Lone Wolf (14 page)

“But the moon will be back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and Thunderheart will not. It—it…” Faolan stuttered. “It’s not fair.”

Gwynneth puffed up to twice her size. She stepped so close to Faolan that her beak almost touched his nose. “You are too fine a wolf to think in such a small, selfish, stupid manner!” She lifted one wing and whacked him on the head. He sprang back. “Now you must go. Go to the wolves.”

“I know nothing about them!”

“You know more than you think,” Gwynneth said, her voice gentle again.

“Can I visit you?”

She sighed. “Not until you come back the gnaw wolf of a pack.” The soft gray shadows before the dawn were thickening. “Now I must go to sleep. It’s almost twixt time.”

“Twixt time? What’s that?”

Gwynneth yawned sleepily. “Twixt time is that minute between the last vanishing drop of the night and the first rosy drop of the dawn. We call it twixt time and if I don’t get to sleep before that rosy drop, it’s very hard for me.”

“You sleep in the day?” Faolan was startled.

“Um-hm.” Gwynneth nodded, her eyes half closed. “Such are the ways of owls.”

Faolan sighed. The world seemed very complicated.
Owls slept during the day, bears through the winter. Would wolves have a new way of sleeping? What did he know about anything?

The fire was turning cold. The day growing lighter and emptier. Once more, Faolan felt a desperate desire to recapture time. Maybe Gwynneth was right. Time could not exactly be measured, not that warm time he had spent with her in a cocoon spun of firelight and star shine, of the crackles and hiss as the flames danced in their own hot wind.

He heaved himself up and, with the bone of Thunderheart in his jaws, he began to walk away. Never had he felt so lonely.

AFTER MANY HOURS OF SLEEP, Gwynneth felt the world growing darker. Tween time was approaching. The bright shadows that danced on the inside of her eyelids were beginning to turn a dusky violet. And although she still slept, something stirred in her, a gentle alert that the darkness all owls loved was approaching. Though her body remained motionless in the niche across from her forge, a part of her began to rise in a dream flight. Not a feather moved, and yet a whisper of wind lofted her toward that border between sleeping and waking. Then, precisely at the moment of true twilight when the sun dropped beneath the horizon, Gwynneth woke up. Her first thought was
Has he gone?

She peered out from the stone niche and then stepped into the evening, spinning her head almost completely
around. There was no sign of him. She felt a mixture of ease and sadness. She was relieved to be alone again, but she had to admit that she had found the young wolf’s company a pleasure. The wolf was companionable and intriguing, and certainly the mark on the splayed paw was puzzling. The thought of it brought a little twitch to her gizzard.

Gwynneth reflected for several moments about the design on the paw and then with one talon tried to draw that design in the hard dirt near her forge. She wondered what the significance was of those spiraling lines. But even more unfathomable to Gwynneth was her shock upon seeing the spiral, like a bolt of lightning that seemed to flash through her gizzard. Why? What possible meaning could it have for her?

She poked at the fire a bit and then picked up the misshapen metal that she was trying to forge into a willow leaf. But those swirling lines filled her mind’s eye and soon she realized that the elongated oval of the willow leaf was being stretched into another shape. She had not been aware that she had been slowly twirling the tongs as she held the piece in the fire to heat it. It had just seemed a comforting motion, almost hypnotic, as her mind had considered the pattern on Faolan’s paw. The hunk of
metal that had been roughly the shape of a leaf assumed a conical shape, and then, as the Rogue smith accelerated the twirling motion of the tongs, twists began to ripple from the point of the cone toward the base.

Quickly, Gwynneth drew the molten form out of the fire and began to tap the indentations between the rippling twists with her smallest hammer. She became more and more excited as she saw what was happening. It was as if she didn’t even have to think, as if her talons had a direct connection to her gizzard. She worked ceaselessly, with a deeper concentration than she had ever experienced. Fluidly, she moved from one task to another as an extraordinary object began to emerge. She had to adjust the heat of the fire constantly by either blowing more air into it with bellows or damping it by shoveling dirt on top. After every few blows of the hammer, she plunged the object into a tub of water and then instantly back into the fire so that the metal would anneal properly. The rhythms of cooling and reheating for such a delicate object were complicated. If not done properly, the internal stresses of the metal would cause the object to break. But finally the piece was finished.

