Firstborn

by Tor Seidler

  “Are the pups all right?” he said.

  “Didn’t you get shot?” Alberta cried.

  “Yes. Are the pups all right?”

  “They’re fine!”

  “And you, Frick?” Blue Boy asked.

  Frick just lay there.

  “Raze was trying to kill him, Father,” Hope said.

  “Why would you do that, Raze?” Blue Boy said, his eyes slits.

  For a moment Raze looked as if he’d turned to stone. Then he shrugged and said, “We were just sparring.”

  “Liar,” Hope hissed. “You were trying to take over the pack.”

  “We thought you were dead,” Raze said, his eyes fixed on Blue Boy.

  “That much is true,” Alberta said, ignoring whines from the den. “I haven’t slept for two nights. Where have you been?”

  “The place the humans first brought us,” Blue Boy said.

  “You’re not hurt?”

  Instead of answering, he walked down and gave her a nuzzle. “I think they used the same kind of bullet as up in Canada,” he said.

  Frick groaned.

  “Have some elk, Blue Boy,” Lupa said.

  Blue Boy picked up the larger of the two chunks of meat, but instead of eating it he tossed it gingerly into the den.

  “Better get back to the pups, Alberta,” he said.

  Alberta gave him a tender look and followed the food inside. I don’t think she noticed the blood trickling down the side of his muzzle. But by the way Raze’s ears pricked up, I was pretty sure he did.

  20

  I KNEW WHAT A MESS Blue Boy’s mouth must be —I’d witnessed the attack on the unforgiving steel bars that had left the broken-off tooth lying in the pool of his own blood. It was incredible that he wasn’t dead. I’d seen humans do wonders with lame horses and sick cattle up on the Triple Bar T, but Golden Hair must have performed a miracle on Blue Boy while Furry Face was out stalking Sully.

  Curious as I was about it, I figured what Blue Boy needed now wasn’t questions but backup. I flew straight—or almost straight—to the rocky knoll. Lamar was curled up asleep near the foot of the knoll, where he slept when he hadn’t gotten Artemis any food. I landed in a twisted cedar and squawked:

  “Come with me!”

  Lamar sat up and yawned, displaying his impressive teeth.

  “Your father needs you, Lamar,” I said.

  Lamar’s face turned grim. “My father’s dead.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s at the den site. But he’s in troub—”

  Lamar was off before I could finish. He sprinted across the flatland, his big feet sending up sprays of moisture from the newly thawed ground. When he reached Slough Creek, it was looking more like Slough River, but he splashed his way up the flooded bank, not stopping till he reached the boulder.

  I doubt the other wolves noticed me returning to my aspen. Blue Boy was standing on one side of the den, his whole body tensed and his tail straight up. On the other side stood Raze, his tail straight up too, the smaller chunk of elk meat on the ground between them. Standing behind Raze, like bodyguards, were Lupa and Ben. Down the slope Hope was standing over Frick, clearly favoring her right leg as she ministered to his bloody wounds.

  “Have some food, Blue Boy,” Raze said. “It’s elk, your favorite.”

  Blue Boy said nothing.

  “Your ribs are showing,” Raze said. “Those humans didn’t feed you?”

  “That’s no concern of yours,” Blue Boy snapped.

  “Do something to your mouth, did you?”

  “Time you shut yours.”

  “You don’t look so good, old wolf. Did you wear yourself out?”

  Blue Boy arched his neck, his fur standing on end, and let out a low snarl. “I’ll wear you out.”

  But tossing the bigger chunk of meat into the den must have aggravated his poor gums, for the blood was now flowing freely from his mouth. Worse, he was wavering on his feet, as if standing in a high wind, when there wasn’t so much as a breeze.

  “Father!” Hope said in alarm.

  As Raze crouched to attack, Lamar stepped out from behind the boulder. Hope twisted her head around. “Lamar!”

  Everyone looked his way. Even Frick lifted his head off the ground and watched as Lamar climbed the hillside, weaving among tufts of new grass and splotches of melting snow. Raze rose out of his crouch and gave him a murderous glare. Blue Boy looked disgruntled.

  “Taking a break from your coyote?” Blue Boy said.

