by Asta Bowen
The waves turned to small rollers, and she could no longer crash through them. Now she had to swim up and over one small hill after another. Marta noticed nothing but the next hill, though her feet were numb and the cold made her chest ache. Over this hill. Over the next hill. The image of land was gone from her mind. All that existed was one black wave, another black wave, and gulps of air in between.
Suddenly Marta crashed into something solid. She hit full force and sank for an instant, then came up snorting for air. She thrashed in the black water, trying to stay afloat, when she noticed a huge shape towering over her.
A tree. She had reached land. In her numbness, she had not felt the water grow warmer as the rocky bottom rose to meet the shore. The last wave had slammed her into an underwater stump, cutting a gash in her chest.
Marta dragged herself up onto the bank, heaving for air. Numb, she could not feel the ground under her paws. Her head felt distant from her body, and she could not feel that her ribs were bruised and her chest was bleeding.
Marta shook weakly and lost her balance, tumbling to her side on the clay bank. She picked herself up and inched toward cover. Light was growing in the east, behind the mountains she had come from, and she could not sleep where she could be seen. She half slid and half crept up the shore, a shadow in the first light of dawn. She collapsed in the shelter of a brilliant red huckleberry bush.
Twenty-Six
Salmon Fishing
It took days of old wolf persistence and some luck, but Oldtooth finally reached the Middle Fork, as Marta had, without having to fight any bears. In other ways, though, his luck was not holding.
Alone, he could not feed himself. The deer and elk of the Nyack were too big for his broken teeth, and the ptarmigan and hare were too fast for his injured foot. Unlike Marta, who was young enough and strong enough to put off hunger for a few more days, by the time Oldtooth arrived at the river, he craved meat from the middle of his belly to the tips of his guard hairs.
When he discovered the decaying body of a beaver rolled up on the river bank, he lunged into it with a fever. Too hungry to drag the carcass into the trees, he stood in plain sight of cars swishing by on the highway and downed the stinking meat in gulps. His gray flanks blended with the dusty blues and pinks of the river rocks in a natural camouflage, and he fed undisturbed.
Hunger appeased for now, Oldtooth staggered into the brush and slept. After a few hours he wakened and spent the rest of the day wandering this way and that along the banks of the Middle Fork. If he was looking for another beaver carcass, he looked in vain; most animals were still fat and strong from summer, and pickings were not easy.
The next day, his hunger returned and quickly got the best of him. Ignoring the usual scent tracks, chasing everything from snakes to water ouzels, Oldtooth’s arithmetic was reduced to one crucial formula: eat or die. The shorter days triggered his wintering urge, and the old wolf turned downstream, picking his way along the dry flood beds of the river.
The river rocks, though smooth, made him more lame, and he covered only a mile or two at a time. When he stopped to rest he tugged at the bandage on his foot, but it had been bound with skill and loosened only slowly. The looser he made it, the more his foot swelled. His limp grew worse. The muscles in his foreleg gave out, and the bandage grew frayed and dirty.
Oldtooth would have died there, by the river, but for one thing: salmon. The slow-minded kokanee, making their way upstream to spawn, were heart-red and easy to see in the clear water. Oldtooth discovered he could hunt them without running, without even standing, lying motionless where a swirl of current brought the salmon close to shore. Snatching a fish with his jaws, he would snap its spine with a whack on the stones. The smaller ones he swallowed whole.
Despite his fishing, within days after the Nyack Creek drop-off Oldtooth’s condition had become desperate. Without proper food, he had little hope of healing. Already one toe had sloughed off inside the dressing, and the edges of pain were growing ominously dull. When the old wolf finally chewed through the tape, his foot had no life in it. An evil scent rose from the tissue, and from then on the smell went everywhere with him. It was the smell of any dead thing.
Moving on three legs, the old wolf continued downstream. He took some comfort from the icy waters of the Middle Fork, standing with his injured paw in the stream as he watched for schools of fish. Though the salmon arithmetic was not promising, at least it was a plus. There were no traps, no cages, no more bindings or drugged dreams. Where he lay down to sleep was where he woke up next.
