Lone Wolf (2 page)

The Obea, though lacking imagination, did have thoughts. Practical thoughts. Where should she take this pup so that there was no chance it would survive? She had seen something on the pad of the splayed paw that disturbed her. She wasn’t sure why; all she knew was that she had not liked those markings.

What Shibaan
did
know was her job: to take care of the bad business of the clan. She did not mind her duty now. Long ago her failure to have pups was like a sharp pebble underfoot, a constant reminder that she would never be a mother but instead an unranked wolf charged with an unpleasant task. However, she performed her work well, and over the years she had gradually gained some respect from the chieftain. The sharp pebble, once an irritation, became smooth and settled in her being like a polished river stone—there not as a reminder of failure, but simply as part of her character, her charge, her duty as an Obea.

As she carried the pup, she glimpsed again the odd spiraling mark on its footpad. She felt a tremor in her heart. She could have killed the pup, but the Obea was very superstitious. It was against the law to take shortcuts, and she wanted to climb the spirit trail to the Great Wolf, Lupus, and the Cave of Souls.

Ahead, Shibaan saw the gleam of the river under the gray skies that pressed down. It was there she intended to leave the pup. The river was just beginning to break up in the spring thaw. And when that happened the level would rise suddenly, torrentially, and the pup would drown. She would leave it on the edge, where it would be caught by the surging waters.

She arrived at a spot where the bank had been undercut by the course of the river. There were already signs of thaw, so she placed the pup on an ice ledge. It was a spot certain to be swamped, especially when the storm rumbled in.

The Obea was careful as she put the pup on the ice—heedful, precise. The pup was an it, neither a he nor a she, nor even a wolf. Just an
it
that squirmed, mewling and whining weakly. But all that would be over soon. If the storm didn’t take the pup, an owl would. The river was on a major flight path of collier owls who flew into the Beyond for the coals spewed from the volcanoes. They were always hungry when they got to this point. This
malcadh
would not be the first seized by an owl from the kingdom of Ga’Hoole. There were smith owls, too, that set up temporary forges near the volcanoes. Smithing was hard work. Those owls ate a lot. Despite the close
relationship between owls and wolves, a
malcadh
was fair game.

There was a
tick-tick
sound as the pup attempted to grip the cold, smooth surface with its tiny paws. The mewling and whining escalated to weeping, but the Obea didn’t hear it. Her ears were sealed as effectively as the pup’s. There were no vague stirrings deep within her. If anything, she felt only the cold, smooth weight of that stone that had become synonymous with her duty, her charge, her identity.
I am the Obea. That is all I need to know. All I need to be. I am the Obea.

HE COULD NOT SEE, HE COULD NOT hear, and vainly he poked out his tongue to lick, but the smell of milk was gone and with it the warm teat. He could feel only cold, nothing else. It filled him until his small body was racked with violent shivers. How had everything changed so fast? Where was the stream of warm milk, the soft fur, the squirming presence of the other pups? In his brief life, he had known little, but now he knew less. Smell, taste, and feeling, the only senses he had, were starved. The pup felt himself drifting off into a void that was neither life nor death, only a terrible nothing. And with this great void came numbness.

Something stirred—a vibration—and with it a new element entered his barely pulsing life. The terrible cracking and booming as the river ice buckled was so loud
that it penetrated the pup’s sealed ears. Then suddenly, a roar surged through his head. There was a great lurch, and he began to skid off the ice shelf, but digging in his sharp little claws, he gripped hard.

It would seem a cruel trick that the lone pup gained two vital senses, sight and sound, as the winter-locked river ruptured and broke free. It was perhaps the shock that caused his eyes to unseal and his ears to open.

The final thaw of the river unleashed immense cataracts of water that tore at the banks, uprooting trees, dislodging boulders and rocky outcrops. The shelf on which the Obea had placed the pup creaked, then tilted, and at last, there was a sharp crack that splintered in his ears. Light flashed brutally in the pup’s eyes as the moon scorched the ice floes sweeping down the river.

