Spirit Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  “The Cave Before Time?” Edme tilted her head, and once again the light of that single green eye seemed to bore straight into Faolan. “How do you think it came by its name?”

  “I don’t know. And yet I have always known that was its name. There are some things like that. You don’t learn them, you simply know them. You carry them with you always.” He paused, then whispered, “From before time.”

  “From before your time,” Edme said quietly. Faolan blinked.

  Once again, Edme felt a twinge in her hind leg. Was this something she had carried with her always, without really being aware of it? She looked about and shivered although it was hardly cold. There was something about the remnants of a far-off spirit woods that was profoundly unsettling to her. She was surrounded by broken trees, some with the sap beginning to leak out from their trunks now that the weather had warmed. In one, a dead seagull was tangled in the white limbs of a toppled birch. The roots of the tree had dropped clots of dirt on its dangling head.

  “What’s a seagull doing here? We’re so far from any sea,” she asked.

  Gwynneth flew up at that moment. “This spirit wood was near the edge of the Sea of Hoolemere, near the bight. That gull must have gotten caught somehow and blown down in a gust just when the glacier was surging through. Probably didn’t know up from down, sky from ground. Went yeep.”

  Edme closed her eyes. If she were a bird, she was likely to go yeep in this strange place. “Go along, Edme,” Faolan urged. “You’re tired.”

  “There is a good place to sleep over there,” Gwynneth said, flipping her head about to indicate an enormous tree that had been uprooted, leaving a huge denlike cavity beneath it. “The little ones are already settling down.”

  “Are you going to sleep out again, Edme?” Faolan asked.

  She was tempted to say that it was difficult to tell “in” from “out” in such a place. Another dead bird was hanging precariously from a branch, this one a little sparrow of some kind. It was as if this forest had scooped up the last scraps of life and caught them in midflight. This strange, churned-up land seemed a sepulchre for death, for bones.

  Edme cast a glance toward the dusty sky. “Yes, I suppose I’ll sleep out.”

  Gwynneth gave a little shiver and wilfed slightly.

  “I think I’ll sleep in with the others.”

  Faolan and Edme both looked at her. “But it’s night!” Faolan said. “You always fly at night. Owls sleep in the day.”

  “Yes, but it’s hard to tell day from night here, isn’t it?” She paused. “Can’t tell twixt from tween time.”

  “I always get confused. Which is which?” Edme asked.

  “Twixt is just when the last of the old gray of the night vanishes and the first drop of light from a new dawn rises. Tween time is the last drop of the Deep Purple and the first drop of the Black.”

  Gwynneth’s feathers ruffled slightly, as if some spectral wind had passed through them. But there was no wind. She resisted telling them all that she knew about the spirit woods. Wolves were superstitious enough as it was. She knew that in their eyes owls were predominantly rational creatures. It would not do for her to blather on about scrooms and such. She especially did not want to disclose anything about the spirit of her father, Gwyndor, materializing. She found it very odd that he had spoken to her not in the vague language and oblique manner of most scrooms, but in a crisp and clear voice. Indeed he had charged her with leading the wolves to the west by way of the misplaced spirit woods. How could she explain all this? Better not discuss it at all.

  Gwynneth looked about and realized that the spirit woods contained fragments of other trees. Hemlock, spruce — silver spruce that only grew on the island in the Bittersea, the isle where the Great King Hoole had hatched out under the watchful eye of Grank. It was as if the glacier had rolled in all sorts of slivers of the Hoolian empire. She had a peculiar feeling that this glacier, torn loose by the earthquake, had some sort of conscious mind. As if it wanted to take relics of an old world with it on its march across the Beyond.

  Edme was having a very difficult time settling in. Unlike Gwynneth, she had no desire to sleep inside with the other wolves. At first, she settled under a snarl of broken birch limbs that framed the rising constellations in the east. But she could not sleep, and the ghostly white branches made her feel as if she were in a cage of bones. She rose and found another spot, finally curling up for the remainder of the night. She could see the first rungs of the star ladder rising in the east. But all the constellations appeared dim, as if they were made from dust.

