Forever Wolf

by Maria Vale

  He tried to do too much, too soon, and while he managed to tumble down Westdæl, gravity is not prepared to allow him to tumble back up.

  Racing back, I launch myself from a shelf and slide the rest of the way, my feet skittering on the rocks until I draw up next to him, the sound of the helicopter blades banging loud against my skull.

  My teeth clamp tight around the loose skin at his neck, dragging him toward the base of a nearby tree. He curls himself around the base, and I cover his beacon with my dark-gray body.

  Alys us fram westendum and fram eallum hiera cræftum.

  The helicopter emerges over the Gin, its blades almost perpendicular to the ground, sending loosened leaves and a spray of water into the air around us. I cling to Eyulf, who knows not to move. The only sign of life is a tiny whimper, a searching glance as his green eye meets mine.

  I press my muzzle against his.

  Alys us fram westendum.

  Alys us.

  Chapter 21

  Leonora, the Great North’s human behaviors teacher, says that humans judge one another by clothes, by apartments, by vacations, by cars. These are the things that signal their status and what echelon they belong to.

  Wild or in skin, wolves judge each other by strength in action. By decisiveness. By willingness to sacrifice. Every thing we have is shared. Our cabins are assigned and filled with furniture rummaged from the collective stores. Our cars are held in common. Our clothes are passed around and advertise schools we’ve never gone to, sports we’ve never played, jobs we’ve never held.

  Even Offlanders, whose position in human society may require their own stuff, do not actually own it. If they have an apartment, they squat there, keeping it pin neat until some Pack financial advisor decides that it is time to sell.

  The only thing we truly own is the seax, the knife that is the emblem of becoming a full member of the Pack.

  Other wolves judge us by the condition of our blades. A wolf with a pitted blade in a dry sheath is falling apart and will be challenged.

  So while Eyulf sits at the rock pond, drawing, I search for a likely stone that I can use to sharpen Ronan’s knife. It isn’t mine, but I cannot abide a dulled blade.

  Neither of us much feels like being wild. Even when the helicopter was gone, it just felt safer, being in skin and clothes.

  “The helicopters are new,” I say when I finally feel like talking. “Here. They’re new here. The Pack’s lawyers had always managed to keep them away.”

  He rolls his thumb across the big box of pencils. “Wolves have lawyers?”

  “And accountants and fund managers and engineers and hackers. It takes a lot to protect a place like this.”

  He looks at me and then back at the black pencil. “Have you ever been shot at from the air?”

  “Yes.” I need something that’s big enough to accommodate the sweep of a blade, small enough to fit my hand.

  “You don’t ever get used to it,” he says.

  “No.” I need a rock that is water-smoothed, fine-grained, with just the right amount of grit. “But you were shot in skin.”

  I don’t look at him, but I hear the silence when he stops fiddling with his pencils. Then he pulls out an eraser and rubs tight strokes on the page.

  “How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen shot wolves, and some who’ve survived long enough to change back. Their entry and exit wounds don’t line up when they’re in skin.”

  Weighing a rock in my hand, I decide it seems about right.

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  I pull the stone smoothly away from me. One, two, three. “Why would a human shoot another human?”

  He takes out the gold-brown pencil and holds it to the side, rubbing it back and forth against the paper.

  “Why would a wolf”—he taps the dull end of the pencil against his torso—“gore another wolf?”

  I turn the seax and start again.

  “I was shot by my family.”

  I stop my scraping and stare at the line of the blade. “Family? What do you mean ‘family’? Wolves don’t have families.”

  “I did. Lionel and Barbara Hauptstadt, and their daughters, Unity, Charity, and Purity. And Elsa, a white wolf with floppy ears and a sloppy tongue.”

  “You mean a dog?”

  Eyulf pushes his stubby black pencil into a sharpener and begins to crank it.