One morning he woke to a strangely familiar scent. It was the smell of easier days, of pasture and cattle, and it was coming from the other side of the river. He found a smooth place to swim across and then limped gamely up a forested slope to the highway.
Across the road the pastures were still green and surrounded by thick trees. The breeze was full of cow smell, which would have made Marta’s nose wrinkle, but didn’t bother Oldtooth. After waiting for several cars to pass, he hobbled across the road and into the trees. Within moments, he caught his first mouse. There was good shelter in the underbrush, and good water in the creeks running through to the Middle Fork. The valley soil was flat and soft under his bad foot. Oldtooth stopped, and stayed. He would travel no farther.
Twenty-Seven
First Snow
Annie and Sula hid from the silvertip sow not one night, but many. Each time they waited until she was out of hearing, then made their way back to the clearing where they had last seen Marta and Oldtooth. Always before, if both adult wolves left the rendezvous site, one or the other returned shortly, but the days went by with no sound, no sign. For most of a week the pups stayed close to the drop point, making meals of any small creature that happened by, and learning to run at the first scent of the bear.
As hunger pulled at their bellies, they tried for larger meals—a snowshoe hare, a marmot—but nothing quite kept the flesh on their still-growing bones. Each night they returned to the rendezvous, howled their help song and hunger songs, and huddled together under the trees.
One night in the darkness, as Annie and Sula slept flank to flank, the cold drizzle falling around them began to crystallize in midair. The valley grew strangely silent, strangely soft, and by the time morning came, a change had come over the world.
Annie wakened first. Even when they had been tiny pups in the den, she was the first one awake and the first to go exploring. Lately, Sula was even slower than usual to wake up and follow her.
Overnight, a sprinkling of star-shaped crystals had frozen to Annie’s face and, mystified, she pawed at her eyes. The stuff stuck to her back too, but her undercoat was not ready for winter, and the chill went to her skin. She stood up and shook fiercely, spraying flakes in a shower, then blinked at the scene before her.
The clearing was transformed. Curious, she ventured out to see what white powder had, magically, dusted their world overnight. Tiptoeing from the firs, she sniffed at the whiteness on the ground, but jerked back in surprise when flakes of ice flew into her nose. She snorted loudly, then sneezed. The sneeze woke Sula, who pawed her own eyes clear to watch Annie’s experiment. For the moment, their hunger was replaced by fascination.
Annie stuck her nose back into the snow, this time on purpose. She burrowed down to the grass and inhaled deeply. Satisfied that the earth was still there, she flipped a clump of snow into the air and watched it fall. It exploded on impact, and she did it again, this time nosing a larger clump and flinging it higher.
Playtime! Sula ran to join Annie, but skidded to a stop when the first shock of snow hit her paws. Bewildered, she picked up one black foot after another, trying to keep them all off the ground at once.
Seeing Sula’s dance, Annie chose the moment to tackle her. The two went down in the snow, wrestling for a hold on the other’s neck until they were thoroughly soaked. When Annie had won—though Sula was faster, Annie was still stronger—Sula slipped the tackle and began to race around the
clearing.
It was a race without reason. She ran and ran. The running instinct was there, but Sula had not learned that she needed something to run to, or at least from, for running to be worthwhile. So the thin black wolfling streaked around and around the clearing, a heedless chase headed straight toward starvation.
Annie stood, barking wildly from the center of her sister’s erratic circles. When Sula would not stop, the gray wolf dropped belly first into the icy crust and lay, nose between her paws, whining to herself and watching with yellow, hungry eyes.
After a time the ache in Annie’s belly sent a decisive message to her feet, and she sprang up from the ground with a shake. Coming in at an angle, she thundered forward and bowled her sister over, then took off uphill. Sula rolled to her feet and took up the chase. Quickly the black shape overtook the gray, and soon they were both running, still without reason, up and up instead of around and around. The scent of their leaders muted under the new snow, the pups ran and ran: away from the rendezvous, away from their waiting, away.