  Faolan slept out as well, and in his dreams he caught glimpses of rags of mist that seemed to swirl through this topsy-turvy forest like the fitful wraiths of creatures past. Am I molting? he wondered as a new lightness engulfed him and he climbed deeper into the powdered night of his sleep.

  Fionula the gadfeather hovered briefly over the sleeping form beneath her. She began to sing a soft ancient song from the northern kingdoms. The music unfurled from her throat and she cocked her head to better see the silver wolf. She spotted the spiraling pattern on Faolan’s paw. Even though the paw was no longer splayed, the whorled markings on the pads remained and the meaning became clear.

  Gyre souls we are!

  Finally, Faolan understood the meaning of that word, gyre. There was a coming and going of his being, of lives through the centuries — a time of disintegration and assembling. In every end a beginning, and in every beginning an end — a cycling that was infinite, a spiraling as old as the constellations sliding through the night skies.

  The gadfeather from another time and the wolf in the fractured land seemed to move together through this spirit wood like visitors to a strange land. Soon an immense shape loomed beside them. The sound of its beating heart shook the trees of the woods. Eo? Faolan thought, turning to the bear. Eo nodded.

  Time to go west, Fionula? thought Eo. Fionula nodded, spinning her head around almost completely so she could look at Faolan.

  At that moment Edme stirred in her sleep. Opening her eye she saw three figures — an owl, a bear, and a wolf.

  Are they real or lochin? And was the wolf Faolan or the frost wolf? A luminous but tattered pelt hung on the wolf’s thin body, a body that belonged to an ancient wolf.

  Who is that? He’s so old but with the gait of a young wolf — a wolf caught in between. Edme felt a shiver pass through her marrow.

  The wolf turned and looked at her for just a moment. He seemed such a paltry thing, so fragile. He was saying something, his voice muffled and yet the meaning clear.

  This is no country for old wolves. Our time is almost finished….

  But the dead forest swallowed his words and Edme could not hear the rest.

  “NO, NO!” EDME WAS WRITHING in her sleep.

  “Wake up, Edme! Wake up!” Faolan batted her with his muzzle. “You’re having a bad dream. Wake up!”

  Edme’s eye blinked open. “Faolan! It’s you.”

  “Yes, of course. Who else?”

  “You’re all right?”

  “I’m fine. You must have been dreaming.”

  “It was a terrible dream,” Edme gasped. “You were old and weak and … and …”

  Faolan felt a twinge in his marrow. There was no way she could have seen what had happened last night, his walk through the spirit woods. If she had seen something, she might have thought it was lochin or scrooms. But Eo and Fionula were not ghosts, they were his gyre souls, his brethren through time, through centuries. And he had felt another presence beside him last night. Had Edme glimpsed that soul with her piercing single eye? Was it the old wolf she had seen in her dream?

  Faolan pressed hard on his paw and looked down at the print it made. The spiraling marks were left in the snow. Faolan had spent his entire life perfecting his gait so that his track would not be visible. But the spiral mark was the last remnant of the paw that had declared him a malcadh, and now he valued it because it signified something much greater.
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br />   The other wolves were just coming out from the den under the upturned tree. Gwynneth had assumed a perch on the stump of a silver spruce. She looked refreshed from her rare night of sleep, and spread her wings as if to air them out from a night spent inside and not flying abroad. “Our course is due west,” she said. “Few of the familiar landmarks are left, so keep the rising sun on your tails. There’s not much cloud cover today and I’ll fly low so you can see me. As we draw closer, perhaps Whistler can take the lead, for the terrain may be more familiar to him than to me. We’re close to the Blood Watch and the border.”

  The Whistler stepped forward. “Every single cairn used by the Blood Watch has fallen. There are no borders now to speak of.”

  “But what about the outclanners? Can they just run about willy-nilly now?” Mhairie asked.

  “I suppose so — if they’re still alive. The few I’ve seen were dead or severely wounded — legs broken in the quake, heads crushed under tumbling boulders. Indeed, if there is one blessing of these terrible times, it’s that our enemies have been vanquished or nearly vanquished. In any case, ‘borders’ is a useless term, a thing of the past.”