  “She ran around on four legs like I did, she barked like I did, she had white fur like I did. As far as I knew, she and I were alike. Wolves didn’t raise me. A dog did.”

  Turns out Lionel was the one who refused to call the new dog Snowball, the girls’ preference. In a perverse joke of fate, he named him Eyulf—lucky wolf—instead. Apparently, he hoped a dog named Lucky Wolf would bring more of it—luck—than a dog named Snowball when he went hunting for deer to feed a family that needed it.

  Neither the dog nor the name could change the fact that Lionel’s aim was piss-poor and he did not have a hunter’s nerve.

  The Hauptstadts lived in a farmhouse that hadn’t had a farm for a while and was instead just a ramshackle building with a tractor rusting in the backyard, the smell of absent cows everywhere, and fallow lands that belonged to the bank.

  Barbara, the second half of this broken couple, worked long hours as a cashier at the Save-On-Foods. The only thing they succeeded in was keeping themselves and their despair from infecting their daughters, who largely raised themselves.

  The girls slept in a big room past a parlor that no one had ever used. It had a collection of tiny perfume bottles with stained bottoms, a clock made of corroding metal that no one ever remembered to wind, and an ombré openwork shawl of rust and brown draped over the back of the sofa.

  This would, he said, come into play later.

  He has a beautiful voice. Deep and wolfish even in skin. I think I could listen to it forever.

  What he didn’t learn from Elsa, he learned from the girls. He and Elsa slept outside, but in the evening, they gathered in the back room while Unity read to her sisters. He watched Unity’s finger trace the markings on the pages. Elsa often fell asleep, though he would paw her awake during the exciting parts.

  He was in his second winter at the Hauptstadts before he fully understood the language of humans. It took another year to decipher the meaning of those little markings on the pages. Twice the girls caught him reading—paws on the pages, nose hovering above the words—and laughed and laughed.

  That night, he pushed the book he’d been reading toward Elsa, who chewed spittily on the corner but showed no other interest.

  He worried about Elsa. Not only was she not much of a reader, but she also wasn’t even particularly good at following straightforward directions: Leave the stupid cat alone. Don’t eat Daddy’s shoe. Stay away from the tractor.

  At first, he admired her rebellious spirit, but it wasn’t rebelliousness that drew her to the puddle under the tractor. “Don’t lick that,” Purity had said. “It’s poison.”

  As directions go, that seemed, Eyulf said, “unambiguous,” so later, when he went mousing, it didn’t occur to him that she would immediately head to the shimmering puddle under the tractor and lap it up.

  By the time he returned to her, it was too late. Whatever the poisonous stuff was—antifreeze is my guess—it made her unable to walk, then unable to move. In pain. The girls were sobbing, begging with their parents, but if the parents would not speak openly in front of the girls, they hid nothing from Eyulf. Like the fact that they couldn’t afford to take Elsa to the vet.

  Do something, his wife had said. You’ve got to do something.

  So Lionel got in his truck to drive Elsa away. Put his gun in the gun rack. He didn’t stop Eyulf from jumping in beside her, nosing her and nuzzling her jaw. Whining for her to wake up as he had during all those exciting parts she’d sl
ept through. She started to shake uncontrollably, her eyes opened and frightened. Her claws made strange scraping sounds against the metal bed.

  They went not to the woods behind the house, but to a farther wood up in the mountains. Lionel took the dog out and put her on the ground. He loaded up his gun and shot, and that piss-poor hunter missed. Shot her in the back but didn’t kill her. She opened her eyes and looked at him, a look of such absolute betrayal that Lionel turned tail and ran.

  Leaving Eyulf to learn a brutal lesson on the difference between sentiment and love. “Sentiment is what you do for yourself,” he says. “Love is what you do for someone else. I loved Elsa, so I killed her.”

  The girls were devastated. Charity in particular begged her parents to let Eyulf sleep with the girls at night. So for the weeks and months and years that came, Eyulf slept on the floor of their room. Not all nights, but enough.