Twenty-Eight
Not Home
Exhausted from crossing the reservoir, Marta slept fitfully under her huckleberry bush. The sun had barely warmed her wet coat when she was startled by the clang of car doors above her. Groping for consciousness, the wolf cowered in her thicket as voices sifted down from the road. The numbness was gone, and in its place a piercing ache that centered in her chest and spread throughout her body. Marta creaked to her feet as painfully as Oldtooth ever had. Then she edged away from the noise, moving stealthily through the trees along the shore.
When the voices were out of hearing, she ducked across the road and, joints straining, picked her way up the mountainside. This was the hard way—but the easy way was blocked by people. She could not afford to be seen.
The ache in Marta’s flesh sank into a dull weariness as she climbed her second range of mountains in as many days. Her energy was failing. She would have to eat soon, before she lost the strength to hunt. But still the search image in her mind was not an animal: it was a place. Home. The picture of Pleasant Valley lay in her mind’s eye, with its great meadow, trickling creeks, and meandering deer tracks.
Marta reached the ridge by midafternoon, after a struggle through the steep puzzles of alder that grew up in old clear-cuts around the reservoir. At the top, Marta found herself overlooking the immense panorama of the Flathead Valley. To the north and west as far as she could see, the autumn fields basked under a hazy afternoon sun. Stretching to the south, under a gauze of blue, lay the calm waters of Flathead Lake.
Not Dahl Lake. Not Pleasant Valley. It was not home, but Marta ran toward it anyway. She ran down the steep and she ran through the thick. She ran the trails of elk and deer and even bear, animals scattering at her crashing, careless sound. She ignored scrapes on her paws and the wound on her chest and ran: down a rock slide, through more alder, and across the milky swirls of Noisy Creek.
By sunset, she reached the base of the mountains and began traveling along a foothill road toward the lake. Lights blinked on across the Flathead Valley, outlining the city of Kalispell, and the foothills came alive with warm sparks of light from outlying homes. Marta kept to the dark, and ran.
Marta ran for a week. She ran to Flathead Lake, but it was too cold to swim. She ran to the foothills, but they were full of homes. She ran to the valley, but it was busy with roads. She ran to the forests, but they ran out in clear-cuts. She ran all the way around Swan Lake and ended up where she started. Everywhere she went, she kept to the edges, just out of sight.
As her meat hunger grew, she hunted on the run. She caught just enough to keep alive: a grouse here, a rabbit there, a surprised fawn with its spots nearly gone, but no real food. Deer were plentiful in the northern Swan Valley, but so were roads and people. She could not hunt and hide at the same time. She needed a place where she could eat and sleep and not be seen. The ache in her chest and bones was blurred by fatigue. Her strength slipped away with each ridge she ran.
Marta tried every trail in her hunt for home. She ran the Swan Valley and back. She covered the east hills of Flathead Lake in detail, as though their rocky outlooks would show her the way. She ran the southern length of the Mission Mountains in a single day, but some strange tug—like the pull she had felt to her pack—called her back north. She ran in circles, in ovals, in straights, and in knots, stopping only to hide and sometimes sleep. She ran and ran and ran.
One night she left the foothills long after dark. The homes and streets were quiet as she passed the river near the sleeping village of Bigfork. Part of the river flowed through a building and made a loud hum there, spilling down a smooth stone chute before joining the rest of the channel below.
No cars appeared as she loped along the highway, and no dogs caught her scent from the yards in town. She trotted by old log buildings and new condominiums. She heard the Swan River growling hungrily below her as she crossed the old steel bridge and smelled hot grains baking in the cool night. The only light in downtown Bigfork came from the kitchen of the bakery. Marta sniffed deeply at the smell, but kept to the shadow as she passed.
Marta crossed the street, still in darkness, and made it to the highway just as a siren tore into the evening. The wolf dove for cover and a patrol car sped past, lights flashing and tires whining. She slunk deeper into the barrow pit and sneaked among the summer homes along the shore, headed south.
