Lone Wolf (3 page)

The bear’s chest rumbled with chuffs of delight. The more she chuffed, the more Faolan licked her nose. The bear felt her eyes fill with tears. For days this wolf pup had nursed but had hardly seemed to look at her. But now, now when he had finally stopped nursing for just a moment and she had played with him, he played back. He understood. She picked him up again gently and held him away from her face.

They peered once again into each other’s eyes. He wiggled a bit and made the
milk! milk!
bark. She cradled
him, and he clamped on to her teat. But this time there was a difference. He opened his eyes as he nursed and looked right at her. It was as if there were a current flowing between them. Faolan consumed the milk, and the grizzly drank in the luminous green light of his eyes. She felt a deep surge of love.

THEY MADE A CURIOUS TWOSOME—the great lumbering grizzly with the sun reflecting off the silvery tips of her brown fur, and the small pup, his coat a brighter silver, scampering sometimes ahead of her, sometimes at her side, sometimes behind as they foraged for the spring bulbs that were just pushing their sprouts through the ground. One would grunt and the other would yip or hurl out snappish barks. Yet somehow they had found a way to begin communicating. Faolan had begun to swing his head exactly like a bear cub would when saying no.

More and more the grizzly realized that rearing a pup was not all that different from rearing a cub. She marveled at the similarities between the two. Yet it frightened her how small Faolan was in comparison to bear
cubs. Small and defenseless. However, the pup was very fast, much faster than a bear cub, and could cover ground with great bursts of speed. The grizzly thought Faolan’s speed might compensate for what he lacked in size. But there was the problem of his splayed front paw, which he favored. A wolf, just like a bear, needed full use of all its paws.

Faolan now had begun to lag behind and was making small whimpering
I’m tired
sounds. The grizzly turned around and glared at him. Faolan whimpered and squatted in a hummock of soft grass, wagging his head and growling. “No, no, no!” he said, then blew a great spray of air through his nostrils as if to proclaim
too hot!

He walked slowly forward as if he could hardly drag himself to the grizzly’s side, and nudged against her to try to clamber onto her back. There was a huge muscle over the grizzly’s shoulders that powered her forelimbs, and Faolan loved to climb aboard and ride high on it. Bear cubs were too large to ride at this stage, but not the wolf pup. Even in the den, Faolan liked curling up on that furry mountain when he wasn’t nursing.

Having mothered three sets of cubs, the grizzly had heard all the complaints before. And it really didn’t matter if they were bears or wolves, the young got tired, they
got cranky, they wanted to go back to the den and nurse—easy food. But one day the grizzly’s milk would dry up, and the pup would have to learn about other sources of food. It was particularly important for Faolan because he was so small.
Is he small for his age? Perhaps this is the size of all wolf pups?
the grizzly wondered. Nonetheless, it made her nervous.

It surprised the grizzly that she had grown so attached to the little one. But that spark she had detected when he had first fetched up on her foot and opened his eyes seemed to kindle throughout his tiny body. He was quick, smart, very strong willed, and now the fires from the spark sometimes had to be tamed. How could such a tiny little thing contain such fierceness?

The grizzly lumbered up to Faolan and butted him with her boxy nose. He tumbled backward, squealing in mock pain.

“Get up,” she grunted.

“No! No!”

“No” was most definitely Faolan’s favorite word. “No” and “More milk.” It sounded slightly different when he said it than when bear cubs uttered these same words. His voice was higher, not as deep as a cub’s. The grizzly wondered if this was because his chest was so much smaller than a bear’s. It was so narrow, so fragile. His growls were
also shallower than a bear cub’s. However, the accompanying gestures were very similar to those of a cub. Did the pups of the wolves’ packs toss their heads about this way? From what little she had seen of full-grown wolves, their gestures were nothing like these. Once she had watched a pack from behind a huge boulder as they tore at the carcass of a moose. There was an elaborate formality to their every move. Certain wolves ate first and then others crept up as if requesting permission to partake of the meat. She wasn’t sure how they would deal with a whining, obstreperous pup like Faolan, who had just flopped himself on his back and was flailing his splayed paw dramatically.

