Lone Wolf (7 page)

She swung her head toward the north and west, the far reaches of the Beyond in the low mountains, where the grizzlies frequently lived and denned. She knew from when she had traveled with the MacDuncan clan that it was always bad when a grizzly came out of its winter den too early.

Morag approached the carcass. If it had been in a fight, there were few wounds, at least not enough to help the ravens. She walked slowly around the body until she spotted a terrible head wound near the grizzly’s ear, where the ravens had already torn away what flesh they could. The bear was on its side, and she could see bone protruding from its back. She stopped and peered at it.

The grizzly’s back had been broken by an enormous force. Morag looked up. A short distance away was an immense boulder, smeared with blood. The earthquake, of course! The boulder had tumbled down from the ridge above. The bear must have been in its path. It wasn’t a living animal that had ended this bear’s life, but the spasms of the earth itself.

The two ravens perched on the bear’s hip, clearly indicating that this was the site they expected Morag to rip open for their feast. The ravens were already intoxicated by the scent of blood. But Morag caught the thread of another scent. The scar tissue that had so subtly built up within her began to dissolve. The first shadows of darkness began to steal back in from that empty place she had so completely sealed off.

She became agitated and began nervously racing around the carcass, burrowing her nose into the bear’s thick fur, first beneath its huge arm, then beneath its haunches. The ravens became raucous; soon they were confused. What was the wolf doing?

Morag circled back toward the grizzly’s shoulders, where an immense hump rose like a mountain. But even without poking it with her muzzle, a familiar scent drifted from the dense fur. Morag’s hackles rose and her eyes rolled. She knew this scent. The pup from the year before! From the time she had traveled to the far edge of the Beyond to find a birthing den away from her old pack. The pup the Obea had taken, the one with the splayed paw marked with the spiral print.

Every bit of that sad time rushed back to her: how she was forced to return with the Obea and the remaining pups, and was then cast out of the clan. For an entire moon cycle afterward, she would find the highest point of land each night and tip her head toward the sky, searching for the track of stars called the spirit trail that led to the Great Wolf, Lupus, and the Cave of Souls. She was waiting for
lochinmorrin,
when her unnamed pup with its splayed paw would begin to climb the spirit trail. Then she would know that his abandonment had ended in
death, and he had found peace in the Cave of Souls. But
lochinmorrin
had never come. She had never seen the soft mist of his
lochin,
the soul of a departed wolf.

He had not died, but she had wiped him from her memory until this moment. She sat down on her haunches close to the carcass of the bear. She pressed her head into its flanks. This bear had cared for her pup. She would not rip into the grizzly’s body. She would keep watch over it through the night. She would let no predator near. This would be like
lochinvyrr,
the ritual that wolves followed when they brought down an animal and it was dying. It was a demonstration of respect in which the killer acknowledged that the life he was taking was a worthy one. Although Morag had not brought down this bear, she felt it was her duty to acknowledge the grizzly as worthy, for she had reared a wolf pup as if it were her own cub. The
lochin
of this magnificent bear would follow that spirit trail of stars to its own Cave of Souls. It was all she could do for the bear who had become the Milk Giver for her own pup, and allowed it to survive.

SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAD HAPPENED to Thunderheart, but what? It had been days since the earth had trembled, since the frozen waterfall had broken free of its chamber of ice. The landscape had drastically rearranged itself. There were huge gashes in the snowfield, immense boulders had appeared where there had never been any before. Some of these gashes were as deep as the mountains were tall. The day after the earthquake, Faolan had seen a moose suddenly vanish. There were no trees around, no cave. The moose was there one second and gone the next. Curious, Faolan had cautiously made his way to the spot where the moose had disappeared. He followed a seam that looked like no more than a dent in the snow, but then split wide just ahead where the moose had been standing. The animal had crashed through. Faolan
could hear it now, baying deep in the earth. He stopped in his tracks, standing in the middle of a death trap. There was a maze of these snow-covered seams that disguised deep crevices where the earth had cracked. Had Thunderheart been swallowed by one? Faolan grew weak at the thought of her dying alone in the bottom of an icy crevice.

But for Faolan, there was one thought even worse than Thunderheart’s death: abandonment. Could she have left him? Although he and Thunderheart sometimes talked about the night she had fetched him from the river, their conversation always stopped short. He never asked her why he had been left to drown. He had never dared to think that his wolf mother could have done this to him.

He decided it had been some terrible accident that had all worked out well. He had not been
abandoned;
he had been
found.
By Thunderheart.

But now the questions he had so successfully resisted seemed to ambush him. Had he, back when he was just a tiny newborn pup, been left to die? Had Thunderheart now left him because he wasn’t her
kind?
The ugly word seared through his brain, but it reminded him of something.

That place, the Outermost! Thunderheart had spoken about the taste of the caribou from the Outermost being the best in the spring. She’d once had a den there. But when Faolan had said that someday they could go together, she had replied, “Perhaps. But I am not sure if it is good for your kind.”

Of course!
thought Faolan.
That must be where she has gone.
She hadn’t abandoned him at all. She had gone to get caribou and she would bring it back.

Through the maze of snow seams he cautiously made his way back to the winter den. But when she had not returned in another few days and hunting became more precarious in the fractured snowfield, Faolan decided to head north, toward the Outermost, to find her. He did not care if it was good or not for his kind. He needed to be with Thunderheart. And he knew how to get there. All he had to do was follow the last claw in the foot of the Great Bear constellation, which pointed to the North Star. “The Outermost is in between.” Those had been Thunderheart’s exact words.

