Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves
Page 36
Athaba left the hole and scouted for a while.
It was a fresh summer morning. The light angled through the spiky pines and laced the ground with shadows. Birds peppered the bushes. Small mammals moved over the forest floor, some stealthily, some rapidly. Athaba searched the woodland and found no trace of wolf or man.
Skassi was dead now and had taken many with him. Athaba could not decide whether Skassi was a hero or a fool. His old pack rival had, it was true, struck back at man. That took courage and determination. It took a strong spirit to say, ‘Enough!’ and to make a stand against the deadliest creature on the earth.
Yet, there was no way a wolf, or any other animal, could ever win against man. A battle perhaps, but never the war. The war had been won by the humans a long time past, seasons upon seasons ago, after the Firstdark. They had beaten the wolves and all the other creatures so completely that there was no turning the victory around, no matter how brave and how brilliant the leader of the rebellion. If Skassi had not believed that, he was a fool. If he had, he was at best utterly irresponsible, for he had populated the Far Forests with more souls than that mythical country had ever expected in a single day. The son of midnight had gone out like a wolf and had taken his pack with him.
Athaba sighed, then called for his own pack to join him.
While they were in the cave Ulaala told him that she had heard of an area where human hunters were not permitted to go. No vehicles had ever been seen in this place, and the flying machines never landed there – so she had been told by one of the wolves in Skassi’s pack.
‘This wolf said that bears and eagles and all manner of creatures live in this area, just north-west of here.’
Athaba was a little sceptical.
‘No humans go there?’
‘Oh, yes, they go there, but not with guns. They use those little black boxes which you expect to shoot things, but only click and nothing else. There are quite a lot of them, so you have to get used to the smell of man without panicking, but the wolf assured me that no animals have ever been attacked in this place.’
Athaba could hardly believe it.
‘Not wolves, though. They would kill wolves, wouldn’t they? I mean, I can imagine them leaving the bears alone, and the eagles, but they hate wolves too much.’
‘Well, he seemed to know what he was talking about,’ said Ulaala. ‘He spoke wistfully of it and said he wished he’d never left, but he heard the call of rogue wolf and had to follow it.’
‘Would we be allowed to hunt there? I mean, we have to catch our meat or we’ll starve. Are you sure this place has not been put aside to breed cattle or something? Men do that, you know, keep tame and domestic stock. They can get pretty savage if you kill one of their animals.’
‘No, these are wild plains and mountain country. It seems to be a place where creatures like us are left alone.’
‘Sounds too good to be true, but we’ll go there anyway. What choice do we have?’
So, with their sons and daughters, now yearlings and good at hunting, the pair set out for the plains with the mountain range as their hinterland. When they reached there, they found the word of the wolf was true.
The yearlings developed into fine strong undermegas and recruited other wolves into the pack, until Ulaala and Athaba found themselves headwolves of a pack of seventeen. That was before the new pups were born. After Grisenska had been a mega for one year, she took over as headwolf from her father, choosing a sturdy mate to aid her in the task. Although Ulaala was younger than Athaba, she too stepped aside and relinquished responsibility for the pack.
The pair of them would lie around the den of a winter evening, boring the youngsters with tales of prowess and Athaba would sing songs of the old days in his gravelly voice, as if there had been no other time, no other set of seasons.
When he told the story of the man who was turned into a wolf, however, the youngsters used to look at each other as if to say, who’s our old grandfather trying to fool with such outlandish fabrications?
‘Koonama,’ he would tell them, ignoring the obvious nudges, ‘was both man and wolf, and I often wonder how he fares amongst his own kind. I think he tells them a tale, of how a wolf and a man survived a long journey across the tundra. How the wolf kept him alive and reached down inside, him to find an earlier creature, an inner man that had been dormant for so many seasons the outer man had forgotten him.’
‘Perhaps,’ one of the youngsters might say, ‘he thinks he turned a wolf into a man and gets it the wrong way round?’
‘No, he would not do that,’ Athaba would answer, ‘because the wolf did no manly things, while the man followed the wolf in all its ways. If he thought he had changed me, he would have kept me after capturing me again. He knew he had not tamed me: I had tamed him.’
And there would be a restlessness amongst the youngsters, as he spoke these words, but he knew them to be the truth so it did not matter who listened or who believed.
Koonama knew, that was the important thing.
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Also By Garry Kilworth
Novels
In Solitary (1977)
The Night of Kadar (1978)
Split Second (1979)
Gemini God (1981)
A Theatre of Timesmiths (1984)
Abandonati (1988)
Cloudrock (1988)
The Voyage of the Vigilance (1988)
The Street (1988) (writing as Garry Douglas)
Hunter’s Moon (1989)
Midnight’s Sun (1990)
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares (1992)
House of Tribes (1995)
A Midsummer’s Nightmare (1996)
Shadow Hawk (1999)
Angel
1. Angel (1993)
2. Archangel (1994)
Navigator Kings
1. The Roof of Voyaging (1996)
2. The Princely Flower (1997)
3. Land-of-Mists (1998)
Collections
The Songbirds of Pain (1984)
In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave (1989)
In the Country of Tattooed Men (1993)
Dedication
To Pete and Peggy
Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than angels.
Fable by Janos Pilinszky
(Trans. from the Hungarian by Ted Hughes)
Garry Kilworth (1941 -)
Garry Douglas Kilworth was born in York in 1941 and travelled widely as a child, his father being a serviceman. After seventeen years in the RAF and eight working for Cable and Wireless, he attended King’s College, London University, where he obtained an honours degree in English. Garry Kilworth has published novels under a number of pseudonyms in the fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction and Children’s Fiction, winning the British and World Fantasy Awards and being twice shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Award for Children’s Literature.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Garry Kilworth 1990
All rights reserved.
The right of Garry Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11431 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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