Dim in the pup’s memory was a previous violence. Birth. He had been launched from the warmth of his mother’s womb into the grip of forces greater than himself. His small body was nothing against the intense contractions that expelled him. And now it was happening again. But instead of going from the inviolable warmth of his mother’s womb, he was sliding into the frigid waters of the tumultuous river. He dug harder with that splayed paw, which seemed to have a better grip than the
others. He clung, clung dumbly to the shelf that had joined the other flotsam in the river.

It would have been easier, less painful, to release his grip, to slip off and drown. But there was only instinct, and the instinct was to grip. He opened his eyes wider and saw the gleam of the full moon on the river. The brightness made him squint.

His first lesson: He could adjust his eyes to the light. His first thought: What else might he adjust or be able to change? Might he bring back the warmth he once knew? The smell of milk, the taste? The soft crush of those wiggling furry creatures that had tumbled about him as they all scrambled for the milk? The comforting rhythmic vibrations he felt as he pressed close to suck? There was something beneath the fur, deep in the Milk Giver, that beat.

Icy water dashed over him, but still he clung. Occasionally, he felt the ice shelf spin round and round in one place. The light swirled and he experienced a dizzying nausea. To steady himself and keep his grip he had to shut his eyes tight. Then there would be a jolt and his raft would break loose and join the tumult of the stream again. He felt the ice diminishing beneath him. His hind legs hung off the raft now and were growing numb in the
water. The numbness crept through him. It was not an unpleasant feeling, but with it something else seemed to grow dimmer, to seep from the deepest part of him. His claws began to lose their grip.

The last thing he felt was a tremendous jolt; the last thing he heard was the sound of his claws skidding across the final fragment of his ice raft.

ON THIS STORMY NIGHT, THERE was a sound that rose louder than the roar of the river and the howling of the wind. The anguished cries of the mother grizzly shook the banks on which she sat. Her great gulping grief seemed to suck the air from the earth. The long guard hairs on her back were sheathed in ice and trembled, creating a bristling litter of small sounds beneath the rage of her grief.

When the river had threatened to flood her den, she had turned her back for a few seconds to scan for higher ground. In those seconds, cougars had erupted out of nowhere and made off with her cub. Her single cub. She had only grown one this time. All summer and fall she had eaten, fattened herself up, and for what? To have what would most likely be her last-born killed.

Now, with her teats still dripping with the milk meant for her cub, she was ready to die. She welcomed the river that she had hoped to escape. Not since the mating time five summers before, when a male grizzly had killed one of her cubs to get near her, had she grieved like this. She would not move from the den where she had birthed and suckled the cub. She tipped her massive head toward the moon that watched her like a dead eye, and pleaded with Great Ursus,
Take me, take me!

The grizzly had lost all sense of time, but the night became darker as the moon slipped down in the western sky. Near dawn, the storm had blown out, leaving dark clouds on the horizon like smoldering ashes. The river flood had reached its peak, but still had not taken the grizzly.

A dark sodden clot snagged on her half-submerged hind leg. She shook her foot at the annoying scratching sensation. But when she shook, the clot clung tighter. It made her irritable, and she dragged her paw up onto the bank.

She would later wonder what it was that stopped her from reaching forward and simply scraping off the clot. It betrayed no sign of life. The scratching could have been
the prickly thorns of a bramble that had become entangled with the flotsam of the racing currents. River trash. That was all. And yet she felt something.

She would think of it as a spark. She had seen sparks come from the sky, and sparks struck from rocks when tumbling boulders collided, but she had never imagined a spark coming from a river. A spark from a river, unquenched, undamaged, undiminished, flying upward from the watery turbulence and containing in its minuscule sphere of light, the promise of life. So she reached forward and carefully picked up the sodden clump with both her front paws. It didn’t squirm. She couldn’t see signs of breathing. But it was a cub of some sort, and when it opened its eyes with what seemed great pain, she
saw
the spark.

As the sun lifted over the horizon, she saw its light reflected in the cub’s two eyes. And then she saw an image that shocked her. It was her own reflection in the eyes of an animal that was not born of her, nor of her kind.
It’s a wolf,
she thought.
I seek death, and it seeks life
.

