Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves

by Garry Kilworth

  Chapter Twenty Three

  In the far off times just after the Firstdark, when wolves were making songs of all the geography of the earth, songs that were maps of the world which would show future generations where to find waterholes and soaks, and at what time of year; songs that told descendants which plants and fungi could be eaten and which could not; in those far off times, there were still primal forces loose in the world. Some of these forces were great evils who followed the humans out of the sea-of-chaos and into the world of the wolves. Even the men themselves were not able to deal with the terrible powers alone. They had, of course, brought with them their shamans and wizards, their witches and warlocks, their magic men, their sorcerers, but many of these were untrustworthy and some sided with a great evil dedicated to the destruction of both ordinary man and beast.

  These nebulous entities who occupied the nightmares of all living creatures, had once lived in the dark sludge at the bottom of the sea-of-chaos, and should never have found their way to a world of light and air. Left in their own environment, they were harmless beings, unable to evolve into anything more than a huge bubble of foul, heavy gas. Let loose in the atmospheres of the earth, they moved sluggishly over the surface of the globe, until they came to a place where there was goodness and joy. In such a place they settled, bringing corruption, disease and decay. In such a place birds and beasts began to experience unrecognisable fears, and wake from terrible dreams. In such places, the rot began which would eventually destroy all living creatures and turn green fertile land into a bog where only mists could stay.

  One of these places was Hidey Wood, a region much further south than where the wolves are today, where deciduous trees mixed with conifers in a temperate climate that grew a multitude of fungi and flowers amongst the grasses between root and leaf. Where tooth wort grew and titmice lived.

  All manner of different creatures lived in Hidey Wood which was one of those last retreats from the onslaught of men. It was a place rich in vegetation where oaks broadened their shoulders and hornbeams filled the spaces between.

  At this time, most of the men lived on the plains where they were busy erecting huge stones, both hewn and rough, in circles of all sizes, which would help to drive out the primal forces of evil that had escaped the sea-of-chaos. One or two, however, were impatient to begin living in the woodlands. So it was that a man came to Hidey Wood, and though he settled down peacefully enough and took just sufficient from the wood for his own needs, a Great Evil had followed him from the central plains, chased there by the magic rings of wood and stone.

  This Evil settled in amongst the rotting humus of the woodland floor, in the dark shadows thrown by tree and fern, beneath the stagnant pools of water poisoned by dead leaves, under ancient roots, in abandoned holes, behind the webs of spiders. There, in the heart of the wood, in its disparate parts, the Evil festered and began sucking the life from the lush greenery around it, draining it of all vitality. The man saw this and called on the woodland creatures to do something about it, otherwise he would have to burn Hidey Wood to the ground and set up a stone ring on its charred remains.

  It fell upon two creatures, normally enemies, to find a way to defeat the Great Evil. One of these was Issa, a weasel, a creature with a facility for languages. The other was Katanama, a red kite. Elected by the other creatures of their home, these two were instructed to put aside their differences and find a way to rid the land of the Great Evil.

  Issa was a slender, rusty-coloured female, forever busy searching the holes and hollows of Hidey Wood for prey. One of her favourite foods was snails which she found among the coltsfoot and catkins on wet mornings. Her lithe body was often seen snaking swiftly over the forest floor, looking for mice and voles, ready to go for anything smaller than a badger or bigger than a beetle.

  Katanama was a kite who soared above the woods, hanging on the wind, sometimes so still up there that others often thought him lifeless, his wings too rigid to let him fall. Katanama preferred dead things to live, and in his lazy way he was glad of the man that had come to the wood for men are wasteful creatures and keep scavengers like kites in their daily meals.

  These two, left together, consulted a mystical fox named O-sansan, on the way to rid the woods of the Great Evil which loured over and lurked in their forest home.

