by Asta Bowen
Then there was the matter of sense. Though Annie and Sula had the proportions of grownups, they knew little of wolf ways. Wolves their age still needed to play monkey see, monkey do, tug-of-war, and hide-and-seek. They needed to watch from a distance while a pack of good hunters made every kind of kill, and they needed the meat from those kills to fill out their half-grown bodies. The young of the year needed to chase one another until their bones grew long and thick, and to practice every move until it came effortlessly: tracking, chasing, cornering, dodging, killing. They needed to play follow the leader for many seasons, until they learned the way of the wolf.
When their howl did not bring Marta and when Oldtooth sank back to the ground, the sisters were hungry enough to begin their own hunt around the clearing. Sula flushed a ptarmigan almost immediately, but sprang back in surprise. A wiser wolf would have sprung forward—getting, not spending, precious energy—but that was arithmetic. Sula hadn’t learned arithmetic yet, and neither had Annie. What they did know was tag, so tag was what they played. Around and around the clearing they dashed. Despite the tranquilizers, the lack of food, and weeks of confinement, they played with zest. Annie zoomed in for nips at Sula’s throat and shoulder, getting beat out—as sometimes she was, even before their capture—by her sister’s rattlesnake speed.
Round and round they went, not noticing the strangeness of the place, the lateness of the season, or even, for the moment, their own hunger. Not noticing, until they finally stopped to rest, that Oldtooth was gone.
Twenty-One
Hungry for Home
At first light, Marta was wakened by a steady drizzle patting the cotton wood leaves over her head. It was cold here, but not as cold as the high place she had run from. Blinking, she lifted her nose: there was the cold, fast river in front of her, and the trace of grizzly bear behind her.
Marta stood. Her eyes felt sandy and her joints stiff as she ducked out from the brush. She ached, and not just from the long run and the short sleep. For the first time since being captured, Marta was hungry, and it was not an ordinary hunger. Though she had eaten nothing in the past week, this discomfort was not in her belly but in every muscle, bone, vein, and shaft of fur. What she felt there, half-hidden in the cottonwood saplings on the Middle Fork, was not a meat hunger. It was the hunger for home.
Home: the key to survival. In Pleasant Valley, for the first time in her life, she had lived as a wolf was meant to live, with a home and pack that were hers alone. In the nightmare that began when she found the first trap near the den site, Marta had lost both home and pack. She still had the will to live; that had been dimmed in the clinic, not destroyed.
To survive, Marta needed a home. Land was life itself; without the right habitat Marta could not even save herself.
Pleasant Valley was home. It fit. There, she knew how to hunt and she knew where to hide. There, she knew how to survive. Here, she knew she would not.
Two cars hurtled past on the highway. Marta crept to the riverbank, looking up and down the winding valley. This was not home. Wherever home was, she had found it before, and she would find it again.
Marta trotted to the river’s edge, drank, and studied the surface of the water. Downstream were whitecapped rapids; upstream the water looked calm but fast. Marta ran upstream, ducking into the brush when she heard traffic on the road.
At a narrow point in the river, Marta stopped and gauged the crossing. It was many times her own length, and too deep to wade. A golden cottonwood leaf twisted in the eddies. Despite its gliding surface, the current underneath was strong.
Marta plunged in, and the cold swallowed her. Hard as she paddled, the river pushed her toward the rapids faster than she could push herself to the opposite shore. Straining to keep her chin above water, Marta refused to look downstream. Water swirled around her radio collar. With one ear to the growing roar of whitewater, she kept her eyes fixed on the rocky bank and pulled steadily toward it. She did not panic in the current, but let her body angle downstream as she paddled into the deepest part of the river.
Pull, pull. Pumping blood into her legs, which were almost numb from the cold, Marta felt the current begin to weaken as she neared the shore. The instant before her paws nicked bottom, a great roar filled her ears. Marta shot a look at the rapids, but their roar was still several lengths downstream. The new roar was coming not from the water, but from the shore in front of her.
