Lone Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  Faolan had been told to wait by a red-speckled rock to be called into the cave for the raghnaid. He looked up into the star-powdered night, searching for signs of the new constellations that appeared during the Caribou Moon. He found great comfort in searching the sky, hunting for the old familiar constellations that had sailed through the nights in the seasons he had spent with Thunderheart.

  It seemed colder than normal for this moon, and he wondered if the creek the pups were playing in would be frozen by morning. But there were not even glimpses of the first stars of the snow moons yet. Curious, he thought. He scanned the sky for other constellations. Faolan especially liked the star picture that the grizzly bears called the Great Claws. Thunderheart had told him that the owls called it the Golden Talons, and he’d learned that the wolves called it the Great Fangs. But the constellation was almost gone now and would not return until early winter. Other constellations had begun to rise. That of the caribou would climb higher and higher following the horns of the Caribou Moon during the frosty autumn evenings, and soon the caribou’s mate and calf would walk behind him across the night. Faolan missed the Great Claws. He didn’t even like the wolf name for the constellation. The Great Fangs—how stupid! It made him think of slobber in the skies, long threads of saliva spinning off into the night just like Mhairie running with the byrrgis.

  Talk about a temper! He had never experienced such a drubbing. It was so different from the usual abuse. That slobbering mouth never quit! Although she had not slobbered when she stood over him, yelling her head off.

  He looked up again, searching for the Great Claws, which would always remind him of Thunderheart.

  When he glanced away from the stars, he saw a thin, white wolf looking at him as she passed by the rock where he waited. His blood froze. He got up to move away but still felt her eyes on him. There was no mistaking who this wolf was. Lael, the clan’s new Obea. The Obea was the female wolf in each clan responsible for removing deformed pups from the whelping den, tearing them from their mother’s milk to take them to a tummfraw, a place of abandonment where the pup would die. If the she-wolf he had seen with Lord Bhreac and Lord Claren delivered a malcadh, it would be Lael who would carry it away. Unless, of course, the mother went by-lang and succeeded in losing herself and the pup in the deep away. Faolan felt the green eyes of the white wolf following him.

  A pup now ran up to where he was waiting.

  “You’re big for a gnaw wolf,” the pup said. “I mean you’re big for any wolf.”

  “Yeah,” said another.

  “He’s bigger than my da.”

  “My da and my mum put together!” said another.

  “Hey! He should be doing a submission roll.”

  “But he’s so big,” whispered a rust-colored wolf.

  “Doesn’t matter, he’s a gnaw wolf.” The other pup came forward. She, too, was rust colored and must have been his sister.

  “You’re supposed to get down, you know. I mean, you’re already in trouble.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. Sorry.” Faolan began to sink to his knees.

  “You talk funny, too,” said the bossy little wolf.

  “My mum says he talks like a bear.” A new pup had now come up to watch the spectacle by the red rock.

  “A grizzly bear was my second Milk Giver,” Faolan said, twisting his neck so his face pushed into the ground. I cannot believe I am doing this. I am five times the size of these pups.

  “A bear. Weird! What was it like?” the first pup asked. He was a genuinely curious little fellow and had crouched down a bit to get on eye level with Faolan.

  “Are you scared of going in to see the raghnaid?” asked a gray female pup.

  “Are you cag mag? If a bear was his Milk Giver, you think he’s scared of the raghnaid?” said the curious pup, who was still crouching.

  But they were wrong. Faolan was scared, not of the raghnaid so much but of the shame of facing Duncan MacDuncan.

  The half dozen or so pups who had crept out from behind the red rock soon became bored and went off to wrestle on a patch of scoured ground. Faolan looked across at them. Two other pups had escaped from their parents’ den and were trying to nose their way into the tussle, but their mother came out, gave them each a swat that sent them flying, and then growled. The pups obediently followed her back into their den.