  As Lamar passed under my aspen, he shot me a look. Deservedly, as I had let the cat—or coyote—out of the bag. But he just kept climbing. He went right up between Blue Boy and Raze and ripped off about half of the remaining hunk of elk. After chewing a while, he crouched and swiveled toward Blue Boy, as if now he was going to challenge him. Every muscle in Blue Boy’s shaky body stood out.

  But all Lamar did was creep forward and give the bottom of Blue Boy’s bloodied snout a kiss. Then he regurgitated the elk he’d just chewed onto the ground and moved off to Blue Boy’s side. Lupa’s eyes grew round as a deer’s. Raze’s blazed with fury. Lamar watched his father. Blue Boy sniffed, gave Lamar a dubious sidelong look, and sniffed again. He lowered his snout tentatively and sampled the pre-chewed elk.

  It took him a little while, but Blue Boy devoured it all. The meal didn’t staunch the flow of blood from his mouth, but it seemed to restore his stability. He swiped the grease and blood off his lips with his tongue and gave Lamar another sidelong glance before turning his gaze on his other son. Ben hung his head and stepped backward, his tail between his legs.

  Then Blue Boy’s eyes fixed on Raze. “What were you saying?”

  If it had been anyone other than Raze, I would have pitied him. A moment ago he’d been about to dispatch the wobbly alpha and take over the pack. Now he was faced with two wolves, each bigger than he was—on the very spot where his father had humiliated him almost two years ago.

  “Nothing,” Raze muttered, his tail wilting.

  21

  SINCE STEPPING OUT FROM BEHIND the boulder, Lamar had been the picture of calm, but now his eyes flashed and his ears bent forward, pointing directly at Raze.

  “You did this to Frick?” he said.

  Raze looked warily from Frick to Blue Boy to Lamar. I thought he was about to make some glib response when he spun around and flew off up the hill, spraying Lupa with mud. Lamar charged after him.

  “Let him go,” Frick rasped.

  Lamar slid to a stop. Raze might not have been the biggest of wolves, but he was fast, and he was over the hill and out of sight in a flash. Lamar trotted back down the slope and joined his father and Hope at Frick’s side. Ben was staring up the hill looking shell-shocked. Lupa must have been in shock too. She made no move to clean herself off, just stood there speckled with mud. Hope limped off into the woods and returned with some herbs from Frick’s secret stash, which evidently wasn’t secret to her.

  While Hope tended to Frick, I told Blue Boy I’d been convinced he was dead when I left him in the compound. It turned out he’d come to, and Golden Hair had spent most of yesterday nursing him. She’d even poked him with a needle, as I’d seen Earflaps do with ailing horses.

  “Then the other human came back in that noisy contraption,” Blue Boy said.

  “I hate to have to tell you this,” I said, “but he’d been off hunting your brother.”

  “Uncle Sully?” Lamar said.

  I nodded. “The human shot him.”

  “With the same kind of bullet they used on me?” Blue Boy asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  Blue Boy sucked in his breath and lowered his eyes to the soggy ground. Lamar looked stricken.

  “Why would they do that?” Hope asked.

  “He’d been killing cattle,” I said.

  “In Montana,” Lamar said quietly.

  “How do you know that?” Blue Boy said, turning to his firstborn son.

  “I got to
know him a little,” Lamar said. “I liked him. Though I’m not sure he was always reliable.” He glanced up at me. “There were no voles in the barranca.”

  “Sully was just trying to get you out of there,” I said. “The human was coming with his rifle.”

  Lamar’s eyes widened. So did Blue Boy’s.

  “You’re sure he’s dead, Maggie?” Blue Boy asked.

  “I didn’t leave him till the buzzards came.”

  “Poor Uncle Sully,” said Hope.

  For a while the only sound was the gurgling of the swollen creek. It made me think of Sully’s fishing.

  “He was quite a wolf, in his own way,” I said. “I even saw him catch a fish.”

  “Really?” said Hope.

  “He told me about the other owl,” Lamar said quietly.

  “What other owl?” Blue Boy said.

  “The one who grabbed him when he was a pup.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “He told me other things too.” Now it was Lamar’s turn to study the ground. “I owe you an apology, Father.”

  After another silence Blue Boy said: “You just happened by today, did you?”