The roar of the rapids or the roar from on shore: momentum sent Marta through the frigid water and dully, she felt her pads touch the river bottom. She dug in her claws and scrambled out of the current. The wall of noise slammed into her and she dropped, dripping, onto the smooth stones as a freight train clattered past on the tracks above her.
After the train passed, she peered up over the bank and looked along the tracks. She listened. No trains. No cars. The valley was silent except for two sounds: the rush of whitewater and the sound of a small airplane droning up the Nyack drainage she had just come down.
Marta sprang up the embankment, leaped the tracks, and was across the road before her coat had even stopped dripping. She did not pause on the other side; she could be seen there, and anyway, there was nothing to stop for.
There were no scent posts, no landmarks, no familiar trees or rocky outcrops by which to choose direction. Home, wherever it was, lay in the only direction Marta knew: straight ahead.
Twenty-Two
Not Quite Alone
Sula stood panting in the middle of the clearing and turned a triumphant eye toward her sister. The race was over and she had won. Annie, panting too, gazed back levelly; win or lose, she was still the one to be answered to. The empty space in Sula’s middle felt suddenly bigger, and she turned to beg food from Oldtooth’s gray muzzle. Not there.
Sula’s panting ended in a gulp. She ran to the spot where Oldtooth had been and whimpered, but no gray shape emerged from the bushes. She looked around. Suddenly the clearing seemed much bigger than it had, and new smells licked at her from every direction. Hunching her shoulders, she peered at the snowy peaks towering above.
Then without a glance at Annie, Sula threw back her head and howled. It was a blunt, how-dare-you-leave-us-like-this howl. Marta was off somewhere, and now Oldtooth too. That just didn’t happen, not this soon after moving to a new spot. Not when they were this hungry.
Sula’s howl ended in a grunt, and she plopped to her belly in the spot where Oldtooth had lain. It was still warm. With a huff, she poked her black nose between her black paws and waited. Annie prowled the clearing, pretending to ignore her sister, but soon gave up and plopped down next to Sula. Side by side they lay, waiting for Marta or Oldtooth to come and show them what to do.
They waited, and noon became afternoon. They waited and their stomachs growled, and the wind picked up in the trees. They waited and dozed, and noises skittered in the brush near the creek. Finally, in the hour just before dark, Sula was wakened by an especially loud growl coming from her sister’s direction. She reached over to nip Annie awake, but Annie was far from asleep. Ears back, neck tight, her nose pointed straight into an awful smell coming from the brush a few yards away. Whiskers trembling, the fur around Annie’s gray neck ruffed out like Oldtooth’s when he sensed danger. A new noise gnarled from her throat.
Sula swept to her feet with a fearful yip, and just then a crash sounded from the direction of the smell. Grizzly bear. The harsh grunts and breaking of branches were coming their way. Though the pups had never seen a grizzly, instinct took over and they shot from their bed.
As they bounded away, an ancient bear with silvertip fur burst into the clearing. She stopped, snorting angrily at the mix of man and wolf scent, and cocked a pale ear after Annie and Sula. Their scent still fresh, the grizzly charged, crossing the grass in one smooth motion, but the wolves were already losing themselves in the thick brush above the clearing. The sow halted with a lurch. Unable to see what she could smell and hear, she swung her great head low and bellowed, creek water d
ripping from her chin.
The bear peered after the scared-puppy sounds fading into the brush, and clapped her jaws shut with an impatient snap. Just beyond her bad sight, a streak of gray and a streak of black vanished into the darkness as fast as their half-grown legs could carry them.
Twenty-Three
Starburst
As the pups blazed a frightened trail upstream, their old friend and teacher limped haltingly in the opposite direction. When in danger, Oldtooth had the same urge to run as Marta, and when he left the clearing, his leaving was as sudden. He did not turn back to see Sula besting Annie in their game of tag, and there was no farewell howl or final wolf kiss. This was not arithmetic; it was reflex. The last weeks had tangled his intelligence like a clump of winter fur, and for now he moved on instinct alone. Like Marta, the command went to his feet and—despite the throb—they obeyed. Like Marta, he went downhill.
