Star Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  Myrr stepped forward. “Was it like a night during the Moon of the Mossflowers, when the softest air blows down so lightly that it hardly stirs the petals of the mossflowers? Was that what their skin felt like?”

  “What nonsense!” Edme barked. The travelers all turned to her in surprise. They were unaccustomed to Edme snapping in such a surly manner, especially at Myrrglosch, the pup she had practically raised.

  “Myrr, may I remind you, and you” — she nodded at Maudie and Abban, who stood nearby — “that not one of you pups has ever experienced a summer in the Beyond. The last true summer in the Beyond was almost three years ago, when not one of you was born. You’ve never even seen a mossflower. Let alone this nonsense about what they might feel like on some … some” — she began to stutter — “mythic summer night.”

  Faolan blinked. This outburst was so unlike Edme.

  Myrr stepped up. “But we can imagine, can’t we? Just because we can’t see something, can’t touch it, doesn’t mean we can’t feel it.”

  Edme closed her eye briefly. Her heart raced. She knew what Myrrglosch said was true. Why did she want to deny him a bit of fanciful thinking and denounce the pups’ imagination? What could be worse than disdaining imagination? Without it, they might never have survived the famines, never escaped the torn lands of the Beyond. Was she worried that Myrrglosch, a fearless little wolf, was dangerously attracted to this sort of adventure? Even the cubs seemed enthralled with Maudie’s tale. She wanted to curse that mhuic sea.

  The brigade settled down for the rest of the night in a snow snug on the bridge and planned to set out again at dawn. Eelon had reported that there was only one pressure ridge on the bridge and it was not exceedingly high. However, several leads had opened up on the Frozen Sea and traveling on it would be impossible for a while. Edme took great comfort in that news. She was about to leave for her watch when Faolan came up to her. Her tail drooped, and she began to sink into a crouch of submission. Faolan lowered his own tail as well. He couldn’t stand to see her like this.

  “I know I spoke wrongly. I was … was …” Edme stammered.

  “I came to thank you, Edme, not to scold you.” Faolan winced. One did not scold an equal. One scolded a pup.

  “Thank me?”

  “You saved Maudie’s life. You saved it at the risk of your own life. No one thanked you.”

  “Banja did. Oh, she did, Faolan. There’s been such a change in her since she became a mother.”

  “Well, I think you have some mothering to do now as well?” She looked up at him. Confusion swam in her eye.

  “Myrr — go back, comfort him, Edme.”

  “I know. I was awfully sharp with him, wasn’t I?”

  “A bit. He’ll get over it.”

  “It’s just that I worry. This sea.” She looked out at it. “Pups and cubs, the young ones, they all crave adventure in a way I don’t think we ever did.”

  “We were gnaw wolves. We had enough adventure just surviving.”

  “But we are just surviving. Trying to get to the Distant Blue alive, isn’t that enough adventure?”

  “Yes, one would think so, but the difference is that as gnaw wolves we were always living on the edges of a pack, of a clan. We had no family to keep us safe. This little brigade of ours has become a family — we are a clan.”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say we are a clan of sorts.”

  “No, not of sorts, Edme.” Faolan’s voice hardened. “Make no mistake that we are a clan. The first clan in this new world of the Distant Blue.”

  Edme returned to the snow snug and Myrr lifted his head.

  “Edme, are you angry with me?”

  “No, dear. Never. I was wrong to speak so, so harshly.”

  “But it was my fault, Edme.”

  “What? No, not ever. Why would it ever be your fault?”

  “My stupid imagination,” Myrr said, and Edme inhaled sharply. “Imagination can be bad. I know.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “My mum and da, they imagined the prophet was real. They thought he was Skaarsgard, come down from the star ladder to save them. They joined the Skaars dancers. And it was all in their imagination — even when you and Faolan showed them who the prophet really was, they wouldn’t believe you. That’s what I mean. Imagination can be very bad.”

  “Imagination can be good, Myrr. If we can’t imagine, we cannot feel another creature’s pain or sadness. Imagination is why we do lochinvyrr — to tell the dying animal we understand its pain, to thank the animal for the sacrifice of its meat.”

