Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves

by Garry Kilworth

  It was at that interview that Skassi realised the value of chauvinism, in real terms, and he fell into the role of the aggressive patriot with such vigour, that by the time he made shoulderwolf again he believed in it himself. The pack was not only a good pack, it was the best pack that was or ever had been. Its only faults were the trivial flaws in a few of its members and these could bullied out of them, until it was perfect. He made this his sole object in life: to raise the pack to perfection. The individual members of the pack hated him for attempting to scourge them of their slight faults, though they were afraid to speak out because his patriotism was an almost impenetrable defence. An individual would expose himself to the body, and his enemies would take the opportunity to crush him, even though each one of them secretly agreed with his view.

  So, Skassi was despised by all.

  Yet, he loved them, and displayed this love so violently that he was safe from their hatred.

  He was unerringly devoted to them and the removal of their sins, their small stains, their tiny blemishes, and had Athaba known what it was like in the pack, during the seasons that followed his banishment, he would have been glad to be the outcast he had become.

  PART TWO

  The Night of the Raven

  Chapter Six

  Ravens are large and formidable birds, almost twice the size of kestrels. Athaba was surprised by their intelligence, thinking that because they were scavengers they must be stupid, because creatures with any brain at all can hunt their own food. After he had been with them for a while, he began to revise his opinion. The ravens lived very well, without having to hunt. They knew how to get the very last piece of meat from carcass. He watched in amazement the first time he saw one using its intelligence to get at meat that would have been inaccessible to a wolf.

  It was the carcass of an elk and when every scrap had been stripped from the bones, and Athaba had used his jaws to break open the last of the weaker bones to get at the marrow, he said to the ravens:

  ‘It’s finished.’

  One of the black birds hopped forward.

  ‘Nein, nein. No finish-shed. More meats.’

  The raven picked up one of the thicker bones in its beak, carried it, staggering, to a high piece of ground with a sheer drop on to some rocks, and let the bone go. It fell, and bounced. Undeterred, the raven went through the same exercise again. This time the big bone cracked open on a rock, revealing the marrow. The ravens began to feed again.

  Athaba was amazed.

  ‘What did you do? I’ve never seen that before.’

  ‘Ach, I bash this bones on rock. Raven do this all time. Come crrrrrackking opens. Gut, ja?’

  ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ repeated Athaba, still a little perplexed by the use of tools to get at previously inaccessible food.

  When they came across a camping place where man had left some of his food containers, a raven kept picking one up with its beak, tossing it away from itself with a shake of the head, and pecking up the beans that fell out on to the snow. Again, Athaba was very impressed. It made his brain spin when he tried thinking of such things. Of course, he would play with objects, and if something fell out by accident, all well and good. And he would stick his nose in a can (at the risk of getting it stuck!). But what the ravens were doing seemed to be a different thing altogether.

  Life with the ravens was a dreary day to day existence, tracking his own pack through the snow, following spoor he once printed himself. He grew very lonely and depressed. Sometimes he would sit for hours just staring at the stark shape of a rock formation against the dark-light sky. He would lift his head and put his nose to the breeze, drawing on the scent of the pack, a few miles ahead. The ravens would watch him with their heads cocked, on such occasions, and nudge each other, saying ‘Vot shames, vot shames,’ and then spoil it by breaking out into a cackle of laughter.

  They were irrepressible birds whose minds were not made for serious contemplation. Everything had a humorous side to it and they ensured that side was fully illuminated on all occasions.

  Much as he needed their company, Athaba often felt the need to get away from them, to walk off on his own.

  When the next summer came, and the midnight sun returned, the hunting was good. Athaba did not need to share with the ravens. He went out on his own and caught what he needed, allowing the black birds to feast later. The pack under its new leaders, whoever they were, had dispersed and was loosely roaming the countryside. Whenever one of them encountered Athaba, there would be an embarrassed turning away. They were not so brave on their own.

  One day he surprised a mega in the forest. She came through the slanted shafts of light, tripping amongst the mosses and lichen, the sunbeams picking out the red hairs amongst the grey. Since he was resting amongst some ferns, downwind, she had not caught his scent.

  He moved, giving away his position.

  She came to a halt, startled, and her expression was one of surprise.

  It was his sister, Koska, and she stepped back, with a cry of, ‘Who’s that?’

  Athaba felt a wave of tenderness flow through his body. He had never been very fond of his sister, since she seemed always to prefer the company of others to his own, even when he had been a successful wolf. Since leaving the pack, he had begun to think more about her though, and understood that she had needed to distance herself from him. He had never been, after all, the very model of a wolf. Even in his heyday, there had been the taint of mysticism about him, which he could hide from all those but his close friend Ragisthor and his mother and sister. Koska was, after all, his only surviving litter-sibling: they had shared the womb together.

  He moved up, into the path of the wind, so she could catch his scent.

  ‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’s only me, Athaba.’

  She wrinkled her nose as if there were a disgusting smell in the glade. A shudder went through her frame. Clearly, her brother was not someone she had been looking forward to meeting again.

  ‘There is no Athaba. You are the utlah.’