  A shaft of moonlight suddenly poured down and illuminated another she-wolf and her two pups. Their coats were a silvery gray, much like Faolan’s own, and Faolan tried to imagine what his life might have been like if his paw had been straight and not splayed. If he’d had a wolf mother and father or sisters and brothers to play with in the moonlight, to cuff him soundly on the muzzle and make him follow them back into a cozy den. He would have known then that the Great Claws were called the Great Fangs.

  Faolan groaned and sank down to his knees, but he would not screw his face into the dirt even though he saw a high-ranking male wolf stride toward him. He rolled to one side and looked at the stars. There was a swirl of clouds that thinly veiled the moon. The clouds quickly scudded away, but for just a moment, they looked identical to the whirl of lines on the pad of his splayed paw. Why had that upset the yellow wolf Heep so much? Heep had backed off from biting him because he was frightened. And yet the first time Faolan had ever looked at those swirled markings, he had found them deeply comforting. He had thought the whirling tracery spoke of something marvelous, hinted that he was part of a larger pattern of endlessly spiraling harmony.

  At that moment, Faolan’s reveries were interrupted.

  “Up, gnaw wolf,” a pack elder growled. “Duncan MacDuncan is ready to see you. Mind you do the proper veneration and obeisance as you approach. The chieftain is failing rapidly and it is most important that submission rituals be upheld. None of your blasphemous byrrgis behavior, cur. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Faolan said meekly, and rose to follow the pack elder. He was careful to tuck his tail between his legs and lay his ears flat despite having a terrible itch in one that seemed to bother him more, the flatter he laid his ears.

  The chieftain’s cave was immense, and in the center was a pit with a fire burning in it. On the wall hung scraped hides and an array of antlers—deer, caribou, musk ox—all of which had the most intricate carvings. Faolan tried to keep his gaze down, but it seemed his eyes were drawn back to the flames.

  The clan elders who comprised the raghnaid were in their ceremonial headdresses of gnawed bones and necklaces, and it seemed to Faolan that there were only two sounds in the cave—the crackling and snapping of the fire as it devoured the air, and the odd clicking rattle of bones. No one spoke. But when Faolan glanced up, he saw something he had not expected in their eyes—fear. Do they really think I am moon rot? he wondered.

  The ancient wolf Duncan MacDuncan was reclining on the pelt of a bull elk. Once he had been a wolf with a dark gray coat, but with age, he was almost white. There were bare patches on his shoulders that revealed scars from long-ago combat. His shoulders almost suggested a landscape of the battlefields he had known. Like scorched earth, it was as if the fur had refused to grow there any longer. His eyes were milky green, the color of the streams that ran down from the glaciers in the high country. There was a notch in one of his ears, and it was not hard to imagine the cougar who had torn it.

  Behind him, soaring into the shadows, were two racks of the most enormous caribou antlers Faolan had ever seen. Beside the chief an elegant she-wolf rested on her haunches, her head held high. It was Cathmor, the chieftain’s mate. Her dark gray coat was almost black, and her eyes a lovely shade of green that reminded Faolan of the mossed rocks in the river where he and Thunderheart had fished their only summer together.

  “Bring him forth,” the chieftain wheezed. The elder who had escorted Faolan gave him a rough nudge, and Faolan began the traditional belly crawl toward the pelt where Duncan MacDuncan lay. The sight of this once noble chieftain shocked Faolan. Duncan MacDuncan looked broken, as if the slightest b
low would shatter him completely.

  “Close enough,” the elder said after a few seconds.

  “No! Closer,” Duncan MacDuncan rasped.

  When Faolan reached the edge of the pelt, he twisted his neck and began to grind his face into the floor. He caught a glimpse of the fire out of the corner of one eye. His hackles started to rise and then settled, and a calm stole through him.

  The chieftain stirred slightly on his pelt. “Easy, my dear heart,” Cathmor whispered, and lay a calming paw on the chieftain’s flank.