  Enough so that when the unthinkable happened, he was sleeping on the flattened green shag at the foot of their beds.

  “I woke up feeling sick. My stomach was churning, my muscles stretching and clenching. It couldn’t be the tractor poison, because Lionel had cleaned that up long before. Then my ears started ringing, and even though it was dark, it got darker in a way it never had been before, and I was completely blind.

  “Every bone and muscle and tendon felt out of place and rubbery, and when it finally felt solid again, it was all wrong. It was like I was both naked and cocooned. The dark had gotten darker, the quiet, quieter. My nose was almost useless. I kept sniffling and snorting and trying to pop my ears and shake my head.

  “And for the first time, I felt really cold. I curled up tight, trying to fluff my tail over my nose, except there was no tail. I tried again to wag it, but when I looked behind me, it was gone. All I saw instead was a skinny naked ass, and I started howling.”

  If he’d been at Homelands, he would have known what he was. He would have spent his life surrounded by wolves shifting. He would most likely have experimented with it himself at least a few times. He would know what would happen with the Year of First Shoes. The whole Pack would have helped him during the difficult transition from pup to juvenile. The Pack would work together to train him how to wear clothes and hold forks and speak with tongue and mouth, not with chest and throat.

  But there was no pack.

  “You can imagine,” he says with a laugh. “The girls wake up, and all they see is this screaming, naked, white-haired boy. Of course, I didn’t know how to walk, so I was careening around on my knuckles and toes, bumping into everything. They started screaming, too, which was really hard on the ears. I scuttled out into the parlor, dragged on the throw from the back of the sofa, because I was cold.”

  “Then I heard the gun locker being opened upstairs and scurried toward the porch and the stairs, but instead of clearing them with one single jump, I fell. Lionel had thumped to his daughters’ room and then back toward the door and off the porch, and meanwhile, my fingers and toes had gotten trapped in the stupid shawl and I tripped into the ditch. I’d only just managed to right myself when the screen door slammed shut.

  “Then I hear the click-clack of his pump action, and wouldn’t you know it? The first time in his life that Lionel Hauptstadt manages to hit something, it’s the skinny freak whose penis is caught in the openwork shawl.

  “The one fucking time he actually aims true, it’s at me,” he says.

  He laughs. “Hysterical, right?”

  I look at the stone in my hand. “It’s not funny, and you know it. Don’t pretend.”

  He looks over a gray pencil held sideways, then goes back to his drawing.

  “I was shot by a human and survived. You were gored by a wolf and survived. The difference is I choose not to relive what happened every minute of every day. Torturing myself—”

  “The difference is, you are not to blame for what happened to you. I am. What I did destroyed everything. If I ‘choose’ to remind myself, it’s so that the same thing doesn’t happen to them.”

  I press the seax to my thumbnail, testing its edge.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  The blade digs through to the nail bed.

  “Why do you always say ‘they’?”

  “‘They’?”

  “When you talk about the Pack, you always say ‘they,’ never ‘we.’ Like you don’t really belong.”

  Blood beads in a neat line across my thumbnail.

  “I am all that is left of…of Pack Vrangelya. If I forget, there is no one to remember that they ever existed.”

  After drying the blade on the ragged T-shirt, I slip it back into the sheath.

  “And me?” he asks. “Will you remember me?”

  My finger traces the clumsy α carved into the leather by a wolf who never understood the sacrifices required of an Alpha.

  “Yes.”

  He turns his head to the side, looking at the page. “Do you want to see?”

  I move next to him. It’s a figure. Not really a figure, but parts of a figure: dark hair escaping from a careless knot, a knife, a stone, water, the tensed muscle of a forearm, brows that are too black and straight above eyes taut with concentration.

  A gap between shirt and waistband reveals the tail end of a scar that looks almost beautiful, a finial decorated with delicate rootlets.