  A thing of the past. And this pain in my leg, Edme thought. Is that also a relic of some injury of old? The ache in her hind leg seemed familiar. It was not unbearable by any means and if she paid attention to how she walked it didn’t bother her at all. In fact, she rather liked her new style of walking. Her stride had become longer and a bit smoother. Almost like an outflanker’s tread. She noticed that Faolan, too, was walking differently. Perhaps it was just his new paw, but they had been traveling together for some days and this was the first time she noticed it.

  She was looking down and concentrating so hard on her walking that she didn’t notice that a fog bank had begun to roll in. She looked up, hoping to spot Gwynneth, but a woolly ceiling had dropped down from the sky and within a matter of seconds, it was so thick that she could barely see her own paws. Nor could she hear the reassuring tupp tupp of wolf paws hitting the ground around her. Every single wolf had stopped in its tracks. It was as if the powdery light of the spirit woods had clung to them and thickened to an impenetrable whiteness.

  “Myrr! Myrrglosch!” she called out frantically. Had the little pup been swallowed by the fog?

  “Maudie!” Banja shrieked. A little yip was heard in response.

  “Thank Lupus!” the red wolf cried. Edme could hear Banja clamping her jaws on the soft fur of the little pup’s neck. But where was Myrr?

  “Myrr! Myrr!”

  “Don’t panic,” Faolan called out into the white blankness.

  “Don’t panic! What do you mean?” Edme barked.

  “Everyone stay calm and stay exactly where you are,” Faolan ordered.

  “Where’s Gwynneth?” Mhairie said.

  “Here!” The single word peeled through the fog. “All of you do as Faolan says. I’m going to take a roll call. Then I can get a fix on your location.”

  Gwynneth had been stunned by how quickly the thick fog had blotted out the landscape and swallowed the wolves. Visual navigation was completely impossible. She would have to rely entirely on ear-slit location navigation and the first thing to establish was where each wolf was.

  “Faolan!” she cried out.

  “Here!”

  “Edme!”

  “Here!”

  “Myrr!” There was only silence.

  “Myrr?” Edme’s voice broke.

  “Myrrglosch!” Gwynneth shreed this time, but still nothing.

  Banja, Mhairie, Dearlea, and the Whistler all responded, “Here.”

  “Where is he?” Edme howled now. “We can’t leave. I won’t leave!”

  “Of course we won’t leave,” Faolan replied. “We go together. Gwynneth, is there anything you can do?”

  Gwynneth felt her gizzard clench. It was up to her now. She had to think fast.

  She needed the wolves to gather together in one place but she dared not let them try to find their own way to a central spot. The last thing she needed was for them to go wandering off on their own and fall into a fissure. From their answers to the roll call, she ascertained that the Whistler seemed to be in a fairly protected place. If a gale came up, they would need shelter. She would lead them one by one to the Whistler.

  “Whistler!” she called.

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m going to lead the others to you one by one. Nobody move until I set down directly in front of you.”

  “But what about Myrr?” Edme cried out.

  “I shall find Myrr. If I can find a mouse by the beat of its heart from half a league in the air, I can find Myrr. We’ll do this quickly and in order. Edme, you’re first.” It had to be Edme, for as practical as the she-wolf was, Gwynneth sensed she was quivering to dash off into the fog in search of Myrr.

  Seconds later, Gwynneth alighted in front of Edme. “Come with me.”

  “How? I can’t fly.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Gwynneth snapped. “I am going to fly just above your head. You can feel, can’t you?”

  “Feel?”

  “Feel the wind from my wings.” She waved them vigorously, sending up a small swirl of snow from the ground.

  “Yes, I can feel that,” Edme said. “But what about Myrr?”

  “I shall find Myrr, and when I do I want you here and not lost out there wandering about like some …” She paused. “Never mind.”

  “Idiot. I know. I love the little pup. You don’t understand. He lost his parents and now …”

  “No, Edme, you don’t understand. He didn’t lose them. They lost him. They turned away from their own son. I was there when they walked away from him. He was begging them. Remember what he said, Edme?”

