Lone Wolf (6 page)

The bear and the wolf had not been working long before both of them struck something hard. Faolan looked up in surprise and paused, but Thunderheart grew excited. She had heard that sound before! It was a hollow
kah-kah
noise. In another minute, she grunted in delight. They had uncovered a lava bed with a natural tunnel that had been made from the flow of an inactive volcano to the north and west. Off the first tunnel, there was an elevated section that would trap heat and provide good drainage if there were any leaks from above.

“This is perfect,” she said, looking around. “Just perfect.”

“Perfect for winter?” Faolan asked, for he had the feeling Thunderheart was referring to something else.

The grizzly looked at him now. Her gaze was very serious. “I must explain something to you, pup.”

Faolan felt a dread stir deep within him.
Please don’t talk about wolves again. Not wolves!

“I am not sure what wolves do, but bears sleep through the winter. Our hearts grow slower and beat but a few times when there were many beats before.”

“Mine, too! Mine, too!” Faolan said. Although he could feel his heart racing.

“No, Faolan, yours doesn’t.”

“I’m just like you, Thunderheart.”

“No, you’re different. I sense you are not going to sleep as deeply as I do.”

“I’ll try. I promise!”

“You can try all you want. But that doesn’t matter. You will most likely grow bored here.” She glanced around at the tunnel.

“Oh, no! No, I won’t! I love to watch you sleep.”

Thunderheart lifted a paw to silence him.

“Don’t interrupt. You’re big now. You will get hungry. All I am saying is that if you grow hungry and bored, you have my permission to go out. Snow rabbits are plentiful here. They don’t sleep. I am sure of that.”

Faolan was suddenly alarmed. “Are you saying I am like a snow rabbit? Are you telling me to go play with a snow rabbit?” His voice seethed with indignation.

“Faolan!” Thunderheart roared, and the lava rock walls of the tunnel shivered. “Don’t act stupid. I’m telling you to go out and kill the rabbit, eat it. Not play with it!”

“Oh!” said Faolan meekly.

IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER THE wolf and the grizzly moved into the winter den that Thunderheart began the cold sleep. In the beginning, it was just short snoozes and she often told Faolan to go out and scour the slope for rabbits and marmots. She wanted to get him used to going out alone. He would always bring some meat back for Thunderheart in his gut. He had learned through some primal instinct that the large chunks of meat that lodged in his first stomach could be regurgitated in steaming piles on the floor of the den for Thunderheart. The first time he did this, she roused herself from the thick blanket of sleep in which she was folded, but it became more and more difficult to wake her after the first heavy snowfall. Thunderheart slept so deeply that, just as she had explained to Faolan, her immense
heart began to beat slower and more quietly. It was as if a deep hush had fallen upon her and she sank deeper and deeper into an insensate sleep.

Faolan did not like the quiet. It unsettled him. The sound of that great heart was his first memory. So it was not simply boredom that drove him from the den, but the silence. Despite Thunderheart’s immense size, she seemed in her stillness a shadow of her summer self. Faolan could not understand how she slept so much. And, as the rhythms of Thunderheart’s body slowed, it seemed that those of Faolan’s accelerated.

The deeper the snow outside, the better for Faolan. He loved bounding through the drifts and making huge powdery explosions. Down on the flats of the meadow, the wind had pounded the snow into a great hard surface, and he enjoyed skidding and coasting games. He had become expert at tracking the big snow hares and found their meat delectable.

He loved everything about winter—the strange green sky as twilight descended, then the deep purple dark of the night and the glittering jewel star that hung in the north and never moved, but guided him back to
the den. The ice-spangled bracken poking through the drifts were as luminous as the constellations that floated in the dome of the night. One night soon after the first snowfall, he had spied in the distance a spectacular sight. It was the waterfall they had passed on their way to the winter den. But now the cascades were frozen in the air, suspended like silver flames caught in a wintry eternity.