  There was genuine hate in her grey eyes. It struck him then that she had suffered a little because of him. Other wolves, even other litters with the same mother and father, would regard her with distaste. She was as closely connected to a raven-wolf as one could get.

  Her eyes burned into his.

  ‘Yes, I am the outcast,’ he said, ‘and I have no name.’

  He realised then that he had lost his status, not just as a wolf, but as a natural creature. The pack would have been told he was not the wolf that had been born Athaba, but some alien beast, which had possessed Athaba’s body. Since wolves considered it impossible that one of their own kind would practise mysticism, then there must be some other creature inside the grey pelt. Koska would have been told that another animal (probably a fox, since the redcoats were often into devilish arts) had entered and was using the body which had once belonged to Athaba. With the brand of the utlah, or outlaw, on his hide he was nothing, nobody. From that moment on he began to call himself ‘the Outcast’. The ravens had at first referred to him as ‘the utlah’ which was the archaic word. He himself preferred ‘the Outcast’ and encouraged all in the use of this term.

  ‘Get away from here,’ said Koska, in a choked voice. ‘Go away, far away. You have made my life miserable.’

  ‘If you had stood up for me, like a womb-sister should, I might never have been banished, and you would not need to say such things to me. You’re a coward, Koska, and one of Skassi’s instruments. He uses wolves like you to further his ambitions – or used to.’

  ‘Why – couldn’t – you be normal, like any other wolf?’

  ‘Because I’m not normal. I was destined to be great, or nothing. At the moment, I’m nothing, but I shall leap back, and when I do you’ll be proud to be of the same litter.’

  He didn’t believe it himself, but he needed to recover some of his lost pride. He was not going to hang his head before his sister and beg her forgiveness for being
her brother.

  ‘Never,’ she spat. ‘You will never come back!’

  With that, she turned on her pads, and walked off into the waves of mosquitoes and gnats which moved ravenously through the forest looking for blood. The Outcast watched her go, fighting back a feeling of intense sadness. She had always been very proud, his sister, and a proud wolf hurts easily, is prey to a bitterness that is sharp and cold, and comes too early in life. A bitterness like an unseasonal autumn frost.

  It was a mosquito summer that year. Most years the insects ruled the evenings, roaming like dustclouds in their millions. They were irritating thunderbugs which blackened the sky with their numbers. Birds feasted on them, but beasts were tormented by them. The only good thing about the mosquitoes was that the females liked sucking the blood of men more than any other creature and this kept the numbers of human hunters down for at least one month of the year. There were times out on the tundra, or in the forest, when you swallowed a hundred lives with each new breath.

  Athaba lay and panted in the heat of summer sun, hating his coat even without its extra thickness, and thought that the mosquitoes had moved inside his brain. There was a buzzing there, which had nothing to do with the blackouts he sometimes suffered. His head felt as if it were floating over the streams and runnels with their fringes of sedge. Sometimes he wondered whether it might not be better to walk down into some valley where hunters were camped and offer himself to the guns. The Far Forests were surely not as lonely as a long hot summer full of dry insects and dust. But something stopped him. A feeling that there was a lord of the ladders, somewhere, who was cutting a stone staircase in the wall of rock that surrounded him. This mystical god, who pushed wolves from high places, could also restore them to their pinnacles once again, so long as they were patient. So, he waited for the lord of the ladders to finish his work.

  When a new autumn came, with its soul-stirring russets and whisperings of winter, the pack came together again. Bigger hunting parties would soon be needed, to find and bring down the larger quarry. The Outcast was surprised to find he could not tear himself away from his old pack. When he thought about striking out completely on his own, or trying to join another pack, his heart went cold on him. It was extremely unlikely that another pack would allow an outcast into its hierarchy and the thought of living completely cut off from all society filled him with despair. There seemed to be an invisible umbilical cord connecting him with his former relations, which was impossible to sever. He remained a raven-wolf, dragging along behind the pack, and suffering intense loneliness. If he got too close to the pack – close enough to catch whiffs of his puppyhood – they sent out a war party to chase him away again.

  The Outcast came to learn that exile was sometimes more terrible than death. He began talking to himself and would wake from some dream to find he was ranting. Coyotes began to fear him for his savage appearance and wild eyes, and refused to pass the time in conversation, hurrying away to find some other carrion rather than share a carcass with crazy-face.

  The ravens didn’t care, of course. They were all half-mad themselves, and considered their new companion only mildly eccentric compared with some of their own kind. They thought he was hilarious when he pretended to be dead one day, so that some of his pack came to sniff him and he could hear them talking over him. They stood off from the wolves and chortled:

  ‘Ja, ja. Is a dedder, this Outcastings. We eat him, ja?’

  The wolves did not think much of the joke. When the Outcast leapt to his feet they attacked him, chasing him over a nearby hill on to a frozen lake, where they spent the next few moments in a weird skating dance, trying to catch him. The ravens enjoyed this scene immensely and asked the Outcast to do it again, the next day, and were not put out when he told them to fly into the nearest rock.