  O-sansan consulted the green slime on the bark of the alders and investigated the possibilities of the creeping fungus in the cracks of the blackthorns. Finally, she spoke:

  ‘We need a wolf,’ she said, ‘to do battle with this entity. Only the wolf, of all the fighting creatures of our north-western lands, has remained pure of heart. The wolf seeks no alliance with men, asks for no favours, concedes no territory willingly. The wolf has remained uncorrupted, its spirit strong, its soul unblemished. This evil thing that has come to Hidey Wood can only be defeated in mortal combat by a wolf with an unimpeachable spirit. Even so, that wolf is not guaranteed success, and will need to have great courage and fortitude. A spiritual warrior. You must find such a creature and persuade him to journey to Hidey Wood, to do single battle with this Evil.’

  This seemed clear and simple enough and the two creatures began a search of the nearby countryside. The weasel went in all the holes, dens, earths, dreys and other places of darkness she could find, and the kite took to the airways and searched the open plains for sight of a wolf.

  After many days it seemed clear that though there were wolves in the area, they had been driven into hiding by the presence of man, and indeed were rapidly being exterminated. These wolves dared not leave their pack and spent all their hunted days avoiding huntsmen. They were poor creatures, with damaged spirits, and not of any use to the Hidey Wooders. The pair went back to O-sansan.

  ‘Ah,’ said the wise old vixen, ‘this is man’s doing. He has driven the bravest wolves far north, to the distant mountains, and left this land bare of their presence. You must travel many days and nights to find the creature we need.’

  When the kite and the weasel had left the fox, they began their journey north. However, the kite was obviously much faster than the weasel who made very slow progress over the terrain. Finally, the kite landed by the weasel called Issa and said that they must think of another way.

  ‘You’re much too slow,’ said Katanama. ‘At this rate we shall both be dead of old age before we rid the wood of its evil.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ asked Issa.

  Katanama rustled his squared buzzard wings, clicked his hooked beak and shifted his weight from one claw to the other: a beak made for tearing pieces of meat from a carcass, claws made for vice-like gripping, each with a set of sharp talons.

  ‘I suggest,’ said Katanama, ‘that I carry you the way I carry my food. I can grip you in the middle with my claws and we can fly to the north country together.’

  Issa was not sure about this. Although Katanama ate mostly carrion, he was not above hunting small creatures which were still full of life. He was a scavenger, but a predator too. Once he had her in his talons, he might forget himself for a moment. It would only take one jab of that vicious curved beak and Issa would be kite meat.

  She voiced her fears.

  Katanama conceded the possibility.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘I cannot fly to the north alone because even if I find the wolf, I shan’t be able to speak to him. You have a gift for languages. You speak my tongue and you know Canidae. It is essential you travel with me. I have given my oath not to harm you and I shall not break my word deliberately. In order to make sure I never forget myself, you must constantly remind me of our mission. Just keep saying to me, “Remember the wolf!” as we fly along and you shan’t come to any harm.

  So Issa was gripped gently in those strong talons and lifted from the ground she had never before left in her life. As she rushed skywards, the land flattened below her and spread itself rapidly in all directions. The trees became dots, the hills bumps made by moles, the rivers silver slow worms. The suddenness of the lift t
ook her breath away and for a while she was so frightened, so awed and overcome by the experience, she could not speak. Fields were like fallen leaves below her and the whole scene was one of terrible beauty. Finally, she fought against the wind that rushed up her nostrils, down her throat, and was able to squeak out, ‘Katanama, remember the wolf!’ whenever the claws began tightening around her slim, lithe waist.

  The world rushed under them. They flew through rainstorm and windstorm, through cloud and mist, through clear skies and dark, over seas and strange lands, until they came eventually to the land of the wolf.

  Here, the country was mountainous, and there were eagles and falcons, the wildcat and the lynx, wolverines and martens, all manner of predator that hunted and killed like the weasel, but were not averse to a little weasel meat now and again. Issa told Katanama that she trusted his claws more than the landscape below, full of its bands of predators, so they searched the snows, the caves, the timberland, in the same way that they had reached the high country, with Issa in Katanama’s talons.

