The Icelandic Hand Domestication

The rest of my stay in Bulgaria was thankfully uneventful. I conducted a few interviews -- in broad daylight and nowhere near any alleys -- with some elderly pub patrons about the history of the Kukeri in their town so I could justify the trip come tax time.

I also visited a few Kukeri costume makers who were, as luck would have it, the best in the area. I even managed to get a good deal on a Kuker outfit and had it shipped home. If I ever get tired of it I might just take it to the university and work it into one of my lectures, but I doubt I will ever get tired of it.

As I was heading to the airport to catch my flight back to Iceland, I received a text from Armin. "Come see me ASAP." I wasn't sure why I thought my time away was long enough for him to change his cryptic style of messages. Armin liked riddles and guessing games and I figured I was just going to have to enjoy the challenges that his being a man of few words presented.

I decided that it was easier to wait for the ten-hour flight to be over and ask Armin in person what was eating at his brain this time than to try to read between the lines of a four-word text. Knowing Armin, it was going to be worth the wait.

•

Once I landed and got my bags I found the same graduate student who picked up me on my first visit to Iceland waiting for me at the airport this time, as well.

"Let me guess," I said with a bit of a smirk, "you don't understand a word of English today, either."

He chuckled.

"Not true. In fact, on our way to Herdubreid this afternoon I promise to tell you everything I was pointing at the last time you were here."

"How about telling me what Armin wants to show me so badly," I prodded.

"No luck," he said, shaking his head. "He is keeping this side-project of his under wraps. Only three or four people, including Armin, know what he is up to in his little trailer."

I dumped my suitcase in the trunk and feigned hurt feelings.

"Armin must really be moving up in the world if he now has a trailer."

We both laughed and got in the car.

"Seriously," I asked, "what does he need a trailer for? All he is doing is watching what The Icelandic Hands are doing to the herd populations. Can't he just keep his binoculars in his backpack like everyone else?"

My driver smiled and shook his head again.

"This is all very hush-hush. I wish I could tell you, trust me. He keeps on using words like 'breakthrough' and 'game-changer' as if it were the most convenient way to empty the air out of his lungs."

We turned onto the highway and headed for Herdubreid as I pulled my camera out of my backpack.

"He told me to promise you that you that he would give you a full tour and the low-down once you got to the camp. He also said that he has booked the same hotel room that you had last time you were here, and that he left that research paper that you were fighting with the night before you left in the room waiting for you when you check in. Does that make any sense to you?"

I wasn't sure if Armin's student was looking at me, but I could feel myself blushing uncontrollably at the thought of opening up the door to my room and immediately being jumped by an Icelandic Hand. After an exhausting flight and a long car ride into the heart of the country, I would be no match for the fur-covered mass of muscle that was even now lurking in my room.

I regained some of my composure and turned to my driver.

"That does make sense, thanks. I imagine I will be dealing with that paper all night long and into the early hours of the morning."

•

The camp at Herdubreid looked exactly as it did when I left for Bulgaria, save for the trailer. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see but the truth of the matter was that Armin's newest addition to his research project looked like he purchased it from a swap meet ... after everyone else has thought it was best not to take the trailer home even if the seller was giving it away.

"You made it!"

I turned around to see Armin walking towards me with his arms outstretched.

"What do you think of my recent acquisition? It may not be much on the outside but I finagled a grant and filled it will all the bells as whistles on the inside."

Armin hugged me for a little longer than I was comfortable with and smiled.

"We missed you here. How was Bulgaria?"

"I got a little more than I bargained for," I said. Pointing at the trailer, I joked that it was too bad that Armin hadn't gotten a little more than he bargained for.

"You won't be so glib when you see what I managed to get with the grant money." He swept his left arm towards the door of the trailer. "Come inside and let me see if I can impress you."

Armin was not wrong. As soon as we stepped through the doorway it was like we had gone into another world. Big computer monitors, centrifuges, microscopes, and more gadgets than I thought possible were crammed into every nook and cranny of Armin's eyesore on wheels.

"What do you need all of this gear for, Armin?," I asked, setting my backpack by the threshold. "Weren't you just supposed to watch a bunch of sheep for a while?"

"Hey," he said, pretending I had hurt his feelings, "I am more than a walk-in-the-woods kind of guy, you know. I am onto something big here."

A voice came from the other end of the trailer.

"WE are onto something big here, Armin. Or more to the point, I am onto something big and you just came up with the cash to help me figure it out."

Armin and I both turned to see a blonde woman sitting on a stool at the end of a row of tables covered with lab paraphernalia. She was peering into a microscope and didn't look up as she continued to chide her boss.

"What's that expression about brains and brawn? I think your friend knows which one you are." A faint smile appeared in the corner of her mouth after that remark.

"Judging by the way you can obviously handle yourself," I said, "my guess is that you are the brains AND the brawn of the outfit."

Her smile grew wider and she looked up from her work and towards us. She was gorgeous. Her hair was cut short in a cute bob, and her eyes were a deeper steely blue than one would have expected from such a fair-skinned woman. I assumed she was a post-graduate student but it was difficult to guess her age from a cursory glance.

"I like this guy, Armin," she said, pointing at me. "You should bring him around more often."

"After his last comment I am not sure I want to. Besides, Sóldís, he was already here a couple of weeks ago, before we brought all of your toys from the university to my much-maligned portable laboratory."

She had slid off her stool and was walking towards us, adjusting her lab coat and shirt as she manoeuvred through the chairs and cables between her station and the main door.

"Well, I imagine you want me to give him the cook's tour and the rundown of what it is we are doing out here," she said.

"As only you can," Armin said as he half-mockingly bowed to Sóldís who was now standing in front of Armin and me.

She was even more beautiful up close. I wasn't sure it she was wearing any perfume or not but I found myself enraptured when her wake caught up with her at the front door. I know I lost track of time just staring at her and felt a little self-conscious when she stuck out her hand.

"Welcome to Armin's mountain ... again," she said. "I'm Sóldís."

"Nice to meet you."

"So what has Armin told you about our little project?"

"Absolutely nothing," I said looking from Sóldís to Armin and back to her again. "He tends to enjoy showmanship as much as science."

"Well, you know about the issues the local shepherds are having with the Icelandic Hands, yes?"

I nodded.

"They are basically cutting down the procreation rate in the herds."

"Exactly," Sóldís said. "What Armin and I are trying to do is give the Hands something else to satisfy their cravings so that the sheep can go about being sheep and make even more sheep unencumbered."

Armin elbowed me gently.

"Synthetic sheep semen, in a nutshell," he said.

Sóldís rolled her eyes at Armin.

"You and your alliteration, Armin. But, yes, that is what we are doing here. We are synthesizing sheep pheromones and the properties of their semen and making it into a liquid that can either be sprayed or imbedded into items that will distract the Hands long enough for the sheep to successfully mate."

"What about just getting rid of the Icelandic Hands altogether?," I asked the two of them. "I mean, this whole process can't be cheap."

"As much of a nuisance the Hands have become," Armin explained, "wiping out an entire species is not looked upon favourably by any agencies we have been in contact with. Besides," he continued, "they, like all parasites and predators, have their benefits."

"Would you like a demonstration?," Sóldís asked.

"You actually have some of this synthetic made up?"

"Yes." She waved us over to a medium-sized fish tank. "We have been testing the liquid ever since we moved the lab out here. Our initial formulations had limited success but we have been able to tweak the formula to the point that we are getting good results during our test scenarios."

As she was talking, Sóldís had pulled out a spray bottle from under the counter below the fish tank, and opened the lid of the tank where a small Hand was resting in the corner.

I blushed.

"Is that a ...?" My voice trailed off, too ashamed to ask in front of Armin and his assistant.

"Yes, my boy," Armin said, "it's a dildo. It's a bit bigger than what the Hands would come in contact with during their predatory cycle but we didn't want any of the test subjects to be injured if they latched onto pieces of wood or metal. A dildo seemed like the best option."

Sóldís had a smirk on her face as she picked up the phallus from the tank. I think she enjoyed making me uncomfortable as she put on the demonstration of the artificial semen. She spritzed the tip of the dildo and down the shaft with the liquid, rotating it get good coverage all the way around.

The small Hand started to shuffle in the bedding of the fish tank as soon as Sóldís squirted the first bit of artificial enticement onto the flesh-coloured rubber.

"I think your little friend is intrigued."

She looked at me and smiled.

"You have no idea." She tilted her head to a set of cages kiddy corner to the fish tank. "Just wait a few seconds for the other one to get a whiff of this stuff. Don't worry," she said, setting the dildo down in the tank and closing the lid, "the cages are built to be banged around a bit."

Just as she finished speaking I heard the first clanging of metal on metal behind us. When I turned around I could see that there was a row of cages, each of them probably big enough to hold a Great Dane comfortably. All of them were empty except for the one where the rattling was coming from. At first I could only see a few fingers of the Hand that was inside but after a few moments the bulk of the creature was apparent as it pulled itself up the lattice work of the cage door.

"We call him 'Bobby'," Armin said. "It took a little coaxing to get him in the cage but we treat him well and he seems to be okay with hanging around with us."

Bobby had begun to shake the cage door more forcefully.

"He can't get out, can he?," I asked.

"Not to worry." Armin took the spray bottle from Sóldís, went to a small bar fridge, took out a piece of raw meat and sprayed it liberally with the artificial enticement, and pushed it through one of the squares of the metal door.

The large Hand grabbed it and quickly moved it from the fingers at its outer edge into the centre of its body and everted itself all in what seemed like a split second. The thick white fur of the Hand's other exterior shivered and pulsed around the piece of meat it had shifted to the core of its body, jostling the cage furiously as it cleaned the synthetic from the piece of meat.

"We treat Bobby really well around here. He's a big boy and we have to keep him happy, you know."

"Our little friend," Sóldís said, trying to bring our attention back to her demonstration while letting Armin know that she didn't appreciate being upstaged, "is more in line with where we need to start our program. 'Get them hooked while they're young,' as they say."

All of us were now focused on the smaller Hand in the fish tank. It had made its way across the base of the tank and had already engulfed the whole of the dildo by the time we turned our attention back to it. The white downy fur rolled like waves as it gently half-squirted the formula-soaked phallus out of its orifice and convulsed as it drew the appendage back inside where it slowly cleaned the surface of the dildo of every last molecule of the artificial semen.

Armin and I definitely appreciated the creature's stealth a little more personally than Sóldís did but all of us were impressed by the little Hand's diligence.

"The little ones seem to be a bit more subtle in their approach than the big guys," I said to no one in particular.

Sóldís put the lid back on the tank and looked at Armin and me.

"The smaller the Hands are, the more they have to rely on being sneaky." She looked over at the cage where the larger Hand was finally settling down.

"The big guys like Bobby can charge across a field just as fast as, if not faster, than the speediest of Icelandic sheep so subtlety doesn't have to be in their repertoire. The little ones have to make their way through the fields without arousing any suspicion or they'll end up missing their chance for a snack."

"Has anyone thought about removing the Hands from the wild and farming them like any other domesticated livestock?"

Armin made a face at my suggestion.

"We still aren't sure what the Hands' role in the ecosystem is, and with enough animals on the endangered species list due to people thinking they know what's best we thought it was only fair to find a food substitute for the Hands so they can flourish without letting them unduly affect the Icelandic sheep herd population."

"Besides," Sóldís said, "where's the challenge in not even trying to find out where Bobby and his friends came from?"

"Exactly!" Armin was now tapping his watch. "We should let Sóldís get back to work. Show and tell doesn't pay the bills."

I shook Sóldís' hand (for maybe a little longer than she might have been comfortable with) and Armin and I headed back to the hotel for an early dinner.

•

As I was unpacking my suitcase after saying goodnight to Armin, I realized that I had forgotten my backpack with my camera and laptop in the trailer. I made my way back to the site and saw through the closed blinds that a few lights were still on in the trailer.

I knocked lightly a couple of times and waited but no one answered the door so I tried the handle and found that the door was still unlocked. I opened it and stepped inside, almost tripping over my backpack.

I looked down to the far end of the trailer where the lights were still on and saw Sóldís hunched over her workbench. I had to stop and take a breath when I saw her. Gone was her lab coat and the very clinical air it gave her -- from the doorway I marvelled at the immense mohair sweater that she was now wearing.

The fine hairs looked so enticing as the fluorescents backlit the outline of Sóldís torso. Even from that distance I could see that the depth of the pile of her sweater would easily swallow up anyone's hands who was lucky enough to wrap their arms around her.

"Sóldís?" I didn't want to disturb her but I also didn't want her to turn and see me just standing there gawking at her plush and fantastically dense sweater.

I walked towards her and said her name again and when she shuffled a little on her chair I thought I had been able to get her attention. It was only then that I realized that she wasn't wearing the most gorgeous monster mohair sweater I had ever seen -- it was Bobby that was wrapped around Sóldís' torso. She was still hunched over her desk, her mouth open with the occasional whimper coming weakly out of her throat.

My shock and dismay at the sight of Sóldís wrapped up, cocooned by one of the biggest and strongest Icelandic Hands I had ever seen was only paralleled by how turned on I was from seeing the white, fluffy mass undulating over and around her. It took me until then to realize that she was completely naked. The creature stretched from just below her hips to her collarbone, sporadically sending out of its fingers from each of the upper and lower margins of its form to explore the skin outside of its direct control.

As soon as I saw the spray bottles with the synthetic semen compound on the counter beside Sóldís I knew exactly what was going on. She must have unlocked Bobby's cage, stripped down, and sprayed herself with it. I remembered being in my hotel before leaving for Bulgaria and being hunted down by the smallish Hand that Armin had left for me. Being stalked and overwhelmed by the creature was definitely part of the foreplay, but I could not imagine hearing the crashing and seeing a Hand of Bobby's size come charging at me.

I looked back to Sóldís only to find that she was staring right back at me, her mouth still open, the tiny little whimpers still emanating from her throat every once in a while.

"I'm sorry, ... I didn't mean to ... ." I couldn't help but just watch her as Bobby fingered at her underneath his thick, pitching fur.

She didn't try to avert her gaze from me. I took a few more steps towards her and watched as Bobby gave a shudder as he sensed my presence. Sóldís closed her eyes and moaned timidly, tilting her head back, letting her hair fall to her shoulder and just mix with the white fleece that encapsulated her.

Before I knew what I was doing I was standing in front of Sóldís, my arms wrapped around the supple white fur that girdled her, burying my fingers into the luxurious hide, kissing her. Bobby twisted and jostled around Sóldís as my hands ran up and down her back. I could feel the creature wiping away at the lab assistant's skin, cleaning off her torso.

When I looked back at Armin's assistant I found her staring right back at me.

"Maybe we can let Bobby taste you, too," she said, awkwardly unbuttoning my pants with what few inches of her fingers she managed to sneak out from under the Hand's mantle. I didn't need to be asked twice and stripped completely.

I slid easily into Sóldís -- the two of us were extremely wet -- and collapsed onto her as she squeezed herself around my cock. The Hand's fleece against my torso brought back memories of the night before I left for Bulgaria. The hairs of the creature were immeasurably light and wispy but had a heft to them that made you want to curl up in them and never leave their folds. I gripped my hands around Sóldís' ass and squeezed as I thrust myself into her, each time the white fibre washed over the contours of my chest and belly.

"More," Sóldís said. "The bottle ... ."

I didn't have to figure out what she was asking me to do, nor did I ever stop to think if it was even safe. I grabbed the bottle of synthesized semen, and behind Sóldís' back I unscrewed the cap and raised the bottle to her neck and poured half the liquid down her spine and then brought it under her chin and emptied the rest over her chest.

The reaction was immediate. Sóldís screamed as Bobby's fingers chased the solution as it trickled down the woman's skin, flitting wildly and lapping up every drop. She pulled me close, kissing me with all her strength as Bobby convulsed around her, squealing into my mouth as one and then another of the creature's appendages followed the fluid into the crack of Sóldís' ass.

I was using every bit of self-control to keep from cumming as I watched the furry beast feed just so I could caress and be caressed by the luxurious white mane but at some point Bobby must have gotten a whiff of my own semen and he began clutching at the base of my shaft, searching for the source of its next meal.