  ‘Is good with wordings, this Outcast,’ they yelled with ear-splitting volume to a neighbour only inches away, as they tore pieces from the hide of a caribou. ‘Is good. Very funnys. Fly into stonings. Caaaaaaak! Caaaaaak!’

  These were small events in a long period of solitary roamings for the Outcast. He moved through the night months with despair gnawing away inside him. The ravens were no real company: nor would any other creature but a wolf fill his inner emptiness. When the darkness was upon him, he cursed himself many times, for his pride. If he had only showed servility, acknowledged Skassi’s place above his in the pack, he might have been with them now. At such times, had he seen Skassi on the horizon, he would have run to his erstwhile rival and begged to be allowed to pass a few words with him. No such opportunity presented itself. There was just the ice and darkness. The Outcast’s heart began to harden to stone. He would rise after a rest and eat snow, if there was no unfrozen water available. Then he would put his nose to the wind and seek the scent of those he had known. The tracks would be found and he would follow behind, pausing only to eat, sometimes with the ravens. Once he found indentations in the snow where some huskies had been lying. There was no sign of men, so the Outcast decided the dogs had gone wild. Perhaps their owner had died, out in the wilderness? Anyway, he considered trying to find them, to see if he could join their numbers. They would need a good hunter, being domestic creatures, unused to feeding themselves.

  When he caught up with them, he found them going south, returning to the place from whence they had come. They mistrusted him, chasing him away. When he called to them and said he wanted to join their group they told him to go and look for a hybrid swarm.

  He considered doing this, but eventually decided against it. The hybrids were much further south and he was afraid of losing all contact with his pack.

  The winter was cruel to him. It raked his belly inside with hunger pangs. It froze him, the ice clinging to his pelt, painfully sticking to pads, in between his claws. The shaggy musk oxen with their matted knotted strings of fur hanging from them, looking for all the world as if they were already dead and rotting, seemed to be becoming fewer. Certainly they were harder to find than they had ever been and ‘there was no reason to suppose they had become more intelligent or cunning. They were dull creatures who spoke in deep mournful voices about how good it would all be when something happened. None of them was sure what that something was, but it would improve life no end once it did come about. Musk oxen were always complaining, wishing for the past or the future, or simply sullen.

  That winter the pack, which had been whittled down to about fourteen in number, moved further north than ever in order to avoid the hunting parties that were being dropped by air and used snow machines in order to chase the wolves. The Outcast followed his kind up into the frozen world where the plant eaters, the lemmings, hares, musk oxen and caribou had to keep on the move all the time in order to find food. They left their beloved trees far in the south. This was the place of the five-month night and five-month day with a month in between them when the change took place. This was the land of the northern wolf. There were few hunters here, though there was a human group of dwellings where men lived.

  These harmless humans played with toys that spun in the wind, and sent inflated bladders up into the sky with metal objects dangling from them. (The Outcast found one of these coloured objects one day, lying on the snow, and he worried it for an hour trying to get some sense of what it was, but in the end he gave up and left it as one of those useless toys of which humans were so fond.) Occasionally, the pack would scavenge from the bins outside the group of huts, and when they were not there, the Outcast would go. Sometimes the food was frozen to a block of ice and he had to chew at the corners to break it down. Sometimes he would see one of the humans, covered from head to toe and wearing a mask, battle his way in an ungainly fashion from one but to another, braving the wind.

  Even in this desolate land, this wilderness of wildernesses, the pack would not allow the Outcast back into its protection. He lived out on the snow, digging himself hollows when the wind was strong and howled in his face. The wind in the north was a constant force, never completely
dying out to that occasional and precious stillness he had once experienced in the timberlands. He missed the mornings when the light drifted down from the treetops like soft fine mist and the quiet was so profound it made you wonder whether the foxes were right, that there was something in their idea of a spirit of the landscape. On those still days the very earth and stones seemed possessed of soul.

  Now he was in a place where the darkness moved and wailed, and the light, when it came, was jagged and sharp and angled off mountains and hills that had voices. He roamed the glaciers and icefields, and the hares stood on their hindlegs and saw him coming from a long way off. He crossed paths with foxes and ermines, his rivals for the running meat.

  One ermine in particular, he came to know as well as any wolf might know another creature who is in competition with him.

  They passed each other, a few times in the area of the human huts, wary at first. The ermine was more interested in smaller vermin that scavenged around the bins, but like the Outcast it did not disdain the discarded offal either. The Outcast, hungry for social contact, especially since the ravens were no longer with him, began attempting conversation with the ermine.

  At first their exchanges amounted to grunts and nods and facial expressions, but gradually the Outcast began to learn words from the language of the wiry creature: Mustelidae. Since the language of the canids had evolved from Mustelidae it was not such a difficult task as the Outcast expected, even though the ermine showed no interest in learning any Canidae. After three months the Outcast was able to understand a great deal of what the savage little ermine had to say, and could speak a little himself.

  ‘It’s not the meat so much as the killing I enjoy,’ said the ermine one day. ‘You know the feeling – sinking one’s teeth into soft flesh and feeling it squirm in one’s mouth.’