Oldtooth never heard Sula’s indignant howl. By the time the pups noticed his absence, he was deep into the thick, beary brush of Nyack Creek. Though he left shortly after Marta, he was not catching up with her. The trail she left was narrow and fast, while his was looping and wide.
The old wolf was hurting. Despite the days of rest and care in the clinic, his paw was worse, not better. On rocky parts of the trail he flinched each time the foot touched the ground. He rested often, biting testily at the wrap and carefully cleaning his other three paws. He could not afford to lose any more.
Oldtooth traveled and rested, crossing Marta’s scent and sign along the way. Although she had run straight through the grizzlies’ territories, he made sharp detours around the bark scrapes that marked one bear’s range from another. But then, Marta could run from danger. At this point, Oldtooth could barely walk.
He had lived through worse. The time in the coyote trap was worse. Between the steel teeth sawing into his leg bone and his bloody jaws sawing against the metal hinge, all that existed in those hours was pain. It consumed him so completely that he didn’t notice when the trap broke open and kept on chewing. That was how he broke so many teeth.
The pain now in his paw was little by comparison. But it was enough, as Oldtooth made his way down the drainage of the Nyack, that it slowly dulled his wits. After a while he began to ignore the scrapes of short bears; then the scrapes of larger bears; finally he ignored all sign of grizzly, and the loops and detours in his track shrank to a single, slow thread. All he could do was follow in Marta’s tracks, one labored step after another.
By the time Marta reached the Middle Fork, Oldtooth had traveled half that far, and the pups were running headlong in the opposite direction. Scattered like a starburst, the Pleasant Valley pack was a pack no more.
Twenty-Four
Hungry Horse
Having escaped whitewater, trains and cars at the river, Marta turned into the mountains on the south side of the highway. Under a cold, needle-fine rain, she ran up an avalanche chute that gave her a clear trail and a trickle of water to drink. Near the top of Pyramid Peak the drizzle hardened into sleet, and the cliff face was slicked over with ice. Marta scrambled up the bluff in bursts, gripping the ice with her claws. She slipped once, pushing loose a head-size boulder that bounced down the avalanche chute like a skull.
Marta caught her footing again and stood, sides heaving. She could hear the wind and snow driving over the crest, and something in it smelled good, like a valley. Like home. She settled her feet, caught her breath, and plunged for the top.
On the summit she was greeted with a gust of wind that nearly sent her rolling down after the boulder. With it came a biting blast of snow, and Marta wrinkled her nose and shook. When she opened her eyes, she peered into the distance.
What she saw was mist and snow. Her nose was not wrong; there was a valley below. She inhaled, getting a chestful of snow along with the scent. It was a valley with trees and deer and—Marta’s ruff raised slightly—bear. But there was more: big water, much bigger than Dahl Lake. Big water, bear, and no meadow. This was not Pleasant Valley.
Marta shook the snow from her black overcoat and stepped down from the ridge, toward the big water. The snow mixed with rain as Marta descended, and by the time she reached the water’s edge, both had stopped. The overcast was breaking open, and the last of the sun slanted through ragged clouds. It would be night soon.
As Marta rested in a grove of trees by the shore of Hungry Horse Reservoir, the first stirrings of meat hunger mixed with her hunger for home. Though she had not eaten for over a week, and had eaten badly for weeks before that, she was too tired to bring herself to hunt. She tended her feet instead, all four in turn, nipping gravel from between the pads and licking ice scratches on the skin. Usually the pack did this together, playing or napping before going on with their journey.
But Marta had no pack now, no one to play with and no urge to nap. Paws tended, she felt a pang and then a song rising from inside, pulling her to her feet and pointing her nose at the sky. She was lost and hungry, but that wasn’t what she sang. She needed to hunt, but she did not sing that either. She would have called for her pack, but she could not sing that far. She sang the only song she could: the lonesome song. She sang it long, and when the notes died away she sang it again. In the silence a single star, the first of the night, winked out from behind the parting clouds.