She held it up, still glowing cherry red—the only light in the foggy night aside from the forge fire. She
blinked, looking at the spiraling coil as it cooled in the misty evening. It was a three-dimensional replica of the spinning lines on Faolan’s footpad. “How did I do this?” she whispered in amazement. It was the most intricate piece she had ever made.

She churred softly to herself, for Gwynneth knew she would have never dared to attempt such a feat if she had known what she was doing, if she had planned it as she had planned the willow leaf. This was a hundred times more challenging than the leaf.
How in the name of Glaux did I do this?
she wondered.
And why?

She now felt an urge to search for the wolf, to try to pick up his tracks. Not that she intended to meet up with him, but she was eager to see if he had heeded her advice and sought out the wolves of the Beyond.

The weather was coming in from the west. The stars and moon were obliterated behind woolly clouds and a thickening fog. Nights like these were often used by owls in covert tracking operations, as they could conceal themselves in the dense cloud cover and track by sound alone.

Masked Owls were members of the Barn Owl family, a species renowned for its auditory skills. A Barn Owl’s ear slits were placed on either side of its head, one higher than the other. This uneven set of the ears helped the
owls to capture sound better. But of additional value, the edges of the owls’ facial disks had muscles that allowed them to expand their surfaces. This helped the owls scoop up any sounds and guide them to their ears.

It was not long before Gwynneth found the sound she had been searching for—the footfalls of Faolan. He had a distinctive rhythm because of the malformation of that forward paw. The spiral pattern in that paw wasn’t engraved deeply enough to leave a print except perhaps in very fresh mud, but Gwynneth thought she could almost hear a sound print from the spiral.

She knew exactly where he was now. The wolf was clawing his way up the rocky scrabble of Bent Wing Ridge.

Good!
she thought.
He’s smack in the middle of the MacAngus territory.
She suspected he had been born into the MacDuncan clan. But it didn’t matter. Angus MacAngus would see that he got back to the MacDuncans, if that was his clan.

But never a MacHeath, Glaux forbid he should be a MacHeath!

THE OWLS CALLED THE RIDGE THE Bent Wing because the two parts of it joined at an odd angle to form an off-kilter wingspread. The wolves called the ridge Crooked Back and the highest part of it they called the Spine.

On the first morning after Faolan had left Gwynneth, he had picked up the wet odor of the caribou. And almost immediately he heard the wolves begin to howl. He listened carefully to what he guessed must be the
skreeleen
, the lead howler, announcing that meat was nearing. Gwynneth had told him about
skreeleens
. She explained how some
skreeleens
only howled about matters of prey and hunting, while others devoted their howling to relaying information about pack location back to the clan. Gwynneth had said that although she understood the
wolves’ howling generally, she never knew the precise meaning of the message.

But Faolan understood exactly what this
skreeleen
was communicating. It was the arrival of a large herd from the northwest. It was traveling at
tock-tock
pace.
Tock-tock
was a slow but steady speed in which the clicking of the caribous’ tendons was still distinct, not a blur of sound as when the caribou ran very fast. It was the
tock-tock
speed that caribou used for long distances. Faolan could hear there were several new calves, a half dozen elderly caribou, at least three young bucks, and one young cow.

It was not long after the
skreeleen
’s message that the first of the caribou herd came into view. Faolan spotted four wolves loping almost lazily along the edges of the herd. He marveled that the herd had not panicked at the wolves’ presence. Perhaps the wolves were feigning disinterest. Faolan was still high in the rimrock. He began to weave through the shadows as he monitored the wolves watching the caribou. He noticed the few subtle signals pass among these four wolves—a yelp, a flickering of ears, a head toss. Soon, two of the wolves peeled away from the herd. It wasn’t long before they returned with the rest of the pack. The caribou immediately increased their speed. And then the scene became an exact replica
of what Faolan had studied so closely on the rock walls in the Cave Before Time. Four females began pressing in on the herd, nipping at the flanks of the caribou on the outside edges.

