Lost Children of the Far Islands (22 page)

“We’re not really getting anywhere,” Gus panted as Leo hauled her up and over another rock. She was right. As a wave crashed by their feet, spraying them with cold
salt water, they realized that they were actually closer to the water than they had been before. They had moved sideways a few hundred feet, but that was it.

“Well, there isn’t really—” Leo started to say, but he was interrupted by a sound rising from somewhere amid the rocks. It was a wolf, howling. The first howl was answered almost immediately by a series of other howls. They seemed to be coming from slightly above Gus and Leo.

They looked at each other in horror.

“Lie down,” Leo hissed.

Flat against the rock, they turned their heads and looked in the direction that the sound had come from.

There, standing above the broken chunks of wet rock that they had used to climb out of the water, was a gray wolf. The wolf was tall but skinny, almost gaunt, and when it turned toward where the children lay, they could see that its eyes were an unnatural, burning red.

The wolf looked in their direction for one endless minute, and then it turned back to the other wolves, who were trotting down through the boulder field in single file. They didn’t appear to be hunting just yet. They were gathering. More and more gray bodies slipped like ghosts between the boulders to join the wolf who had called them.

“There must be more than a hundred of them,” Leo whispered in Gus’s ear. As he spoke, one of the wolves tilted its great, bony head toward them. Curling its lip,
it snarled deep and low in its chest. Instantly the milling wolves froze.

Gus could barely breathe. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life, even more than she had been in the water with the sharks. In the water, she had her speed. Out here on land, she and Leo were trapped. There was nowhere to go. Leo squeezed her hand, once, twice, three times. Not daring to turn her head, she peeked at him out of the corner of one eye.

“Climb,” he mouthed. She squeezed his hand back to let him know that she understood. The wolves stood between them and the water. Their only hope was to find a way up one of the cliffs.

They slipped to the ground and began to pick their way toward the nearest cliff face. Trying to stay low, they ducked into a short tunnel formed by two steep-sided boulders. But the tunnel ran out where the two boulders met. It was a dead end.

“This way,” Gus said urgently. Putting her back against one wall of rock, she placed both of her feet flat on the other side. By hitching up her backside and then moving her feet, she was able to inch her way up through the tight space. Leo followed her lead, and when they reached the top they could see a rough wall nearby, cut with cracks and fissures and very high. It was their only chance.

“Run for it,” Leo said.

As he spoke, a howl broke loose behind them. One
of the wolves had found a way through and was signaling to her pack mates.

“Run!” Leo screamed, and he and Gus leapt to the ground and began to sprint.

They could hear a wolf in the tunnel. It was whining and growling, trying to find a way to follow the twins’ scent trail. It scratched at the sides of the short tunnel, but it could not climb out the way that Gus and Leo had.

Gus and Leo reached the wall and scanned it desperately for any features that might help them climb. The rock was broken with cracks, but they all seemed to run horizontally across the face, not vertically.

“There,” Gus said, pointing at one narrow crack that ran up the dark face. “Boost me.”

Leo clasped his hands and Gus stepped up and onto the cliff face. Reaching high, she stuck the fingers of her right hand into a horizontal crack. Then she jammed her sneaker sideways into the vertical crack, the way their father had taught them when he took them rock climbing in the Camden Hills. Then she had been wearing a harness and sticky shoes. Now she had only her fear, but it was enough. Pressing down with her sweaty, slippery fingers, she turned her foot and stood on it. The pain made her gasp, but her foot held. Below her, Leo started to climb.

“Keep going,” he said through gritted teeth as he stuck his own foot into the crack.

Gus jammed her other foot above the first one in the crack and stood up on that, and then repeated the series
of steps. Leo was just below her. Gus leaned back and looked up. One of the horizontal cracks over her head formed a very small ledge. If she could move her foot up again, she might be able to reach the ledge with her hands.

Suddenly Leo screamed. He had one foot in the crack and his fingers on the wall, clutching at slight bumps in the rock. The other foot was kicking at a gigantic, red-eyed, slathering wolf crouched below him.

“Leo!” Gus screamed as the wolf leapt.