Faolan knew it would be a long trip. But he was determined. Along the way, he sought temporary shelters,
although they never seemed as nice or as cozy as those he had shared with Thunderheart. How could they be? Despite the warming weather, they were cold places without the comfort of the sound of that great, drumming heart. Those rhythms had been as much a part of Faolan as the beating of his own heart.

Faolan had just roused himself from a short nap in a cave far to the north of Thunderheart’s winter den. The cycle of one moon had passed since Thunderheart had disappeared. And although the weather was growing warmer, there were still patches of snow in the territory he entered. He was surprised to see that the trees were different here as well. There were hardly any broadleaved trees, but mostly the kind with green needles and the cones that Thunderheart loved to eat. Faolan wondered if he was getting close to the Outermost.

Since it was colder, the trees also kept their frost longer. So even now as he wove his way through the closely growing trees, their needles prickled with minuscule stars of frost, wrapping the woods in a dazzling radiance. Sometimes the trees thinned and for great stretches the land became almost entirely barren. The ground was covered with lichen, which Thunderheart had told him made for fat caribou. Perhaps this was a sign that he was drawing closer to the Outermost. He decided to push on.

A few nights, Faolan heard the howling of wolves, and at first he was excited. But the howls were as different from the ones he had heard in the Beyond as the trees were. They were not melodious in the least, and seemed oddly meaningless. More like crude snarls in the night. Indeed, if the howls reminded him of anything, it was of that cataclysmic moment when he had felt the earth move. He had thought perhaps the world had been possessed of the foaming-mouth disease that Thunderheart had warned him about. She had told him to beware of any animal with a foaming mouth. He must never hunt one, but stay as far as possible from such a creature, even if it was a tiny ground squirrel.

Although Faolan felt sure he was entering the Outermost, it was frustrating that he had not picked up the scent of any grizzly. He ached for that old summer den where the glacier lilies grew and the banks of the river were thick with irises. The gilded summer mornings he spent swimming and looking for trout now felt as fragile and fleeting as the cloud pictures he and Thunderheart had loved to watch.

The days started to lengthen, and as they lengthened, they seemed emptier. Faolan was diligent in his scent marking so that even if he could not find Thunderheart, perhaps she could find him. But she never came and she
did not fade from his memory. Still, Faolan never gave up hope.

In the meantime, he had to go on with the business of living. He had to find meat. He must eat and grow fat as Thunderheart had taught him. Even though he did not sleep through winter, he must be strong and fat to keep the cold away when it came again.

The loneliness of his life grew. Deep within him there was an emptiness that seemed to expand little by little until he felt almost hollow. One day he passed a tree that had been struck by lightning. Its trunk had been scoured out and all that was left was a deep black gash. Its limbs were gray and skeletal, barren of any needles. As he looked at it he realized that he was exactly like that tree. It still stood, but why? It was not living, yet it was not dead. He walked on, the hollowness inside him amplifying with every step. But the hollow steps brought him no closer to Thunderheart.

Faolan continued to hear the howls of the other wolves, but they made no more sense than before. He knew they were wolves, and yet he felt no kinship with them. They might as well have been as different from him as
the marmot he had killed a few nights before. Was that what Thunderheart had meant when she said that this place might not be good for his kind?

Faolan preferred to hunt at night, but the nights were becoming shorter and shorter. And when the frost forest seemed to tilt and turn full into the sun, the night simply vanished along with the last remnants of sparkling frost. Thunderheart had told him this happened in the Outermost. There would be no night, no darkness, only sun for the next few cycles of the moon.

On the same day that night disappeared, Faolan began tracking a cougar. Cougars were dangerous. Thunderheart had told him how just before she found Faolan, cougars had killed her cub. They were big—bigger than marmots or wolverines—and fast and cunning. She had told Faolan that he would not be ready to tackle a cougar for a long time. But he felt ready now. And in the back of his mind a strange logic had started to haunt him.
If I can kill the cougar,
he thought,
the cougar who took Thunderheart’
s
cub, maybe she will come back to me.

He had been tracking the cougar from the time the sun had first risen until it hung low in the sky and seemed to hover endlessly above the horizon like a vigilant golden
eye watching the earth.
And so am I,
Faolan thought as he entered the second day of tracking the cougar. The loitering sun inspired him.

It was well into the second day when he began to sense the cougar was tiring, that he was actually closing the distance. But Faolan also became aware of another presence, one that had been following him for a shorter time but was persistent nonetheless. He was immediately wary.

Faolan had developed a quickness of mind that allowed him to concentrate deeply and yet at the same time maintain his alertness. He had caught his first glimpse of his tracker, a tawny smear, behind a thicket of bracken. He was being followed closely now. But he would not be forced off the track of the cougar, nor would he rush the kill.

He spotted the cougar settling down with a hare. The cougar was a bit larger than Faolan, longer and lower to the ground, but it appeared more slender and its chest seemed narrower. Faolan had been careful to maneuver himself into a position downwind of the cougar so his scent would not be carried. He had so skillfully tracked his prey that the big cat was completely unaware of his presence. He was certain, however, that there were two
other wolves tracking him.
They want this meat, too. But I’m no raven! I’ll not eat second.

Faolan crept up on the cougar to almost within pouncing distance when a sudden shift in the wind brought his scent to the cat. He saw the flicker of the cougar’s nostrils and then the cougar was off. But Faolan was not about to give up. The cougar seemed to be devouring the land in front of him. Faolan kept up.
I will kill you and eat you. I shall grow fat on the meat that devoured Thunderheart’s cub. For Thunderheart!
The sound of his feet engulfed him and the thunderous heart of the grizzly became his. There was a thin stand of trees ahead. He had almost reached the cougar when the cat leaped up into the tree.