He wanted to go back to the den, to the cool, welcoming shadows, to its earthy coziness, to the smell of the river, to the soft moss pads that grew at the opening where he loved to take his morning nap. But most of all, he wanted to curl up against the grizzly and nurse. Even the thought of that sweet milk made his stomach growl. Bulbs had a horrible taste. There was no juice in roots. He had even complained that they were too hard for his teeth.

He began whining loudly now.

“Urskadamus!” The grizzly grumbled the ancient bear oath, which meant “curse of a rabid bear.” Then she blasted him with a series of short huffs of intolerance.

This was the first level of scolding. But Faolan continued to whine and roll on his back, wagging the splayed paw.

Enough of this!
she thought.
He must learn not to give in to his weaknesses.
He must, she realized suddenly, learn to make them his strengths. It would be a cruel lesson, but there was an even crueler world awaiting him.

She growled for the first time ever at the pup and then with her own mighty paw whacked his good front paw. Now Faolan howled in real pain. His green eyes flooded with astonishment.
How could you? How could you?
he wondered.

The grizzly did not have words for every occasion that a young pup would understand. Sometimes teaching or communicating by example was the best way, and then later the words would come. So she lumbered past Faolan and began digging in a patch of onion grass with her own paw, the one she rarely dug with. The message was clear:
Use the splayed paw! Make it your digging paw.

Meekly, Faolan began to scratch the dirt where the onions grew. It took a long time, but finally he dug one up.

The grizzly was proud. She came up beside him, making low purring sounds, then nuzzled him gently and
licked Faolan under his jaw with her enormous tongue. She turned and began digging in another nearby patch of onions. Faolan stared at her in dismay.
More?
he thought. But he began scratching with the splayed paw. He did not want to risk her wrath again. What would hurt more than a whack was if she said he could not nurse.

No milk, only onions! Unthinkable!
He dug harder.

The pup had done well. The grizzly had watched him out of the corner of her eye. In a very short time, he had turned the splayed paw in a special way so that he could get nearly the force he had with the other paw.

Faolan was a quick learner, and not just quick, but inventive. Still, the grizzly constantly regretted that she knew so little about wolves. But bears and wolves tended to avoid one another. This was quite different from the owls and the wolves, who had formed a close alliance over a great span of time that reached back to when the wolves had first arrived in the Beyond. The grizzly often thought that if she had been an owl, she would have been a better mother to this pup. But it was stupid to waste time regretting that she was not an owl.

Instead, she thought and thought, searching for every
scrap of memory she had of wolves. She vividly remembered once watching from a high promontory two packs that had come together to hunt. She had been quick to see that the way wolves hunted was very different from that of bears. Bears were much larger and more powerful, but wolves made up for their lack of power with their clever ways. Bears never formed packs. And perhaps because of that they had a different manner of thinking. The wolves’ ways seemed complicated and mysterious.

And owls
, the grizzly continued her musing,
owls are so clever!
They knew how to make tools, weapons. They stuck things in the fires of their forges and made claws that fit over their talons. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, bears weren’t so smart because they were so much bigger, bigger than wolves and so much bigger than owls. Then a really dreadful thought occurred to her:
Perhaps I am not smart enough to rear a wolf pup!

She looked back at the poor little thing as they made their way to the den. He was completely exhausted, wobbly to the point of staggering off the narrow path. He was most likely too tired to even cling to her hump while riding.
Well
, she thought,
smart or dumb, I’m all he’s got
. She turned around and picked the little pup up with his head
in her mouth and the rest of his body dangling, the way she would have carried a one-moon-old cub. At least two moons had passed since Faolan had fetched up, and he was still small enough to be carried carefully in her mouth.