The rest of the night and the next day, she continued south along the lakeshore. She ran and hid, hid and ran. At one place she crouched for hours under a dock, waiting for a picnic to end before she could move on. Finally the houses thinned out, and at the end of the day she found herself on a deserted stretch of shoreline. She crept into the trees and rested, waiting for darkness. When dusk came, she inched out onto the gravel beach.
As she stood, the sunset deepened from gold to red across the long plate of glassy water, and Marta’s energy ebbed with the light. In the past weeks she had survived chase and capture in Pleasant Valley. She had seen the world and seasons turned upside down, and suffered the loss of home and pack. For days she had traveled in hunger and pain, feeling little, hunting for home. Now, as the evening sky deepened from palest blue to indigo, Marta felt the end of her strength.
She felt the hunger now, and she felt the pain. She felt the gash in her chest, warm and swollen, and she felt her knees buckling beneath her. A chill swept through her body. With one last effort, she climbed back up the gravel shore and into the trees. The last thing she saw as her eyes sank shut was the glint of moonrise on a golden leaf, falling silently to the ground.
Twenty-Nine
Beaver Woman Lake
The day the snow fell, Sula followed Annie far upstream. They didn’t know that the higher they went, the harsher the weather would be, or that the higher they went, the less there would be to eat. Rattled by hunger, with no leader to follow, the youngsters did not know how to use what sense they had.
As Annie and Sula continued upstream, they moved out of bear country and into the jaws of winter. The weather roused their urge to hunt, but instinct without teeth was as good as no instinct at all. The kind of prey they could catch and kill with milk teeth—in Annie’s case, gums—was not what they needed. They needed meat, and plenty of it; they needed hunting practice, and plenty of it; they needed the protection of elders and pack. They had none.
While Oldtooth limped across a cow pasture far to the south and Marta ran mountain ranges far beyond that, in the wintry reaches of the Nyack one gray and one black wolf stopped growing. Annie’s gray coat wore thin, and her stomach hurt all the time. Sula lagged farther behind, breathing hard when she ran and howling with a crack in her voice. Her milk teeth fell out, but no real teeth grew in. She ran less and rested more. Each day Sula grew more listless and sleepy, until one morning, even Annie’s fiercest hunting howl did not rouse her.
Annie tried several times to wake her sister: first a nudge from her chin, then a wail, then an
emphatic nip below the ear. Sula’s whiskers did not even twitch.
The hunger in Annie’s belly was deafening. She stood over Sula and bellowed, a tuneless song that swelled over her sister’s back, still curled in sleep. Annie clamped her jaws around Sula’s in a big sister wolf kiss, but still Sula’s eyes didn’t open. Her muzzle felt strange: strange and cold.
Annie cocked her head, sniffing gingerly. A strange smell—or lack of smell—came from the familiar black nose. Annie caught her breath and backed off stiffly. There in the cold, eyes fixed on her sister, Annie took the slowest of breaths. She held it for a moment, then let go. A faint mewl, like the cry of a newborn, rose on a trickle of steam from her lips.
Against logic, instinct undone, Annie pushed still farther upstream after Sula’s death. Sometimes racing with panic and sometimes sluggish with fatigue, she crisscrossed the drainages of the upper Nyack. Along the way she snatched up rodents and sometimes ground birds, but nothing filled the howling in her belly. Her trek drew higher and higher into the stony peaks, until she came to Beaver Woman Lake. Like Sula, she became sleepy and listless, and she found shelter in a hollow between two dwarf fir trees.
It was quiet there, at Beaver Woman Lake, except for the falls humming down into the Nyack. There were no grizzly bears to run from, and the deer and elk had also moved down country for the season. For the first time in her short life, Annie was completely alone.
Soon she stopped feeling much of the cold, and her sense of smell dimmed. Her nerves carried only one message, hunger, but even that disappeared after a few days. She stopped hunting, and no longer moved except to wobble to the lake for a drink. Then she returned to her fir trees and rested. She listened to the tiny animals burrowing for winter, and she listened to the creeks spilling down the smooth cliffs of the cirque. The last sound she heard was the drone of a small airplane somewhere overhead, and it lulled her into a sleep from which she never wakened.