Swiftly, the herd split. The female wolves in front of the formation of the pack began to bear down on two elderly bucks. Faolan watched it all. Eight females nipped at one buck’s heels, trading off in alternate spurts of speed to conserve their own energy, yet keep the caribou pressed to the limits of his own endurance.

Faolan had brought down a caribou using his own ingenuity and what he had remembered from the cave paintings. But he had been alone. There was an incomparable beauty to what he saw now: the pack working together, smoothly, flawlessly. The splendor of it called to him. He did not know it, but the wolves had a word for what Faolan was seeing:
hwlyn
, spirit of the pack. Faolan craved that which he could not name.

Faolan watched the wolves for several days after that first morning. For the most part, he kept to the ridge, conducting his surveillance with extraordinary caution. He stayed downwind of the wolves.

The ridge ran for a great distance above a valley that
was a thoroughfare for many clans of wolves. It seemed to Faolan that normal territorial rules were not observed here. There were practically no scent markings, which must mean that it was open hunting to all clans.

He spotted something and crept down closer. It was the first time that he had seen a pack with what he thought might be a gnaw wolf.

He wanted to watch carefully and see exactly what this meant. Gwynneth had said a gnaw wolf’s time in the pack was hard. The wolf had to prove itself.

The pack had brought down a moose just before he spotted them. Faolan watched closely as two members, a she-wolf and a male, approached the carcass slowly, almost reverently, and then sank to their knees and began to tear at the belly and the flanks, the tenderest parts of the animal. After they had eaten for a bit, the male raised his head and nodded toward four others of the pack who now walked toward the carcass. The gnaw wolf, a small yellowish wolf, hung behind. And not only did it stay back, one of the other wolves gave it a sharp head butt and a nip that sent the gnaw wolf yowling. The she-wolf who had eaten first raced over to the gnaw wolf, peeling back her lips in a ferocious low growl. The gnaw wolf flattened himself on the ground, rolling back his eyes until the whites shone like the gauzy shadows
of two moons in the daylight. He yelped and whined pitifully.

The other wolves ate and ate. The gnaw wolf began to creep a bit closer, always slithering forward on his belly. If he got too close, a wolf broke away from its gorging and charged the gnaw wolf, snarling.

Will he ever get to eat?
Faolan wondered.
How long must he wait?

But while the wolves’ treatment of the gnaw wolf was harsh, they did not seem vicious like the wolves of the Outermost. There seemed to be some greater purpose to their actions. But it was nonetheless mysterious. Finally, when the pack wolves had eaten their fill, a silent signal was given and the gnaw wolf approached. There was hardly a shred of meat left on the moose carcass. The she-wolf who had eaten first trotted up to where the gnaw wolf was trying to salvage a bloody tendril. She gave him a soft head butt and disgorged a pile of steaming moose flesh. The gnaw wolf groveled, mewled, and whined his gratitude. To Faolan, the groveling was the most revolting part of it all.

Not every pack had a gnaw wolf, which seemed fortunate to Faolan after witnessing the treatment of the small
yellowish wolf. He saw similar scenes over the next few days. It was hard for him to reconcile or make sense of the gnaw wolves’ treatment with what Gwynneth had told him of the exalted status they could attain when they became members of the Watch at the Ring of the Sacred Volcanoes. They seemed to be utterly despised by the others in the pack.

Faolan asked himself the same question over and over.
What kind of life am I going to? To be alone or be reviled, is there no other choice?
He did not want to be part of a pack if it was only to be the object of their cruelty. And yet he had seen something else when he had observed those wolves hunting. It was the matchless splendor of a pack working together, the inexpressible, amazing unity for which there was a single word,
hwlyn
, that Faolan had never heard but the meaning of which he sensed. It was the lure of that unnamable spirit of
hwlyn
that would finally draw Faolan down from the ridge. And yet something always stopped him just as he was about to bound down the steep slope of the ridge and reveal himself to a passing pack.