  And the one-eyed wolf did remember. Myrr’s words came back to her. Mum, Da, that’s just a wolf, not a prophet … just a wolf. But his parents simply walked away from him. It was Faolan who picked him up in his mouth. The pup had come with them, and Edme had become not his second Milk Giver, for he had been weaned and she had no milk, but his taiga, which was as close to being a mother as any Watch wolf could ever really become — until Banja, who broke all the rules of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes.

  It did not take Gwynneth long to lead the other wolves to the Whistler. The fog had become completely impenetrable.

  “I just don’t understand how Myrr could have so quickly disappeared. He was right behind me and then just gone. He couldn’t have fallen into a crevasse, at least I don’t think so. I mean, there aren’t any around here, are there?”

  “No, none,” Gwynneth said firmly. “I would have spotted them before the fog came in. Try to stay calm. I am going to fly a scanning pattern.”

  Gwynneth spread her wings and waited several seconds before lofting herself into flight. During those seconds she tipped her head one way, then another. Finally, she flipped her head almost upside down and backward.

  “I’ll never get used to that thing they do with their heads,” the Whistler whispered as Gwynneth dissolved into the fog. “Makes me a tad queasy.”

  “I wish the Sark were here,” Edme moaned. “Between the two of them, with her sniffer and Gwynneth’s ear slits, they would find Myrr.”

  Banja came up to Edme and ran her muzzle through Edme’s withers. “I’m sorry, Edme. I can see how you love that pup. From the first time Myrr arrived at the Ring you were so … so …” Her voice dwindled. “Tender.” The word was barely a whisper. “I never really knew about those feelings until I had Maudie. I’m sorry for so much, Edme.” She gulped a bit and continued. “It seems almost wrong that I have so much now. Two eyes and a pup of my own. I don’t deserve it.”

  “Don’t talk that way. It’s not a question of who deserves what. You are a very different wolf now. With your two eyes and your little Maudie you will do well in this … this …” Edme turned to Faolan, whose own eyes had filled with tears. “In this new place we are going in the far west.”

  The far west
. The words had a deep resonance that made the wolves’ marrow quiver.

  Faolan spoke up in a strong clear voice. “Don’t worry. No one is going to be left behind, especially Myrrglosch. Remember what his name means — a bit of a miracle.”

  A BIT OF A MIRACLE. THE WORDS ran through Gwynneth’s head. That’s exactly what I need right now! she thought. She was picking up scraps of the wolves’ conversation on the ground but unfortunately no pup sounds were coming through. The Masked Owl swung her head slowly from one side to another as she flew in ever-widening scanning circles, searching for the distinctive tip tip of small wolf paws that was slightly different from the tupp tupp of full-grown wolves. The snow-covered ground below was laced with the pitter of scurrying rodents and their rapid heartbeats. There was also the scratching sound of a grouse chick trying to peck its way out of an egg.

  Why now? Gwynneth wondered. Grouse didn’t hatch out until the late spring moons, but of course the seasons were as tangled as everything else in the Beyond. A jumbled mess. She didn’t hear the heartbeat of any parent grouse. The hatchling would die within hours. There was a marmot stalking nearby and Gwynneth knew it would make quick work of the chick. She picked up marmots, grouse chicks, snow squirrels, and snow hares, but no wolf pup.

  Then she heard a new sound, something halfway between a whimper and a rumble. It took a broad chest to make such a full-bodied, reverberant sound, but it seemed too high-pitched to be fully mature. I know that sound, Gwynneth thought. And it was coming from not one chest but two — two sobbing bear cubs. The sobs camouflaged another sound — a familiar heartbeat. “Myrr!” she hooted as she plunged through the fog.

  Fragments of Myrr’s speech seemed to fly out on their own wings. He was trying to console the cubs. “I’m alone, too. My mum and da … well, they … and now … Oh dear, Gwynneth!”

  “Myrrglosch, the wolves are frantic. You disappeared! Edme is about to —”