Each day was shorter as the earth tipped farther away from the sun. But the nights were longer. Once he thought he heard something new in the night—a long melodious howl that inscribed itself in the blackness like an unfurling banner of song. It stirred him profoundly. It was new to him, yet oddly familiar. He felt compelled to howl in return. It was amazing to him that he understood perfectly the message embedded in the howl:
I am here, here with my mate. Our sister and brothers have returned. In one more moon, when the mating times come, we shall move.

Faolan understood the message, but there were strange pieces of it that made no sense. What was a sister? A brother?

Each night for the next cycle of the moon, he went out to hear the wolves. He understood more and more,
but despite his growing curiosity, he did not dare travel closer. For there was a warning woven into the message:
This is our territory. Do not trespass.
The warning was as clear as any scent mark. By the end of the moon’s cycle, the howling had finished. The wolves had left as they promised.

For the first time, Faolan felt a bit lonely. He returned to the den after the first songless night and looked at Thunderheart.
How long will she sleep?
he wondered. She no longer slept sitting up, but instead lay on her side. He curled up next to her and listened to the slow beating of her heart.
So slow, so slow,
he thought. And yet still he found profound comfort in its languid rhythm.

There came a day when the earth began to tilt toward the sun. The darkness near the entrance of the den seemed thinner, and Faolan even detected a slight quickening in the beating of the grizzly’s heart.
Perhaps this lonely time is coming to an end,
he thought.

Faolan still made his forays out to hunt for the tasty snow hares and marmots. One day as the morning lengthened, he went farther from the den than he had in a long time. The day had turned very warm and great slabs of
ice began to slide down the inclines, peeling back the slope until dun-colored grasses began to poke through. It was a great day for hunting and he ignored the storm clouds gathering in the west on the horizon.

Meanwhile, back in the den Thunderheart began to stir. It was much too early for her to leave the cold sleep, but she felt an absence, a void in the den that pushed her from her slumber.

It was a dangerous time for a bear to be out. Winter had not made its last mark. Bears were weak, their reflexes slow despite their hunger, which was always overwhelming at the end of the cold sleep. If a bear ventured out, the first danger, aside from sudden changes in the weather, was encountering another bear who was just as hungry. Territorial markings had not been made. Tempers raged and bear fights were inevitable. Thunderheart knew this, even in her sleep-drugged state. And although she was not extremely hungry, she was terrified when she discovered that Faolan had gone. In her confusion, she forgot that she had expressly given Faolan permission to leave the den and go out to hunt.

Thunderheart was determined to find him. But when she crawled out of the den, she gasped. A sudden blizzard had torn in from the west, turning the world white. Tracks
were covered instantly, and when she looked up, she could not even see a dim smear of the North Star’s light. Still, she had to go out. She had to find the pup. She knew Faolan’s scent. The blizzard could not cover it completely. If he had found prey he might have marked a small hunting ground. She was desperate to find him. Desperate and confused.

With the blizzard blowing so ferociously it was difficult to discern what time of day or night it was. The entire world had dissolved into an impenetrable whiteness. But Faolan made his way back to the den. He was shocked to find it empty. Had Thunderheart gone deeper into the tunnels when the blizzard started? He explored briefly but he knew her scent, and there was no sign of her. He began to pace. He tried to imagine what might have happened to her or where she could have gone. He had picked up no scent on his own journey back to the den. It seemed as if she had simply vanished.
She wouldn’t have left me…No, never. She would never just leave me.
The very thought sent a tremor through Faolan until the hackles on his neck and every guard hair on his back stood straight up. It reminded him of something, something that had
happened long, long ago that he couldn’t quite remember. She would come back, he reasoned. She had to!

He waited all that night and into the next day. He paid no heed to the grumbles of his empty stomach. Food meant nothing to him. There was only one thing he wanted: Thunderheart. The den was too quiet. The beat of her enormous heart, even in its slow winter rhythms, was gone. He could not live without the sound. It was all he knew, all he had ever known. He stepped out of the den into the rage of the blizzard and began howling. Howling for the great grizzly. Howling for all he had ever known and loved.

