by Asta Bowen
The voices faded, and the wolves were left alone in their bright, flat surroundings. Human scent thickened the air. On the other side of the door a dog barked, jerking the wolves to attention. Marta growled, as if by reflex.
Nothing in Marta’s life had prepared her for this: not the harsh days in the north or the death of her pack, not her life alone or her travels with Calef and Oldtooth. Her survival had always depended on her surroundings, but these surroundings were different. Her instincts were useless. Her first instinct, to run, was checked by the walls of stone and metal around her. She couldn’t leap them without a running start, and the cage left no room for that. Her second instinct was to dig, and that proved futile too. After the people left, Marta pawed through the bed of straw, but all she found was a solid concrete floor. She had no urge to follow her third instinct, chewing: her mouth was still sore from trying to free Annie and Sula from their kennels at the aspen grove.
Marta’s teeth and feet were useless here, and her great nose was crowded with scents so strange that she could not tell one from the other. Without teeth and feet and nose, her mind could not work. Her heart still pumped and her eyes and ears still gathered information, but she could do nothing with it. The deciding, reacting part of her shut down. When she was hungry, she picked at the deer meat that appeared in her cage. When she was thirsty, she lapped vaguely at the water in her bowl. Her fierce will to live was nowhere to be seen.
Days came and went. Groups of people came and went as well, always talking, often with the flashes and clicks that made Marta wince. A tarp was hung over the wire, and fewer eyes peered into the wolves’ cages, but sometimes little people came and pressed their faces close, or even wiggled small fists through the wire until a big hand came and pulled them back. Whenever people approached, Marta grew edgy. Though her legs ached to run, she did not even stand. When the people left and her shaking quieted, she lay motionless in the straw. She stared, or slept.
A cage away, Oldtooth also stared and slept. In between, Annie and Sula ate little. They played halfheartedly with each other and with bones from the meat they were fed. They could not curb their curiosity about the people who came and went, and sometimes sniffed at the fingers pressed through the wires. Sometimes they slept, and sometimes whined to their elders. But the only example Marta and Oldtooth offered was stillness, and the pups were too young to practice stillness.
After a few days, the stream of visitors ended suddenly. Marta came to recognize the woman in the white lab coat who, along with another young woman, was the only one who passed through the hallway now. They brought the wolves food and water and spread clean straw over the concrete. The woman in white paused sometimes at Oldtooth’s cage, and bent down to look at the dressing on his paw. She let Annie and Sula lick her fingers through the cage, and though she moved gently, she still made Marta tremble and turn her head.
As time passed, Marta sorted through the confusion of smells. Most of the scent was human, so strong and fresh that it overwhelmed all others. But there were animal smells too: some old, some new, almost none of them wild. The scent of domestic dog was strong and made her cage seem very, very small.
One day, Marta watched as a small group of people joined the woman in white outside Oldtooth’s cage. She gestured to his injured paw and spoke. A man with a long, slender stick slid it through the wire mesh and poked Oldtooth neatly in the rear. The wolf jumped in surprise, then relaxed. The man pulled the stick away. The people waited as the tranquilizer took effect, then cautiously entered Oldtooth’s cage. A man held Oldtooth’s head in his lap as the woman bent over his paw, cleaning it with a strong-smelling solution and dressing it again with a fresh bandage. The people spoke in low voices as she worked. They lay Oldtooth back on the straw, stepped out, and closed the cage door.
Then the people came to Marta’s cage, and before she knew what was happening, she felt a sharp poke in her own backside. Then the world dimmed again, as it had once before. Vaguely, Marta felt a tightening around her muzzle, then around her front feet, then her back feet. Then darkness.
When Marta awoke, her feet were bound front and back, and her jaws were tied shut with a rope. The golden straw and smooth block walls whirled around her as she struggled against the tranquilizer. Her eyes felt gritty, and she heard phantom calls—Oldtooth’s voice, Sula whimpering like an infant—and she whined and pulled against her bindings. With her jaws shut, the whine came out an off-key howl, a growl, and a squeak.