Exhausted, hungry, she picked up one paw and placed it in front of the others. Her feet were the only way home.
Twenty-Five
Black Wolf, Black Water
Under a dark, clearing sky, Marta followed the road along the shore of the reservoir. As she rounded a curve, she heard a disturbance. The glow of a bonfire lit a circle of trees, and in the circle were dozens of people: young people, some jumping about and playing and others sitting and staring at the fire. The loud ones were hooting and shouting, and above their voices howled a strange metallic voice with a metallic, pounding heartbeat.
Marta stopped, her own heart pounding against the music. Intent on the danger in front of her, she did not notice a danger from behind. Coming around the curve, tires scraping gravel, a car was upon her before she knew it.
The flash of headlights caught only her hind legs and a swish of tail as she lunged left, off the gravel and into the narrow band of trees between the road and the water. Marta crouched there, turning her head and squeezing her eyes shut against the rock fragments spinning out from the back tires. Marta heard the pounding of the car’s own metallic heartbeat, and a cloud of exhaust bloomed around her. Before it could settle she was back on the road, looking for a way around the party. The smell of metal and oil was strong from the string of cars that lined the road up and down from the fire.
The car that nearly hit Marta pulled up and stopped at the end of the row. The driver got out and slammed the door shut, a clank of metal on metal that made Marta jump. She froze, but both driver and passenger moved away from her and toward the people silhouetted against the blaze of their bonfire.
Now another car approached from behind, more slowly than the first, and the wolf again ducked into the shadows. As the second car slowed and parked another started, filling the air with burned-oil smell. It spun around, back in Marta’s direction.
The black wolf hunched motionless. It was not safe to go on, but she had come too far to turn back. She wanted to go onward, forward, ahead. She wanted to go home.
Marta left the road and crept down to the reservoir’s edge. Shadows of the bonfire glazed her coat, and golden sparks mixed with stars in the calm, black water. This was big water, indeed: to her right and left, as far as she could see, the shore ribboned in and out of bays and peninsulas.
Marta stepped in and drank. This water was cool, and it felt good on her mountain-weary paws. It smelled simple: no oil, no metal, just the freshness of night. Marta sank into the water and began to swim.
The water was not as cold as the river had been, and Marta swam easily, with no current to pull her off course. Her black head and neck made black ripples in th
e water, and the stars and sparks twinkled in her wake as she swam away from shore.
From the water, Marta saw the cut-out shape of mountains on the opposite shore. Both sight and smell told her they were a long swim away, and nothing told her what else might lie on the other side. The night was calm, and the water was big—even bigger than she had pictured from the top of the ridge. Running all the way around it would have been hard on her sore paws. She swam.
Marta swam steadily as the stars cut their circles overhead. The mountains in front of her got bigger as the mountains behind got smaller. She swam without tiring, though she still had not eaten. The only discomfort came through her wet fur: the chill of the water, growing colder as it got deeper, was making its way into her muscles. The fat she had built up during the few good weeks of summer was long gone, and underwater, her coat was little protection from the cold.
When Marta was halfway across the reservoir, she picked out the shortest route to land. Cold or not, now there would be no turning back.
The chill sank deeper into Marta’s body as she continued. By now a light wind had come up from in front of her, and little waves clapped at her throat as she paddled onward, chin high, radio collar soaked, into the new breeze. Gradually the stars disappeared from the water, erased by waves. Marta paddled on.
The breeze grew stronger then, and the waves lapping at her throat began to break around her shoulders. Before long she was going through the waves, not over them, and catching her breath in between. The mountains beckoned, but Marta’s progress was hindered by bigger waves and rougher wind.
Marta tore into the whitecaps. The bigger they got, the harder she swam. Her muscles were completely chilled now, and only the fiercest paddling kept the cold from sinking further into her bones. The mountains were taking forever to come near, but Marta no longer noticed the shore. Now she only noticed each wave.