Leo kicked and his sneaker connected with the wolf’s jaw, snapping it back. The animal fell to the ground, snarling horribly. Leo scrambled up another few inches on the wall, and then another. His head bumped into Gus’s lower foot.

“Move, Gus!” he shouted.

The wolf on the ground leapt for Leo, and leapt again, each time falling short. Without hesitating or even thinking about it, Gus stepped up high and jammed her foot into the crack. She twisted it to lock it in place, stood up, and lunged for the tiny ledge above her head. In her fear, she forgot the pain of her injured arm. Her hands slapped the rough granite and slid, and then her fingers found the lip of the ledge and held. She stood with the side of her face pressed against the cool stone, trembling. She could sense her brother moving up the rock just below her.

“Leo,” she said, his name coming out as a sob.

“I’m OK,” Leo said.

Gus looked down at him. He had both his feet and both his hands in the crack and was breathing heavily. His eyes were huge and his hair looked very black against his paper-white face.

Gus took a deep breath and tried to relax her fingers, which were starting to cramp. “I’m OK too,” she said. She took another deep breath.

Now the other wolves were gathering below them, pressing into the small space between the rocks, snarling and snapping and leaping. Each leap fell short, though. Gus and Leo were safe, for the moment.

“Can you climb any higher?” Leo asked, raising his voice over the noise of the increasingly furious wolves.

Gus looked up. The crack ran out at the ledge. Beyond that the wall was smooth and unmarked. “No,” she said. “I can’t go any farther, Leo.”

She tried to keep the panic out of her voice. She knew that they could not stay like this much longer. Already her feet were aching from being jammed in the crack, but worse, her cramped fingers were now going numb.

“We’ll wait them out, Gus!” Leo said.

Gus nodded, even though she knew they could not wait out the wolves. There were easily a hundred wolves below them now, some leaping, some resting between efforts, and some looking for another way to reach the twins. She pressed her forehead against the rock. Hot tears streaked down her face, not from the pain in her foot, although it was fierce, and not even from the terrible fear that was filling her entire body. She was crying
because they had failed Ila. And now Ila was going to die, and their mother as well. The Móraí had put her faith in them and they had failed her.

Gus leaned into the rock and sobbed. She was crying so hard that she didn’t notice that the wolves had gone quiet.

“Gus!” Leo shouted. “Gus!”

Gus looked down at Leo. He was looking down as well, at the wolves, who had stopped snarling and howling. They were milling around uncertainly. One small female sniffed the air anxiously and whined.

“What is it?” Gus asked hoarsely.

“Something’s weird,” Leo said. “They can tell.”

Two more wolves started whining, tucking their tails between their legs and crouching down like frightened dogs.

“Gus,” Leo said in a careful, low voice. “Gus? Look at the ocean.”

Gus peered over one shoulder toward the water. What she saw did not make any sense. Just inside the fog boundary, a series of mountains had sprung up in the sea. Then one of the mountains moved and she realized that it was a whale. It was
a lot
of whales, stretched side by side as far as she could see from her awkward position.

“No dorsal fin,” Leo said excitedly. “That means they’re right whales, Gus!”

Below him, a wolf suddenly let loose a long, thin, uneasy-sounding howl. The wolf next to it shuddered and then joined in.

“Why does it matter what kind of whales they are?” Gus steadied herself and then let one hand dangle for a moment, getting the blood flowing back into her fingers.

“Because right whales love to lobtail,” Leo said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“What—” Gus began, but Leo interrupted her.

“Hang on, Gus!” he said. He hastily jammed one arm into the crack. “If they’re going to lobtail, then we really, really need to hang on!”

“Have you gone totally crazy?” Gus said angrily. “What’s lobtailing, and how is it going to help us?”

But even as she spoke, the great black lumps in the ocean dove as one. And then, also as one, fifty whales’ tails, with their smooth, pointed flukes spread wide above the water, hovered for exactly three seconds and then slapped down with one hundred tons of force per whale.

“Lobtailing!” Leo shouted.

The whales raised their tails again, and again they slammed them against the water in unison, and then again, and again, each time forcing more energy into the water.