Tomorrow they would make their way an even longer distance to forage for the squirrel caches of white bark pine. The white bark that squirrels used to line their nests was one of the most nutritious of the foods available in spring. And with luck perhaps they would find a squirrel. The spring diet was mostly grasses, roots, nuts. Meat would come later, but they could always hope for carrion of an old animal who had not made it through the winter. Even as the grizzly led the pup back to the den, she swung her head constantly to sniff, scanning for the distinctive smell of rotting flesh.

The grizzly had found a new den for spring and summer, one of the loveliest ever. It was in a thicket of alders on the river near a back eddy that would soon be busy with trout. Just outside the den’s entrance, glacier lilies nodded their pale yellow heads. The steep bank down to the river was stippled with wild blue irises.

By the time they entered the den, Faolan was asleep. But he never slept so soundly that he couldn’t nurse. The grizzly sat upright with her legs stuck straight out in front of her. While Faolan nursed, she watched the lavender twilight fall softly on the land. The river reflected the clouds on its glassy surface. It was different from the stormy night Faolan had arrived. She looked down at the pup, who was drunk with milk now.

She wondered about him more and more. The splayed paw was not that odd, but the faint tracery of swirling lines on the pad intrigued her. The swirls were so dim, but there was something almost hypnotic about the pattern of lines. What did it mean? Where had Faolan come from? Why had the river given him up to her? Was he lonely? Wolves were pack animals. Bears solitary. How could she be not just a mother but an entire pack to this wolf? “Urskadamus!” she muttered quietly.

The grizzly wondered all sorts of things. She knew wolves could not sit up like bears. So they must nurse their young in a very different way, perhaps lying down. But she was always worried about rolling over and crushing Faolan accidentally. He was so small and she so huge. And wolves could not stand up on their hind legs, let alone sit up. This seemed especially unfortunate. She saw
so much standing up. She learned so much. It troubled her that Faolan could not do this. Would it, she wondered, be possible to teach a wolf to stand up and walk just a bit on his hind legs? She might try it. She looked down at him again and gave him a cuddle and a nuzzle. She loved him so. It was very odd, she knew. Other bears would look at her suspiciously. But she didn’t care. She simply didn’t care.

Faolan squirmed a bit and settled deeper down into his milk-laced sleep. He had grown accustomed to the percussive sounds of the grizzly’s innards—the windy drafts of her gut as she digested, the bellowing inhalations and exhalations of her breathing, but most of all, the epic thumpings of her heart, that huge majestic heart. The sound wove through Faolan while he slept like a song for his milk dreams. The grizzly was no longer simply the Milk Giver in his mind, but Thunderheart.

IT WAS DURING THE FIRST SLIVER of dawn that Thunderheart unceremoniously dumped Faolan from her lap and gave him a gentle butt with her nose on his muzzle. “Watch me!”

She left the den and he followed her down the banks of the river to the rock slab that slid into the water. It was his first fishing lesson. The trout at this time of the moon’s cycle would begin schooling in the back eddy by the rock. Fishing took patience, and Thunderheart knew that wolf pups, like bear cubs, were short on patience—especially Faolan. But he was a quick learner. She hoped he was ready for the very practical lesson of fishing. He just had to fatten up. She worried incessantly about what she perceived as his smallness.

Fishing of course would be easier in the fall when the
salmon began their run up the river. Then all one had to do was wade on the upstream side of a small waterfall and catch the salmon as they flipped themselves toward their spawning grounds. Dumb with their urge to mate, they were easy prey. But trout were different. Free of any compulsion to spawn at this time of year and certainly having no obsessions about swimming upstream, trout were a challenge. No matter, Faolan must learn. He had to grow fatter, bigger.

The grizzly waited and peered into the amber water, scanning for the first flicker of a trout. She felt Faolan growing restless, and she knew he could not remain still much longer. But the fish didn’t come. The pup whined a bit and wagged his head in the direction of a nearby cluster of sedges. She grunted her permission. Now she would have to keep one eye on the pup and one on the fish.

He was happy, though. The sedges provided an endless opportunity for nosing about for grubs and beetles and ladybugs, a favorite of bears and now a favorite of Faolan. He found a nest and was soon yipping with delight.