The woman in white was speaking. Her voice was more forceful than before as the man bent down with her. They were untying Marta’s trusses.
The man finished loosening the ropes on Marta’s feet while the woman peeled back the wolf’s eyelids and dropped a salty liquid into them. The grittiness dissolved, and Marta spread her mouth in a yawn. The man and woman backed away suddenly when the wolf’s smooth fangs stretched wide. The metal door clanged open and shut as they slipped out into the hall.
As Marta’s senses slowly wound back to normal, she returned to her place against the wall. Ears back, eyes averted, her legs trembled ever so slightly. They remembered the urge to run, but for now, stillness was her protection. So she stayed, alive in her body but silent in her mind, until the voices came again the next day.
This time, the dimming was sudden and complete. She never saw the stick or felt the ropes, never heard the pulse of helicopter blades, never felt Oldtooth’s and Sula’s and Annie’s warm bodies placed next to her. Never felt the earth fall away from underneath her or the altitude pop in her ears. Marta flew with her packmates, in the wide-eyed trance of chemical sleep, guided by unseen hands to an unknown destination.
Seventeen
To Run
This time when Marta awoke, the bindings were gone. The whole bad dream was gone: the cement slab, the metal cage, the bright lights, and confusing smells were all gone. Only a trace of human scent lingered, most of it from her own coat of fur.
And yet all was not right. Marta was outside and her feet and jaws were free, but the land was wrong. She was not home; this was not Pleasant Valley. Even with the sky spinning above and the earth tilting below, the smells told Marta she had never been here before. The plants, the rocks, the water spelled out a location that could have been five miles or five hundred miles from anything she knew. She was free now, it seemed, but she was lost.
To make matters worse, the season was wrong. Marta had last seen the sky in Pleasant Valley in the late glow of summer. These were mountains in the chill gray of earliest winter. Impossible: impossible to sleep that long. Impossible to travel in one’s sleep. How long had she been in captivity? How did she get there? Where was she now? Wherever it was, it was not home. It was high and it was cold—and it stank of something fearful. Grizzly bear.
Bear! Marta’s instincts scrambled to attention, but tangled with the chemicals still in her blood. The trees bent above her, and the gray clouds seemed to tumble under her feet. She felt as if she were being chased, then cornered, then chased again. She barked a warning bark but it came out a groan. Her eyes were gritty again, but this time there was no woman in white with soothing eyedrops.
Marta tripped over something and reared back, startled. Sula! The young wolf’s face came in and out of focus as Marta felt the familiar teeth and tongue on her whiskers. Sula’s whine reached her ears, but sounded wrong through the haze of tranquilizer. A second whine, a second mouth: Annie.
Images tumbled in Marta’s head. The traps, the darts, the cages, lights, ropes, aircraft, voices, smells—the human scent clung to her, drowning out even the smell of her pups. She shook violently, but the alien scent remained.
Marta’s legs throbbed. There were no block walls in front of her, and no wire fences on any side. The radio collar still hung around her neck, but her ankles were free. Gravity righted itself, and she felt her feet on the cold ground. Vaguely, she made out high cliffs on either side of a narrow valley, and the smell of bear filled her nostrils. Then her first instinct, th
e one that had always saved her before, poked into her mind: to run.
Marta ran.
She gathered her legs and bounded out of the clearing, soaring past Oldtooth’s gray form. She ran down, with the flow of water. Down, toward warmth. Down, away from winter. Down toward deer, away from bear.
Down she went like the water rushing in Nyack Creek. Down, and away from the puzzled look on Annie’s gray face. Down and away from where Sula whined, sniffing the cold wind and turning to lick at Oldtooth’s sleeping muzzle. Down through the thickets of alder and aspen and thimble-berry. Down through the suffocating scent of grizzly bear. The creek bottom grew steeper, and Marta ran faster. The trail grew narrow, the alder closed in, and Marta still ran. The overcast sky grew dimmer as the sun dropped to the west, and Marta ran on. As a pup, this was how she ran from danger. When her pack was poisoned, this was how she ran. She ran for her life.