Then as he howled, an odd tremor rose through the depths of the snow, from the frozen land beneath it, from the very center of the earth. The tremblings were like faint quivers, but Faolan pressed his splayed front paw deep and these tremulous shakings became quite distinct. And then more incredibly powerful. For a moment, it felt as if the entire snowfield had shifted under his paws, and in the distance, he saw the frozen waterfall crack and suddenly gush to life.

But in that second he thought of death. And he knew with an overpowering certainty that something terrible was happening to his beloved Thunderheart.

ON THE FAR EDGE OF THE BEYOND, the she-wolf Morag had been absorbed into a new pack. She had found a new mate and given birth to a healthy litter of pups. No one knew her history, and in fact, she herself had all but forgotten it. The minute the Obea had walked away with that pup in her mouth to deliver it to a
tummfraw,
the place for abandonment of malformed pups, Morag began to build up barriers deep within her. These barriers functioned like a kind of invisible scar tissue to toughen her so that she could go on, survive. Such was the way with wolf mothers who had endured the special anguish of losing a
malcadh
pup to an Obea. They quickly forgot. In the wake of forgetting, there was for a time a darkness deep within them where that pup had grown inside their bodies. But it soon faded until it became
merely a gray shadow of which they were hardly aware. They had to be this way if they were going to go on, find another mate, and bear more pups.

Morag was now consumed with a rambunctious trio of red-furred pups. At nearly a moon cycle old, they were busy exploring the whelping den with their milk teeth. They were becoming bolder as well, and began to scramble closer to the white light of the den opening. Morag’s mate helped keep them back. Soon, when the pups were just a bit bigger, Morag and her mate would let them out regularly to explore under careful supervision. At that point, the pups would begin to eat meat. Then they would be weaned, and finally a den must be found near the rest of the packs that made up the MacDonegal clan.

Morag had decided that today she would leave her mate in charge and set out toward the heart of the MacDonegal territory to begin the search for an appropriate den. The weather was still blustery from the remnants of the storm that had blown in from the north, bringing heavy snows to the border between the Beyond and the Outermost. But here it was merely sloppy with rain and sleet. To the west, the sky was clearing and there was the promise of better weather.

Morag ambled along a creek bed. Since the earthquake, it was as if the territory had been entirely
rearranged. Boulders that she had never seen before had tumbled from mountains and blocked up several parts of the creek, causing small pools to form. It was no longer a simple task to follow the creek to the middle of the MacDonegal territory. After several hours of travel, Morag found that she had swung far out of MacDonegal territory and skirted closer to the river that ran into the Outermost.

It was not, however, a tumbled boulder that caught her attention, but a small creek stone polished to a gleaming black finish by the water. She had just set her front paws in a shallow pool when she spotted it. It sparkled like a dark moon in the water and when she looked closely, she saw a pattern of swirling lines. Like eddies in the creek, the lines spiraled around and around. There was something vaguely hypnotic about the spinning design. But more than hypnotic, it kindled a dim memory in Morag. It was disturbing. She turned stiff-legged in the stream with her tail pointing straight out and howled her alarm.

But instead of a response from other wolves, a jagged sound cut the air.
Kra! Kra!
It was the call of a raven announcing the discovery of a carcass. This was not just an announcement, but also a summons for help. Without the ripping teeth of wolves, it was impossible for ravens to
penetrate the thick hide of a large animal. Usually, this sound would have excited Morag. But not on this day. If she had been in the company of her pups, the raven’s call would have offered a lesson. But now she only shrank from the sound.

As she stood in the creek her eyes were drawn back to the swirl of lines on the polished rock.
What is this? What is it that so haunts me?

The raven’s
kra kra
again laced the air. The spinning pattern and the
kras
mingled in the deep recesses of her memory. Haltingly, she took a few steps toward the other bank.

Almost as soon as Morag left the creek, she spotted two ravens circling a short distance ahead. In a clearing she saw the immense carcass of a grizzly. Her first thought was one of slight disbelief. Why would a grizzly come this far south at this time of year? It should still be winter-denning.