  Here and there among the passes, in the valleys, on the hillsides, amongst the snows, were packs of wolves. Each time the pair came across a pack they would descend and call for a wolf to rid them of the Great Evil that had come to Hidey Wood. Wolves would stand and listen, and then either order the pair away or ignore their pleas. It seemed that nowhere in the land of the midnight sun was there a wolf prepared to do battle with an unknown entity from the sludge in the sea-of-chaos. Certainly not for a tatty old kite; certainly not for a blood weasel whose appetite for red meat surpassed their own; certainly not for a MAN.

  So the pair went from pack to pack, Issa reminding Katanama of their mission from time to time.

  One day, when they had despaired of finding the wolf they needed to rid them of the presence in Hidey Wood, Katanama saw a carcass that had been abandoned by a pack. The rotten meat was being picked over by ravens and kites, coyotes, and one lone wolf. Katanama was hungry and suggested they descend to eat. Issa agreed, always anxious to keep her transport well fed.

  They dropped beside the carrion and Katanama began tearing at the meat with his beak, while Issa waited at a safe distance. While she was sitting there, preening herself, the lone wolf came to her. He was a sorry-looking creature, with a moth-eaten coat and tics. Flies bothered his head in clouds. His eyes were weak and watery and he constantly flicked at the air with his stringy tail.

  ‘I have heard,’ he said to Issa, ‘that you and the kite are seeking a champion, to drive out some kind of evil from your homeland.’

  ‘That’s true,’ replied Issa, eyeing this raggedy creature without interest. ‘We need a wolf, a spiritual warrior capable of meeting with this entity in mortal combat. Do you know of such a wolf?’

  ‘Let me first explain who I am,’ said the wolf, settling on his haunches.‘ I am the raven-wolf, the utlah. I have no name because I am no longer of the pack. I call myself “the Outcast” and am all the utlahs that ever were or ever will be. We are one creature because we have been reduced to our basic selves and at this level there is no difference between us. There are many outcasts but only one outcast. Do you follow?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Issa.

  ‘Now let me put this proposal to you,’ said the Outcast. ‘I have nothing left for me in this world. I have undergone the worst possible punishment, including death, that a wolf fears. I have been cast out, banished, from my pack. I may smell, hear, see my old life ahead of me, moving through the mists, but I may never enter it again. I am alone. Not solitary, like the fox, but alone. You, who are not a pack animal, cannot imagine how that feels. It is the end of all things. Blackness, misery, utter hopelessness.

  ‘Then I heard of your mission. Hope sprang into my breast. I am the Outcast, I am a thousand wolves who wish to redeem themselves. Trust me with this quest and you have not one, but great numbers all under a single skin. I wish to travel to this far country of yours, to do mortal combat, and even die in the attempt at ridding your land of this foul presence.’

  Issa was a little taken aback by this speech and while her common sense told her that this poor scruffy creature could not possibly be a match for the Great Evil of Hidey Wood, she began to see that she might not have a choice. It was actually the Outcast or nothing. So she told the wolf, yes, he was the chosen one, and a small flame came into the wolf’s eyes. He straightened his legs, firmed his shoulders, lifted his tail, and set off towards the south.

  On this journey the Outcast met many outcasts, and since they were one, he told them of his mission, and they too left the ravens to walk the long walk to a place they had never seen, to help creatures they did not know.

  The journey from the land of the midnight sun is so long and hazardous that only one in a thousand might complete the task. It takes a four-footed creature over mountains so high that to pause would be to freeze in one’s tracks. There are rivers between that are as wide as seas and seas so vast they seem to have no shores. There are torrents and forests thick with hunters, and great divides that fall to the centre of the earth. There are places where the rock is molten and the earth too hot to tread without burning one’s paws. There are deserts of sand and deserts of ice. There are places where a wolf must cross deadly waters on ice floes and places where there is no food nor shelter from a blinding sun.

  On the journey the Outcast died many times, but since he was of great number he lived to walk on. His dry bones decorated the wide deserts of dust, his frozen form became blocked in ice, his drowned corpse was washed on to bleached sands far from his homeland in the high north. He died, and lived, and each time he left this world he became spiritually stronger because while his number reduced his soul remained whole.