  What has this lad seen in the flames? the chieftain wondered. Does he see that it is about to snow before the snow moons? That this spring, the ice will not crack until it is almost the Moon of the Singing Grass? Is the time of the Long Cold returning?

  If Faolan has the fire sight, then indeed he is a special wolf, thought Duncan MacDuncan, and a portent of grievous times ahead. Then the chieftain shook his head as if to clear it of such dire thoughts. He had a last duty to perform. As supreme leader of the clan and high lord of the raghnaid, he opened the proceedings.

  “Faolan, gnaw wolf of the MacDuncan clan, the raghnaid has been assembled to determine if your actions during a recent byrrgis constitute a violation of our laws. Nearly one thousand years ago, when our ancestors were led here by the first Fengo, we planted laws, traditions, and codes of behavior as thickly as the trees of the deep forests from whence we came. Because we believed that a country without laws was more dangerous than one without trees, that without them, dignified and noble wolves could not stand upright in the fierce winds that sweep our land.”

  The chieftain then turned to Lord Adair, second highest lord of the raghnaid, and called, “Read the charges.”

  Lord Adair came forward with a bone and began to read: “As recorded by the gnaw wolf, Heep, of the River Pack of the MacDuncan clan. On the morning after the fifteenth night of the Caribou Moon, a byrrgis was assembled on the Burn in pursuit of a bull moose. In the first quarter of the hunt, at press-paw speed, the gnaw wolf Faolan followed meticulously his obligations of sniffing and reporting on the droppings.”

  You bet I did, thought Faolan, as if Heep were right there reading the bone himself. You idiot wolf who wanted to go in my place with your dry nose and not a trace of dung to report on it!

  “I humbly pursued my course on the western flank, a flank much too grand for my base origins. As diligently as possible, I searched out urine pools of the moose and, in my most humble opinion, was able to confirm that the beast was healthy. It was not until press-paw speed had broken into attack speed that I noticed a disturbance that seemed to flow through the byrrgis, reaching back as far as my lowly position as a sweeper. It was at that time that I looked up and saw the gnaw wolf Faolan streaking through the byrrgis and cutting out to overtake the young and noble outflanker Mhairie, who, due to her outstanding abilities, had been sent from the Carreg Gaer of the MacDuncans. At the moment he overtook her, chaos began to erode the hwlyn of the byrrgis.”

  There was a gasp from the other members of the raghnaid. Hwlyn was the wolf word meaning “spirit of the pack.” Exclamations of shock and horror swirled through the gadderheal. Tails that seconds before were hanging loosely suddenly tucked nearly as tightly as Faolan’s, not in submission but in fear.

  “Continue,” Duncan MacDuncan ordered calmly. The wolf Adair read on, concluding with a description of how Faolan had risen on his hind legs, and the bull moose had wheeled about in a panic to charge the byrrgis, “thus cleaving the spirit of the pack.”

  “Was any wolf killed or injured by the moose when it charged?” Duncan MacDuncan asked with renewed vigor.

  “No, sir,” replied Adair.

  “Then I say that is rather a…well…promiscuous use of the word ‘cleave.’” Again a shudder passed through the gadderheal. For a wolf who was so close to death himself to use the wolf word for dying so calmly was unnerving, if not to the chieftain at least to the others in the ceremonial cave. “What’s this gnaw wolf’s name? The one who gnawed this bone?”

  “Heep, my lord.”

  “Aaah, Heep, yes, Heep, the one who is always carrying on about being humble. Bring the bone to my pelt so I might examine it.”

  The wolf Adair stepped forward and dropped the bone. It rested in the thick pelt of the bull elk inches from Faolan’s muzzle. He had seen a few bones that Heep had gnawed, and once more, Faolan noticed the subtle scratches made by Heep’s flawed rear-slicing tooth. Either the nick in that tooth had deepened or Heep had been more careless than usual in his work, because it was quite visible on this gnaw-bone.

  “So what do you think, lad?” