Firstborn (12 page)

IT WAS ALMOST AS IF
there was a similarity, some real connection, between me and this wolf. It was a disconcerting thought. Blue Boy's prowess and power were awe-inspiring, and Frick's breadth of knowledge was surprising, but I never imagined I'd experience a feeling of actual kinship with a wingless creature. Yet something about this young wolf yearning for a coyote reminded me of myself when I was younger. Though, in fact, Lamar's situation was bitterer than mine had ever been. I'd been bored with my mate and deserted him; Lamar had unintentionally murdered Artemis's.

While Lamar was suffering from unrequited love, his parents were like a couple of lovebirds. Even while stalking prey, Blue Boy hardly left Alberta's side. One day they actually played a game of tag on our slope. Blue Boy was usually “it,” and when Alberta caught him, she would give him a slathering with her tongue.

“Mating season,” Frick explained, eyeing Lupa wistfully.

Raze was eyeing Lupa too—more suggestively than wistfully. Lupa acted oblivious, but she did catch Raze's eye for a moment.

Raze moved his sleeping spot nearer to Lupa's. One evening he scooted so close their tails touched. She pulled hers back. At around midnight Raze tried to snuggle up to her. She shifted away. He gave her a nudge and walked down the slope, away from the other sleeping wolves. For a while Lupa stayed put, but eventually she got up, shook the snow off her fur, and meandered down to where he was. This was very near my aspen, but I doubt they gave me a thought. I barely existed to either of them.

“Don't you like me?” Raze said in an undertone.

“Only the alphas can mate,” she said.

“I heard different.”

“We were a ragtag bunch then, hardly a pack.”

“What if we took off and started a pack on our own?”

“Just the two of us? We'd never make it.”

Lupa went back up the hill, though not without a little extra sway in her walk. When she settled down in the snow, Raze's gaze shifted to Libby and Ben. It was Lamar's night to warm Frick, so Libby and Ben were curled up together.

I suspected he was thinking of wooing them to join his new pack, but with Libby he never got the chance. In early March, temperatures soared above freezing, and one day, on her way across the Lamar River, she broke through the ice. It was even quicker than with Rider. One second Libby was there—the next second she was gone forever.

Everyone was distraught, especially her mother. But at least Alberta had something to distract her from her sorrow, for she couldn't long hide the fact that a new litter was on its way. Ben, on the other hand, seemed truly lost. I'd been so taken with Lamar that I hadn't paid much attention to his siblings, but no one could have missed how inseparable Ben and Libby had been. Now Ben had no one to play or spar with. When Lamar offered to spar with him, Ben muttered that it wouldn't be a fair contest; Lamar was so much bigger. Hope did her best to pay more attention to him, but then tragedy struck
her
. The warm snap was just a tease, and when temperatures plummeted again, everything turned very icy. One morning, on the way down the path from the overlook, Hope lost her footing and slipped all the way to the bottom, impaling herself on a branch jutting out of a fallen tree. The other hunters were well out ahead, leaving only Lamar and Ben to race down and pull her off. The puncture wound was near her heart.

“Take her back to Frick,” I cawed, remembering how he'd saved her when she was a tiny thing.

Ben helped sling her across Lamar's back, and Lamar carried her home. Hope was panting so heavily that I was afraid she was breathing her last, but when Lamar gently deposited her in the snow near the den she managed to speak.

“You're good”—she gasped —“at carrying runts.”

Frick was sleeping in, as he always did on days when Lamar went on the hunt, but the sight of Hope's serious wound transformed him. He sprinted into the woods. I'd never seen him move so fast. He came racing back, slid to his knees by Hope, and gave her what looked like a long kiss.

“Chew,” he said when he broke away.

Hope chewed. Leafy bits leaked out of her mouth. Frick must have dug up some healing herbs he'd buried in the woods and transferred them from his mouth to hers.

Frick nursed her through the dangerous phase. But it was clear she was going to be out of action a while, and with another hunter lost and game growing scarcer and scarcer Lamar got no more days off. He didn't get any nights off from Frick-warming, either. Raze had suddenly taken Ben under his wing—if you can use such an expression with wolves—and the grateful young wolf insisted on sleeping by his new mentor.

As things got worse, the wolves went back to their old habit of hunting at night. Much as I disliked it, I went with them, but they had no more luck in the dark than they'd had in the daylight, and I was glad when they lapsed back to their morning schedule.

The first thing Hope did when she was on her feet again was suggest to Lamar that
she
take over Frick-warming duties.

“The truth is, I need warming myself,” she said, averting her eyes shyly. “Part of my recovery.”

With April as cold as January, Hope and Frick took to sleeping so closely entwined they seemed like one wolf. Lamar was free again to slip over the hill at night and listen for Artemis. But although there were plenty of wolves howling, and the odd coyote, Artemis's musical howl was missing.

Lamar pinned his hopes on the next full moon. And it turned out to be such a lovely, clear night that, perched near him in the poplar sapling, I almost felt like howling myself. But Artemis didn't.

“What can it mean, Maggie?” he asked anxiously.

I figured she'd either been killed or found a new mate, but I didn't have the heart to share my theories.

“Maybe she has laryngitis,” I said.

This idea cheered him up, but only briefly. “She couldn't have had it
this
long,” he said.

His doleful expression was hard to take, so I set my misgivings aside and flew off into the night. The moon was bright, visibility excellent. When I got to the knoll, I flew around to the far side and spotted Artemis curled up alone under a snowy bough.

I zipped back to Lamar and reported that she was semi-hibernating.

“Oh, thank you!” he cried.

The next morning Lupa took Hope aside.

“You have a sweet nature, Hope,” Lupa said.

“Thank you,” Hope said.

“But a wolf can carry sweetness too far. I realize Frick nursed you back to health. But if you want to show your gratitude it's enough to listen to his yammering. Just because you're wispy and don't have a very lustrous coat doesn't mean you have to settle for cuddling with a monstrosity.”

“I don't think he's monstrous at all,” Hope said. “But I know you used to be a couple. If it upsets you that—”

“Good heavens, no!” Lupa cried.

When Hope and Frick cuddled up that evening, Lupa gave Raze a look out of the corner of her eye. He ignored it. He ignored it the next night, too. Maybe he was playing it cool because she'd wounded his pride by turning him down earlier.

In the middle of the month snow fell day after day without a break. Hunting was impossible. I braved the blizzard for a couple of trips to the dump behind the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, where humans came even in the winter. As for the wolves, they just loafed around conserving their energy—though one afternoon they all suddenly sat up, their whiskers quivering alertly. A moment later my aspen shivered. In fact, everything shivered: the lodgepole pines, even the snowy ground.

“What is it?” Lamar said.

“An earthquake,” said Frick.

There were two aftershocks. But eventually the wolves settled down, and the snow kept falling monotonously. As the days went by, everyone got scrawnier except Alberta.

By the time a sunny morning finally came, Alberta was too pregnant to go on the hunt, so she stayed home with Frick. I went off with the others. From the promontory it looked as if a puffy white quilt had fallen over the Lamar Valley. There was no trace of the river, and the late snowstorm had driven even diehard elk, deer, and pronghorns south. The only creatures in sight were buffalo swaying their great, shaggy heads back and forth, trying to clear away snow to get to the meager grass underneath.

“Looks like bison or nothing,” Raze said.

“You've felled them before?” Blue Boy said.

“Sure.”

I just knew this was a whopper. After telling it, Raze pointed out a big bull standing apart from the others, his nostrils snorting great clouds of breath sideways in the frozen air. Raze suggested Lupa, Lamar, and Ben approach their target from upwind while he and Blue Boy station themselves downwind. The newly fallen snow hadn't crusted over, and Lamar sank in so deep I doubt he saw what happened. I did, of course. The bull smelled the three approaching from upwind and plowed off in the other direction, according to plan. Then Blue Boy leaped onto his shaggy neck. But Raze didn't. The buffalo snorted angrily and gave his mighty horns a shake, sending Blue Boy flying.

As the buffalo plodded off to join his herd, I shot down near where Blue Boy lay. The snow around him was turning crimson. I let out a horrified squawk, and the wolves quickly converged on him.

“Sorry,” Raze said. “I slipped.”

“Did his horn get you, Father?” Lamar cried.

“Just grazed me,” Blue Boy muttered.

It looked to me as if the buffalo had gored him badly, but Blue Boy ignored Lamar's offer to carry him. He made it back to camp under his own steam, though he left a trail of blood in the snow. Alberta took one look at him and did something unheard of. She herded him into the whelping den. The sun disappeared along with them, and soon snowflakes were falling again.

“Just what we needed,” Lupa said wearily.

“Do you think Father will be all right?” Hope said, hoarse with concern.

“Not for a while anyway,” Lupa said.

“Let's just hope another alpha doesn't come sniffing around,” Frick said.

Hope sucked in her breath.

“That could be problematic, huh?” Raze said thoughtfully.

“Very problematic,” said Ben, though I doubt he knew what the word meant.

“Do you think something to eat would help Father?” Lamar asked.

“The only food around is buffalo,” Hope said grimly.

But Lamar had experience catching smaller game. Though he'd done most of his hunting for Artemis by the creek, the notch was so chock-full of snow that he would have had to be a snowshoe hare to negotiate it now, so he headed along the wind-scoured ridge trail. I didn't spot a thing as I flapped overhead, but wolves don't have such long noses for nothing, and he soon caught a scent. He was weaving along with his snout to the ground when I let out a warning squawk. A strange wolf was standing in the trail ahead of him.

Lamar's ears shot back in alarm. I dropped onto an icy rock to get a steadier look at the stranger. He was an adult male, but I was pretty sure he wasn't the marauding alpha Frick feared. Even with a mantle of snow he was smaller than Lamar. He looked underfed—he had on a collar that was quite loose on his neck—and where his left ear should have been there was just a raw wound.

“Am I trespassing?” he said, his tail held low.

“You're on our territory,” said Lamar.

“I thought I got a whiff of Blue Boy's marking scent.”

“You know Blue Boy?” I said.

The stranger's quizzical look reminded me that magpies didn't normally consort with wolves. “Blue Boy's my brother,” he said.

Lamar's eyes widened. “Really?”

“Name's Sully,” the wolf said, giving himself a shake. His dusting of snow flew off, revealing a coat exactly the same bluish color as Blue Boy's. This had to be the brother Blue Boy had called a traitor and a coward. But, of course, Lamar didn't know that. And I couldn't very well tell him in front of Sully.