  Lamar glanced up at me again.

  “Ah, well, you don’t owe me a thing,” Blue Boy said gruffly.

  Hope went back to licking the wounds on Frick’s scarred backside. I asked Blue Boy if the humans had driven him back this way in their four-wheeler before releasing him.

  “They didn’t release me,” he said.

  “Then how’d you get here?”

  “Last night they put me in one of their pens. Same one as years ago. They’d filled in the hole Sully and I dug, but they hadn’t packed it very well. After I got through that, it was easy.”

  This explained the dirt all over him.

  He must have been as tired as he was filthy, for while Hope fussed over Frick, Blue Boy’s head began to nod, and he soon curled up by the den entrance and fell sound asleep. I caught a short nap myself. When I woke up, no one had moved much except Lupa, who was nowhere to be seen. I asked Lamar, who was lying under my tree, where she’d gone.

  “She left,” he said simply.

  I was a little surprised that she would follow Raze after his ignominious retreat, especially considering he’d splattered her precious fur with mud. On the other hand, staying with the pack wouldn’t have been an attractive option. Having chosen the wrong side, she would have been in deep disgrace, demoted to the bottom of the pecking order. Plus, she would soon have had to watch Alberta come parading out with her new litter. What surprised me more was that Ben was still here. By not going along with her, he was alone in his shame.

  Just before nightfall Blue Boy roused himself and went to stand sentinel at the top of the hill. I couldn’t imagine Raze and Lupa coming back to make a sneak attack, but when I flew up to the poplar sapling he informed me that humiliated wolves could be dangerous. Toward dawn he dozed off at his post, and not long afterward Lamar woke up and slipped away. I stayed put. I figured I knew where he was going.

  The sky was still socked in, so there was no sunrise to speak of. But as the daylight brightened, Blue Boy woke up.

  “Lamar went back to that fool coyote, I suppose?” he said, eyeing me.

  Though Artemis had managed to get cornered by mountain lions, I didn’t think of her as foolish, but I let it go. “I imagine so,” I said.

  “Well, I appreciate your going for him. Things might have gotten a little dicey otherwise.”

  For Blue Boy this was quite an admission.

  As the other wolves stirred, we went down the hillside. An ugly new scab had formed on Frick’s rear end, but when Blue Boy asked how he was feeling he said he was much better.

  “I’ll get us something to eat,” Blue Boy said.

  “No, you won’t,” said Frick.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Open your mouth.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Open your mouth.’ ”

  If anyone else had given Blue Boy an order like that, I’m sure fur would have flown. But after a moment Blue Boy actually did open his mouth. Frick inspected his teeth and gums and announced that hunting was out of the question.

  “If you go, you’ll regret it the rest of your life. Which, by the way, will be very short.”

  Blue Boy snorted.

  “You have to face facts, old boy,” Frick said. “You’ve lost an incisor. You’ll never be quite the same. But if you don’t give the other teeth time to heal you’ll lose them, too, and you’ll be as useless as me.”

  “You’re not a bit useless,” Hope said.

  “You’re staying home, Blue Boy,” Frick said firmly. “Besides, if you went, you might miss the pups.”

  This last argument may have tipped the scales, for after a long look at the den Blue Boy sank down on his haunches. Hope volunteered to go look for some food, but she’d clearly landed badly when Raze threw her, and Frick vetoed this, too. Blue Boy turned to Ben, who was sitting hunched like a whipped dog a short distance away.

  I suppose it was a moment similar to when Blue Boy looked at Sully through the chain-link fence at the compound, expecting him to come through their tunnel. Like his uncle, Ben failed the test. He’d never been as bright or as brave as Lamar, and either he didn’t realize he’d been given an opportunity to redeem himself or he was scared to go on the hunt by himself. He didn’t move a muscle.

  Then the moment was gone. I’d assumed Lamar had gone back to the knoll, but now he came trotting down off the ridge trail carrying an enormous hunk of elk in his mouth.

  “Hope did all the work,” he said after depositing the meat by the den. “There’s still plenty left on that bull you brought down. Come with me, Ben.”

