluid. The combination of scents could of course be tracked back, but Santa's fine health, robust age and choice in scent did not come with an expectation he would be tracked down physically.