  And the journey itself built and strengthened his spirit within him. The nature of his quest, his mission, purified his soul. So by the time he came to the edge of Hidey Wood, many months later, he was indeed a single wolf. A single wolf with a spirit so vast that it preceded his tangled form, and though, when the weasel saw him moving across the ridge of her landscape, she was both amazed and impressed, his ragged mangy body gave her no hope in the coming battle. She did not know that a thousand wolves were in that ravaged pelt: a thousand wolves of great courage, fortitude and endurance. For they had set out on a hopeless journey with a torn spirit and in poor physical condition to carry out an impossible mission, and though they had fallen in great numbers, they had reached their journey’s end with the last body that remained to them.

  And the Great Evil felt the wolf coming, and IT knew of the Outcast’s worth, and was afraid.

  It went out to meet the valiant wolf and on a scruffy patch of turf one of the most horrendous battles of all time took place. There were attacks and retreats, victories and defeats, and neither the terrible entity from the sludge at the bottom of the sea-of-chaos nor the outcast wolf would give an inch of ground. Darkness swirled over the land, great storms came and went, ferocious winds tore at the landscape, pits yawned and the earth trembled as the two fought on.

  Finally, utterly exhausted but still struggling, the wolf triumphed over the dark presence and chased it deep into the depths of the earth. The raven-wolf then lay on the battleground, to gather his strength, while the creatures of Hidey Wood called out their praises. Issa and Katanama and the vixen O-sansan were given due deference for their part in ridding the forest of the otherworld creature, but the wolf was lifted above all as the great champion of the land.

  And the man heard the singing and the chanting, listened with envy to the praises heaped upon the wolf, and he took his weapons in a jealous rage and killed the wolf, thus performing one of the most treacherous deeds of the time just following the Firstdark.

  Such a dastardly act did not go unpunished, for the Great Evil that had been defeated by the wolf, because of the nature of the man’s deed, was able to enter the murderer’s head and remained there until he died – raving mad, dissolute and worthless – with not a single creature to mourn him over t
he whole globe.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Athaba turned south once again, unfamiliar paths of the wilderness becoming familiar to him. He began to recognise rocky outcrops that he had passed before on his way north or returning south. He saw a bear cave on the trail and the day after had one of his fits. He wondered about that: why just the thought of a bear should send him into a blackout.

  At one point he saw five wolves kill a bull moose, bringing the bellowing giant crashing down in a tangle of broad antlers, flying hoofs and clashing teeth. The wolves were too preoccupied with their task, and later their meal, to concern themselves with Athaba. The smell of blood was in their nostrils. He watched them eat, then take chunks away with them, back to wherever they had their den. When they had gone, the scavengers appeared out of the windblown topsnow and moved in, but Athaba was now a little too proud to join the beggars at their feast of scraps. He waited until the carcass had been left alone, before descending from his rocky outcrop and stripping the last fibres of meat from the bones. He saw that one of the great horns had snapped under the weight of the falling body. The broken piece was as large as his own flank. Such a mighty beast, the bull moose. He decided it must have been sick to have been overcome by the wolves. Even then it had gone down fighting, trumpeting through those cavernous nostrils, a thrashing storm of dark hide and slate-grey pelts. Athaba had known wolves killed by moose. Once he had found a rival pack member with broken ribs and legs, lying under a tree. Round about the dying creature were blood patches and moose hair. The wolf expired just as Athaba arrived but it was obvious that a battle had taken place, and at least one wolf had come off badly. There was no sign of a carcass at the scene.

  A raven came while he ate but he prevented it from crying out and attracting any of the nearby pack by asking if it knew so-and-so, or such-a-one, names of ravens from his days as an outcast. The bird was intrigued by this wolf who was into the culture of the scavenger and knew all these ravens, and kept shaking its head saying, ‘Nein, nein. Ich weiss nicht, aber Retteltelt? Weissen sie er? He vos vun sonnoffabisch, ja?’ The moose tasted good and Athaba rather enjoyed his chat with the raven. It reminded him of the old days which had now gone into some misty region of his brain. When he thought about it, the old days had been pretty bad, but he had lived through them, survived, and now that they were past they took on a different quality.