  “Sometimes I imagine the saddest thing. I imagine …” Myrr’s voice dropped.

  “What is it, Myrr? Tell me, and maybe it will help.”

  “I imagine that maybe, maybe I might do something bad and you’ll turn your back on me and walk away like Mum and Da did.”

  Edme reached out and pulled the pup close to her. He could feel her heart beating just as he had when Edme and Faolan had taken him over the crest of the pressure ridge. “Listen to me, Myrr. That is never going to happen. I cannot even begin to imagine that. We are not blood kin, marrow kin, but we are kin in a way that is unbreakable.”

  “Like paw fast?”

  “Not exactly, because I am much, much too old to be your mate. But let’s say we are spirit fast.”

  “Spirit fast. I like that.”

  “Well, we are.” And Edme hugged the pup closer. Myrr felt her heart beating, and he knew his world was complete.

  THEY WOULD NOT VENTURE BACK onto the Frozen Sea for several days. The leads had fractured the ice into a deadly maze, and they were confined to the Ice Bridge. They could look down and see pools of water between large fragments of ice. The puffins could fish closer to their ice nests in the bridge.

  Fortunately, the pressure ridges were much flatter than the earlier ones, and this made the passage easier. If they could not find snow snugs on the bridge itself, the pillars beneath offered refuge. They became inured to the incessant chatter of the puffins, who continued to bring them capelin. Often in the evenings, during the time they would usually go out onto the ice, Faolan would go to the edge of the bridge and scan the myriad leads for any sign of tusks, looking for Old Tooth, who had twice saved their lives. Things were changing. The winds blew warmer and the ice was shrinking and the water expanding. The puffins said the bridge had been here forever. But Faolan knew things were never forever. The Ring of Sacred Volcanoes had collapsed within one night. Could not the same thing happen to this bridge? What is the meaning of forever? Forever is for the dead, Faolan thought. Not the living.

  An ice floe not far from the bridge seemed to be dissolving before his eyes.

  One evening at twilight, as Faolan was watching from one of the ice tongues that projected from a pillar and offered a perfect platform for viewing the seascape, Edme came up beside him. She knew that he longed to be back on that frozen plain.

  “You miss it, don’t you?” she spoke softly.

  “It’s not missing it exactly. I just feel that there is a whole world beneath that we know nothing of, creatures who are so different from us. Imagine, Edme, if there were life on the stars, on the moon — doesn’t it make you want to see it? And Old Tooth, who is he? What does he think? Why does he help us?”

  “Abban seems to know somehow.”

  “Yes.” Faolan drooped his head toward the water. Suddenly, he jerked. “Did you see that?”

  “What?” Edme asked, but then she saw it — flashes in the shallow water. Like flames from a pale fire, the cobalt blue water surrounding the ice pillars began to pulse with light.

  “It’s them,” said a small voice. Abban appeared between them. “I knew they would come.”

  They? Edme wondered. Then a group of creatures broke through the surface and lifted their heads from the water. They were the same whales that had rescued Maudie, rolling in the shallows near the pillars as if they were scrubbing themselves. Abban began to tremble, and his eyes widened in
horror. Faolan was about to ask him what was wrong, but then he saw. One of the whales had been raked, and blood oozed from the wounds on his skin.

  “My father’s fangs, my father’s claws!” Abban howled.

  “Great Lupus!” Edme gasped.

  “How would Heep dare come so close to the water to attack such a creature? The outclanners are so fearful of water.”

  The Whistler broke in. “But Heep was raised in the Beyond, not the Outermost. He can swim. Perhaps they are starving and were driven to the water’s edge in search of food.”

  Zanouche’s call suddenly scratched the inky sky.

  “Heep! It’s Heep.”

  There was a great stirring in the air overhead. Zanouche and Eelon melted out of the night and alighted on a fragment of ice that bobbled near the pillars. The two eagles were out of breath from their flight. Zanouche began to speak.

  “I had lost track of them for several days.”

  “Where are they now?” Edme asked. The rest of the travelers gathered behind Faolan.

  “An ice tongue had formed beneath the bridge between pillars in a long span you crossed over maybe half a moon ago. They traveled underneath, and we couldn’t see them. But they’re getting closer fast.”