And then she looked up at the sky, searching for the Great Bear constellation. She could not see it, for dawn was breaking, but deep down she knew that this wolf was a message from Ursus, a scolding. She must not think of
death. Her time had not come yet. It wasn’t an accident that the pathetic pup had fetched up on her leg. It was a gift from the river.

“Faolan,” she whispered. “I shall call you Faolan.”
Fao
meant both “river” and “wolf.” And
lan
was the word for “gift.”

“You are my gift from the river.” And she gathered him to her chest.

The Milk Giver? The pup smelled the milky traces in the thick fur and nuzzled toward the source. But the closer he got, the more confused he became. It did not seem the same. The smell was different and the taste as well. And there was a new, frightening sound. The thunderous roar of the river was replaced by a great rhythmic booming, and threaded through the mighty reverberations were gusty bubbling sounds. As the grizzly gently pressed Faolan closer to her teat, the sounds actually shook him. Yet he felt safe.

It was a different Milk Giver. A huge one, many times bigger than the first, and he was hearing the pumping of her heart and the turbulence of her stomach. Gradually, he became used to the sounds. They blended into the
rushing of the river, folded into the quieter noises of his own sucking.

He sucked. His world became one of milk. Thick rich milk. He shut his eyes and slept, still sucking.

The grizzly looked down on Faolan and huge tears rolled from the corners of her eyes.
The river spirit brought you to me. There must be a reason. I shall nurse you through this morning into the day and through the night. A spark can become a flame, a flame a fire.

She blew her warm gentle breath onto him. The pup’s eyes fluttered, and he sank deeper into dreamless sleep.

THE PUP MIGHT HAVE BEEN SENT from Ursus, and the grizzly might have had the best of intentions, but she was at a loss to imagine how she might take care of this pup beyond nursing him. He was a greedy little creature, that was for sure, and he was so different from a bear cub. He smelled different. He sucked differently. And although he was a bit larger than a newborn bear cub when she had found him, he was not fattening up as fast. A bear cub would have doubled its weight by now. The wolf pup had grown some, but not enough. And yet he nursed incessantly. The grizzly worried that her milk was not right, or perhaps she wasn’t holding him properly. What did she know about raising a wolf pup? If he had been a sign from Ursus, there should have been more signs. Signs that told her what exactly to do.

The grizzly told herself every day that the pup was a gift. But she wanted him to be more than just a gift. Did he feel she was strange, too?
But what do cubs know?
She was startled and nearly chuckled.
I called him a cub!
And then she realized that even though the pup was a wolf, perhaps they were all alike.
Cubs, pups. They think about nothing but milk. Faolan is no different.

He had paused in his nursing for a moment, and she took the opportunity to pick him up in her huge paws and hold him close to her face. They peered into each other’s eyes. His were becoming a lovely green, like the wolves’ eyes in the Beyond, and hers were a rich, gleaming brown, so shiny that the tiny wolf could see his reflection in them.

“You’re a funny little creature!” And she stuck out her tongue and dabbed his wet little nose. He gave a happy
yip yip.

“Oh, you like that!” She did it again, and he squealed now with delight.

She set him down. He immediately rolled onto his back, holding his tiny paws in the air expectantly. The grizzly thought this was a signal that he wanted some tickling. She began to speak with a mixture of words, snorts, and huffs. She wasn’t sure if he understood her or not. It didn’t matter.

“Oh, Great Ursus, you want me to do this again, you funny little fellow.”

The words of the wolves and the bears and the owls did not differ much, but the tone and the expressions in the subtler movements of their heads or their eyes created a hidden language strange to other animals, and sometimes incomprehensible.

Faolan lay on his back, waiting for the huge tongue to tickle his belly. So she did. And the pup leaped up gleefully. This was repeated several times. Then the pup ran a distance and turned his head to look slyly back at her. He suddenly hurled himself toward the grizzly, leaping into her arms. She was so stunned, she fell backward. He climbed up her chest and began licking her chin, then her nose.