As before, she had no idea where she was running. As before, she had no one to run with. Marta ran without thought or intention. She ran without food, without feeling, without stopping. She ran, simply ran.
Eighteen
Lost
Sula and Annie watched their mother disappear into the thickets. This was not the first time she had left them at a rendezvous site with Oldtooth. He was sleeping as usual, though his eyes were open in an unusual way. It was also unusual for Marta to leave without so much as a lick or a howl, but in the last few weeks, everything had been unusual.
Their bodies felt strange right now, after a very strange sleep. Their collars were not uncomfortable, fastened loosely around their necks as they had been in the clinic. This place was new too, but to the pups, almost everything was new.
One thing was familiar, and that was the feeling of hunger. Sula felt it as soon as she was awake. The black pup turned to Oldtooth and whined, sniffing at his long jaws. Oldtooth’s nose twitched, but his eyes remained unseeing. She whined again, louder and longer.
After a moment, Oldtooth licked his lips. Sula’s whine slid back into her throat and turned into a mournful, half-grown howl, and a faint light crept into the old wolf’s eyes. His ears flicked forward and he half raised his head. He made to stand up, but his foreleg—the injured one—buckled under him and a wave of pain crossed his grizzled face. He slumped back to the ground.
Betrayed, Oldtooth looked down at the paw firmly taped in its white bandage. He bit feebly at it. Though still addled by the tranquilizer, he could tell that the tape was tight and strong, and his dull teeth would not pierce it.
A few feet away, Annie heard Oldtooth grunting irritably and wriggled over to help. She bit clumsily at the bandage with her growing teeth, and the first nip made her old friend yelp with pain. Annie tugged harder and Oldtooth yelped louder. His body jerked in a series of spasms, and he gave a warning bark that sounded strangely like a scolding. Annie drew back, surprised, and for several moments Oldtooth’s eyes swam in and out of focus as the drug cleared from his mind. When he seemed quiet again, Annie leaned back toward him. Sniffing at his foot, she gently licked at the dressing over his toes, then nuzzled his gray chin.
Sula, meanwhile, had been running excited laps around the clearing ever since Oldtooth raised his head. Now she veered out of her circuit and plopped down in front of her packmates, panting and licking both faces equally: first Oldtooth, then Annie, then Oldtooth again. The old wolf’s blood rose at the feel of her sharp teeth on his mouth, and he fought to make sense of the sights and smells around him.
No cages, no cement. They were no longer in the bright place where all the rules were different from the way of the wolf. The flat gray sky stretched over them, and the wet earth was back underneath. But this was not the sky or the earth of Pleasant Valley.
This was a higher place, and a colder place. It was narrow, not broad, and thickly forested, with snowy crags jutting into the gray ceiling of clouds. The damp air carried a thousand subtle scents into Oldtooth’s nose, but one was not so subtle, and it snapped his head to attention: bear. They were in grizzly country. Oldtooth let out a real warning grunt and turned to look for Marta.
Where was his hunting partner, the leader of their pack? The grasses were still flat where she had slept, but she was nowhere to be seen. Oldtooth threw back his head and howled in earnest. The pups howled too then, and the calling song brought him to his feet despite his bandage and wound.
Having roused her old friend at last, Sula leaped to her feet, singing high and clear into the cold sky. Annie joined in on the middle notes, and Oldtooth—still jangled by sleep—sometimes sang low and sometimes wavered off key. Nose to nose, their voices wove together as they sang the calling song, the hungry song, the lonesome song, and the lost song. But when they finished the only reply was their own echo, cascading down the snowy slopes of the gorge.
Nineteen
Trespassing
Nyack Creek grew bigger and noisier as it flowed downstream. The calls of Marta’s pack were swallowed by the forest, and she heard nothing above the gurgling of water and the panting of her breath. She ran into the night, and where the smell of bear grew stronger, she ran faster. When she became thirsty, she ran into the creek to gulp its cold water. She did the only thing she knew how to do, run, in the only direction that made sense: down.