  “Faolan! Listen to me,” Caila implored. “We have to get away, now! Heep, he’s … mad. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill Abban!”

  “If only the ice were solid,” Zanouche said. “They’re fearful of the Frozen Sea. They would never venture out on it. They don’t understand the stars. They’re fearful of losing their way.”

  The creatures all looked toward the sea and saw the huge leads that had opened up and the pale blue ice floes dotting the water.

  “Why, I wonder, is the ice blue?” Faolan mused aloud.

  How can he be talking about the color of icebergs at a time like this? Edme thought.

  “It’s similar to why the sky is blue,” Gwynneth said, alighting beside him and seemingly ready to indulge him in his musings. Of course, Gwynneth had known Faolan longer than any of them, including Edme.

  “How is that?” Faolan turned to the owl.

  “The blue light scatters instead of being absorbed,” Gwynneth replied, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation to be having. The rest of the brigade was on the verge of growling with impatience, and Toby stomped his feet. “Some say that the very oldest icebergs are the bluest. I’m not sure about that. It could be that there are more air bubbles in the younger ice. The famous sage of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, the Spotted Owl Otulissa, lived for many moons in the northern kingdoms, doing research on such matters.”

  “Very interesting,” Faolan murmured, and then turned to regard the cubs.

  Edme, an even-tempered wolf, was ready to explode. What is he thinking? Why is he blabbing on about the color of ice when Heep was fast on their heels? She felt a cold chill run up her spine as she watched him observing Toby and Burney. The cubs had grown much, much more than the wolf pups. They now stood twice as tall as the wolves.

  “Toby, Burney, you know how to swim, don’t you?”

  “Of course. We lived by the river. We swam as soon as we walked.”

  Faolan remembered his own swimming days that first summer with Thunderheart. Bear cubs learned to swim earlier than wolf pups. So Toby and Burney would be fine.

  “What are you thinking, Faolan?” Edme asked apprehensively.

  Faolan was standing very still with his eyes clamped shut, but in his mind, an image stirred. Faint echoes came to him from an ancient bone he had carved and was now buried in the cairn of the Fengos back at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes. The strangest thing was that, despite the destruction wrought by the earthquake and followed by the rampaging glacier from the north, the bones of all the chieftains of the Watch had remained unscathed. And Faolan saw in his mind’s eye the bone that his first gyre soul etched upon his arrival out of the Long Cold into the Beyond. The bone depicted wolves leaping from ice floe to ice floe.

  Wambling! Of course! That was the name for what they did. The Ice Bridge had become impassable. They were forced to go out on the great chunks of sea ice. They had leaped from floe to floe, and when the distances became too great, they swam.

  Faolan turned toward the brigade. “We can do this. We can swim and we can jump. Heep will never follow us.”

  “But the pups?” Banja, Edme, and Caila all spoke at once.

  “We’ll get them across — floe by floe,” Faolan replied.

  Then Abban spoke up:

  Swim I can. Swim I am.

  Paddle, paddle paw and tail.

  I know the way,

  I shall not fail.

  Caila cocked her head to one side and peered at this strange son of hers. She said not a single word, but her questioning expression said everything. But how, Abban? I never taught you. There was a rueful mist in her eyes as she wondered how this little defenseless pup had learned something without her. Had he been laid open to dangers when she was absent? It was a wistfulness for moments lost — lost and irretrievable. She stepped closer and ran her muzzle through her son’s withers.

  All pups loved it when their mothers muzzled them. It felt so good to have their mothers’ warm, damp noses poke through their pelt to their skin. Abban loved it, too. He just didn’t exactly know if his words would come out right when he spoke them. So he remained silent. He knew that while she was muzzling him she was casting bitter glances at Airmead. Why was she this way now with the white wolf?

  Airmead, who was a large wolf to begin with, seemed unusually big because of her color. But she appeared to shrink. Her jaw quivered, and her tail dropped. Abban felt sorry for her. His mother hadn’t treated her this way before his fall into the sea. Was there something he did not understand about the white wolf?

  “But what about Maudie and Myrr?” Edme asked. “They’re so tiny. Their legs aren’t long enough to leap. They can’t swim.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll do it,” Faolan replied. He was about to say, “We did it once. We’ll do it again,” but he stopped himself. They would not understand. “It’s called wambling.”

  “Wambling?” the Whistler asked.

  “It’s an Old Wolf term.” Faolan began to stammer a bit. “It … it … it was inscribed on one of the history bones at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes.”

  “Really, Faolan?” Edme tipped her head a bit to one side as if trying to recall.

  She had just begun to grasp the meanings of Old Wolf, but there was something elusive about this one, wambling. And what was this history bone he referred to? Edme had no recollection of it.

  “Don’t worry, Edme. We can do it.” Faolon looked at Maudie and Myrr. “Eelon and Zanouche can help the little ones.”

  “Of course we can,” Eelon said.

  “We’ll carry them,” Zanouche added, then looked Myrr up and down. “You’re not as big as a vixen.”

  “A female fox?” Myrr asked huffily.

  “Oh, I meant no offense, dear,” Zanouche said. “You’re ten times as smart and much more handsome.”

  “Of course I am. Males usually are more handsome,” Myrr replied.

  “I’ll let that go,” Zanouche said with a slight whiff of indignation.

  “Now, how do we do this?” The Whistler came up beside Faolan. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic, more so than the rest.

  “Well, first you slide down this pillar’s ramp!” Faolan stepped onto where the pillar met the top of the bridge at a gentle angle and was soon at its base. Then he made a leap into the air. It was a classic high-arcing scanning jump. He landed gracefully on a sheet of floating ice bobbing nearby off the bridge. “And then you try for the next!” he announced.

  They all held their breath, for the closest floe was at least four times the distance of the one he had just landed on. “But you’re a Watch wolf, and so is Edme and Banja. You’re used to performing great leaps and jumps. Dearlea, Caila, the Whistler, and I aren’t,” Mhairie cried out.

  “Mhairie!” Caila
snapped. “I raised you as your second Milk Giver. And I am a turning guard and you an outflanker. You have muscles. And so do you!” She nodded at Dearlea. “And you, too, Whistler. You can do it. You can learn to do it. If you miss, you know how to swim. It’s the pups I worry about. But if the eagles help —”

  “Oh, we shall! We shall!”

  “Well, then, we have nothing to fear. For I’ll tell you, Heep will never follow us out there. Never!” She turned to Abban. “Abban, tell me truthfully. You really feel you can do this?”

  Yes, Mum, yes!

  Swim I can, swim I am

  And look forsooth

  Here comes Old Tooth!

  They turned and the swags of pearly light seemed to part to make way for the narwhale plying his way between the ice floes.

  “Abide and he shall guide!” whispered Abban.

  THE GLASSY SEA WAS UTTERLY still. The moon was dwindling to No Shine, and there was barely a sliver left. But it was a cloudless night, and the stars were bright. Rags, crouching under a pillar perhaps a quarter of a league behind the brigade, could not believe his eyes. Wolves were leaping from ice floe to ice floe. Sometimes he caught their reflections mirrored on the black water. How could they do it? How could they dare to do it? Of course, some of them were from the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes and learned to leap, but others had never been on the Watch and they were doing it. However, what was most incredible was that little Abban, Heep’s son, was swimming — actually swimming between floes.

  Rags began to tremble. He knew he could never do that. But would it be worse than living with Heep’s rout? Still, he didn’t know how to swim properly. None of the outclanners knew how, for there was very little water in the Outermost. The river where most wolves in the Beyond had learned to swim did not run through the Outermost, and there were no lakes. The outclanners dreaded water more than anything. The Ice Bridge seemed safe to them. The vast expanse of ice that had blanketed the Frozen Sea in the beginning of the journey was a comfort. Heep had even begun to plant the notion in the rout that there was no water beneath the ice. It simply didn’t exist. Heep, of course, would say anything to get the outclanners to follow him. He had big dreams for himself in the new place they were going. He would form powerful clans. He saw himself as a Chief of Chieftains. But what would he say now? Now that the ice had peeled back in so many places to reveal a deep green sea.