  Ben didn’t need to be asked twice. He hopped to and followed Lamar onto the ridge trail. The pair of them carried back enough food to last everyone two or three days. The choicest piece went into the den. Lamar chewed up the next-best chunk for his father, and though Blue Boy wasn’t happy about it, he ate the mushy meal.

  The weather remained gray for the next couple of days. Alberta remained in the den with the pups. Frick’s clawed backside began to give him less pain, and my reinjured wing was soon back to normal. Blue Boy’s mouth and Hope’s leg began to heal too, but on the morning the food ran out, Frick was adamant that they let Lamar and Ben do the hunting. I accompanied the two brothers. I knew how changeable the young can be—hadn’t I myself switched allegiance from Dan to Trilby in the space of a minute?—and just as Ben had once idolized Raze, he now seemed to idolize Lamar and followed him like a shadow.

  When we reached the promontory, we could see two big herds of elk, but no strays. Lamar picked out an independent-minded pronghorn and chased her into a sinkhole with Ben right on his heels. As the pronghorn tried to scramble up one of the muddy sides, the two young wolves pounced on her.

  I had a bite of breakfast and settled on one of the pronghorn’s horns as Lamar and Ben started ripping off a haunch to take back. As they were cutting through the last tendons, I let out a squawk. Raze and Lupa were looking down at us from the rim of the sinkhole, their ears pitched forward aggressively. Lamar backed away from the carcass, bristling.

  But the two older wolves weren’t focused on him. “Hey, Ben,” Raze said. “You’ve got to see our new territory over by Trout Lake.”

  Ben looked up at his old hero.

  “We’ve missed you, Ben,” Lupa purred.

  Even with his snout and whiskers dripping with blood, Ben looked callow and vulnerable. As his eyes shifted uncertainly between Lamar and the pair of wolves up above, I realized that if he turned on Lamar it would be three wolves against one. But this time Ben passed his test. He moved over to stand shoulder to shoulder with his brother. When Lamar snarled and squinted at the intruders, Ben mimicked him perfectly.

  Raze and Lupa exchanged a look of surprise. Lamar started scrabbling up the side of the sinkhole, with Ben on his heels. By the time they we
re up top, Raze was racing away with Lupa in his wake. Soon they were no more than a ripple in the tall grass.

  The brothers slid back down into the sinkhole and returned to their task. I’d flown up to watch but now settled back on my perch.

  “Well done, Ben,” I said.

  He gave me a bloody grin.

  A whole haunch was an ambitious undertaking, and watching the two of them drag it out of the sinkhole was pretty comical: Lamar scrambling backward, pulling from the top, while Ben pushed from below. Lamar slipped back down several times before they finally got the haunch out, by which time it was caked with mud. Dragging it along through the grass cleaned it off some, but it got filthy again on the slog up the promontory.

  On the ridge trail we had to make pit stops so Lamar and Ben could rest their jaw muscles. And there were other delays. Lamar may have been a full year old now, but his curiosity was undiminished. He had to pause on the side of the trail to examine a snakeskin, and a verbena with little starry flowers. He had to gawk at a streak of lightning brightening the gloom to the west. He even chased a small, furry animal with round ears across a stretch of frost-shattered stone, calling out to ask what it was. Of course the terrified creature dove into a crevice without answering. When Lamar got back to the trail, I told him I thought it was called a pika.

  “They’re so cute!” he cried. “I can’t wait to tell . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Frick?” Ben guessed.

  Lamar grunted and clamped his jaws around the haunch. I suspected he was trying hard to ban Artemis from his thoughts so he could do his duty by his father and the pack.

  It was almost dark by the time they got their prize home. After sticking a choice chunk in the den entrance, Lamar chewed some up for his father. Blue Boy made a face when he sniffed his portion.

  “Sorry, it’s not elk,” Lamar said.

  “Pronghorn’s splendid,” Frick said. “Easier to digest.”

  Frick and Hope dug in, and so did Lamar and Ben. In time Blue Boy took a few grudging nibbles, muttering between bites that this would be his last meal of baby food. More jagged streaks of lightning tore the fabric of the sky, and as Blue Boy headed up the hill to stand sentinel, it started to rain. I flew up to the poplar sapling to keep him company. Tired as Lamar must have been from his hunting and hauling, he climbed up there too. Of course Ben followed him.