A century ago the Nyack Valley might have been a wolf highway, but it belonged to the grizzly bear now. Droppings and tree scrapes showed where one bear’s range ended and the next began. The great bear was king of the food chain and the only animal, other than an angry moose, that Marta had to fear. She ran on alert, adrenaline pumping as she trespassed through the territory of beasts ten times her size.
Sometime after nightfall, Marta felt the trail level out. When she stopped to drink, she found the water broad and flat. Not far away, she heard the deep whisper of a river.
As Marta listened to the river she became aware of a much closer sound. It was coming from the opposite direction, upstream from where she stood. The splash sounded as though a big stone had fallen into the creek, but it was followed by another deep splash, and still another. Marta did not have to sniff the air; only one animal was big enough to make that noise. The stones in the creek clanked together under the grizzly’s massive feet. The water hissed when he clawed its surface, fishing for salmon that—once plentiful—had become few.
Marta held her breath, stone still, hearing the bear’s teeth clamp down on a small kokanee. Fish were food and her stomach was empty, but the sound did not make her want to eat; it made her want to run. She slipped away on the soft creek bank, leaving the sound of the bear behind her. Soon Marta came to the edge of the forest, where the creek flowed into the river. The flood plain was braided with gravel channels and shrubby hills that ran along the big water. At the main channel, she heard another rushing sound: there, above the far embankment, was a road. A smooth, hard road with cars that shot by in a rush of metal and oil. Big water and big road: both lay ahead of Marta at the end of Nyack Creek.
She could go no farther without being seen. Being seen had gotten her captured. Being seen had gotten Calef killed. She could not go back either; behind her were too many bears and the signs of winter.
Marta stood in the autumn night, toes to the icy waters of the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. No cars passed, and the low hum of the water soothed her. Her blood cleansed of the drug and her body exhausted, she ached with the need to sleep.
A car rushed past, but its headlights never touched the wolf shadow standing at the river’s edge. No one saw the shadow drink from the river, turn, and disappear into the brush.
Twenty
Abandoned
After Marta left, Oldtooth came to his senses slowly. Sleep and waking fought back and forth inside him as he called for her, and when his last howl ended in a wheeze, he sank to the ground in defeat. Marta was gone, he was hurt, the pups were hungry, and he couldn’t even sing.
His body was failing him, but that was nothing new. Bad teeth and a bad foot were only th
e start of his problems; these days, Oldtooth was having a hard time keeping track of himself. From Pleasant Valley to the clinic to here—wherever that was—he kept going to sleep in one place and waking up somewhere else. Nothing in the old wolf’s experience could account for this.
Annie and Sula were too young to understand the strangeness of sleeping in one place and waking up in another. In the past months, they had gone from the darkness of the den to the playground of the forest, and from the shelter of the trees to the great skies of the meadow. Once they drank milk, and now they ate meat. Once they had no collars, and now they did. Once Oldtooth had no bandage, and now he did. The life of a wolf pup was full of changes.
On their own, the pups didn’t know danger from safety or good from bad. Whenever they didn’t know what to do, they followed their elders. Now, when they saw Oldtooth anxiously sniffing the air, they sniffed anxiously too—but the smell of bear meant little to them. So Annie and Sula did what wolf pups were supposed to do: play and beg for food.
Not that these two were looking so puppylike anymore. Their feet were almost as big as Marta’s, and their ears no longer looked too large for their heads. Though half the size of Oldtooth and still weak from captivity, both youngsters had the strong, rangy silhouettes of adult wolves. Annie was the color of prairie grasses in a dry season, a dappled, feathered gray that rippled like the meadow of Pleasant Valley. Sula, like Marta, wore black fur over a silvery undercoat. Apart from more size, to be a full-fledged wolf all they lacked were teeth—and sense.
Annie’s canine teeth were little more than hard spots in her gums. Sula still had baby teeth, and they were getting loose. If there was any biting to be done here in the upper Nyack Valley—and there would be no hunting without a certain amount of biting—Oldtooth would have to do it.