  “Where are we?” he asks, holding the black pencil over the corner of the page. “I like to remember.”

  “Franklin County, New York. That’s what the humans call it.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “They… We call it Homelands.”

  So that’s what he writes, Homelands, then above it he adds Varya.

  He closes the notebook and stares at the black cover for a long time.

  When I get up, I smooth my shirt in place so that nothing is showing.

  Chapter 22

  It started with the smell of loam, of turned earth hanging in the air, like the scent of blood around a wound.

  Faint, almost nothing, but just wrong enough to pull me from Westdæl to the crumbling bottom of the Gin, where I feel a faint rumbling in the earth.

  By the time I have picked through the giant broken trees and small streams and slick stones to the upper reaches of the High Pines, I don’t feel it anymore, but the warblers and thrushes and flycatchers and kinglets who should have already sorted out their nesting sites and gotten down to the business of filling them are instead fighting inside our border, a sure sign that displaced interlopers are looking for new homes.

  The duties of a perimeter wolf are clear. We are to guard the perimeter, not worry about what is going on Offland. Standing next to one of the NO TRESPASSING signs, I lean into my front legs and pivot my ears, trying to discover what the westends are doing that would stir things up like this. A pregnant doe struggles up the human side of the mountain. She looks at me warily. I am hungry, but I have other concerns, and we are not allowed to hunt the pregnant or calving. She shifts directions toward the east; I watch her, particularly when she comes to the wolf-marked border. She stops, sucking in the unmistakable scent of predator, but then without a look behind, she lifts her hoof and steps over.

  Kinglets may be reluctant to give up their nests, but a little tussling and some redoubled effort and they rebuild. We do not hunt kinglets.

  We do hunt deer, and for this doe to keep coming means that whatever is on the other side of the mountain is worse than wolves.

  It takes time picking my way down the Offland face of the Norþdæl mountains. The trees are not so dense here, the roots don’t run as deep, and the rain turns the earth into mud, making the hardpan that covers large swathes of the descent like a slide. The exposed earth between them is hardly better, and paths carved by hikers turn into rivers.

  On this side of the mountain, though, the smell of turned soil is joined by a gri
nding, whirring sound and a sick, sweet, smoky smell of engines.

  Once upon a time, the runoff from Westdæl and the High Pines fed a river running north. But without wolves, the deer lost any sense of proportion. They ate not only trees and bushes, but all the sedges and grasses that edged the river. Without the roots, the soft, damp banks eroded and collapsed. Without banks, the river itself turned into a weedy, meandering slough, though the ancient outline of its course is still visible as a foggy trough that runs along a plateau before it drops to the valley below.

  Standing at a high point still covered by trees, I watch monstrous yellow trucks with thick chain-covered tires churn through mud and strip the plateau bare.

  One with a single giant claw grabs an ancient white pine and forces it to the ground until it submits with a groan, its baroque tangle of roots suddenly exposed. Then the machine throws this hundred-year-old life to the side where another truck sucks it in, cutting and stripping the trunks, turning them into logs. The third shovels the stripped branches and naked roots into a shredder next to smoking piles.

  Something is going on farther north. From here, I can’t tell what it is—smoke or simply fog settled into the basin. I move carefully, keeping well within the tree line and close to the ground to get a look at the lower level.

  Circling wide around the machines, I find myself farther Offland than I have been for months. Near the edge of the plateau, the lower level of the one-time stream turns into a long alleyway that is no longer trees and water but mud and fire. Arrayed along the length of the basin are large staging grounds, some already denuded and burning. Some have nothing but an access road and a pyramid of pipes.

  And they all line up perfectly in an arrow pointed directly at the Gin, at the vulnerable back door onto Homelands.

  Choking on a long, low growl, I whip around, headed back for the High Pines, for Home Pond, for the Alpha. Whatever our lawyers are doing, they’re looking the wrong way or moving too slowly. I crouch, creeping quick and low along the trees of the plateau.