The fifth time the whales lobtailed, the energy building under the water burst up and out as a gigantic wave. The wave grew as it moved, gaining speed and height as it sped toward the rocky shoreline, like a freight train barreling down a mountainside. When it hit the rocks, instead of disintegrating, the giant wave grew still taller
as all of its energy was forced upward by the impact. It kept coming, higher than a house, dense and black and screaming with energy. The wolves below Gus and Leo were screaming as well, their mouths open in terror and the fur standing up along their narrow backs. A few tried to leap onto the rocks, but most of them just ran in a blind panic, tripping and howling and bumping into each other as the enormous wave crested the beach.

“Turn!” Leo screamed, and then the wave hit.

The water tore Gus and Leo off the wall as though they were made of straw. They were flipped upside down and flung backward, pitched into the maelstrom along with rocks and dirt and drowning wolves. Gus tried not to panic, but she couldn’t get her bearings—there was no
up
in this lashing tornado of angry water. She curled herself into a tight ball, but she was immediately yanked out of it so that she pinwheeled frantically, thrashing her arms and legs as the water raged at her, flipping and tossing her helpless form in the heaving darkness. The burning in her lungs reached a screaming pitch, and she opened her mouth and swallowed as though it might be air, although of course it wasn’t—it was burning salt water and she was choking, choking and kicking and everywhere was blackness.

Something bumped her, hard, and then she thought she felt the hairy body of a wolf pass over her, but she couldn’t be sure and she was trying to remember what Leo had shouted as the wave hit, but she was so tired,
and she couldn’t think straight. Then she was shooting forward like a rocket, and
up
was easy because she could smell the surface and the flat scent of ozone, so different from the tang of the sea. She shot out of the confusion into the open ocean and gulped in a huge breath.

The sea was flat. The whales had gone, and it was as if they had folded up their wave and taken it with them. All around Gus floated the bodies of wolves, battered and drowned. She looked frantically for Leo but could see only driftwood and dead wolves. Then a sleek head surfaced and Gus barked loudly. Leo swam quickly to her.

The whales had saved them from the wolves, but they were still in danger. Even now, they could see sharp dorsal fins cutting the surface of the sea. The surviving sharks were coming, drawn by the smell of death. Without making a sound, the two seals swam to the rock that they had used as a staircase, Turned, and climbed up out of the water.

They could see the slight whirlpools left in the water as the wolves’ floating bodies were yanked under by the arriving carnivores. Gus shuddered and looked away, toward the island. More wolves lay broken among the boulders. The whales’ wave had done its work well.

“Thank you,” Leo said quietly. Gus looked at him. He was facing out to sea. When he looked at her, she gasped. He was still wearing his glasses, but his wet hair was plastered to his head and a livid gash cut across his forehead. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and a great
purple bruise spread below that eye and across his cheekbone.

“You look terrible,” Gus said.

Leo grinned. “You don’t look so hot yourself,” he said.

Gus surveyed herself. One leg of her blue jeans was ripped off below her knee. The flowered bandage was still tied tightly around the wound on her arm, but it was sodden with seawater. She had a dull ache in her side that twinged sharply when she moved, and a stinging scrape on the side of her face. But other than that, she seemed to be unhurt by the massive wave. She sat down, suddenly exhausted. Leo sat down next to her.

“You called the right whales?” Gus asked.

Leo grinned. “Yup. Well, I didn’t know it would be
them
, exactly. I just called for help with the song. Right whales are pretty slow swimmers. I guess that’s why they came after the others. Lucky for us, though.”

He pushed his glasses up, looking suddenly like the old Leo. “They never lobtail in unison like that,” he added excitedly. “Not ever. I’d love to see it again.”

“No thanks,” Gus said fervently. “And we’re not dead, which is good, but we’re still stuck on this beach.”

“Oh!” Leo said. “I was thinking about that, you know, while we were on that wall. Remember when the wolves came?”

Gus shuddered. “Um, yeah.”

“I mean
how
they came.”

Gus looked at him blankly.

“Single file!” Leo said. “Remember? Wolves don’t usually travel like that, unless, you know, they’re in deep snow and trying to conserve energy. Then they’ll often hunt in a single-file line—”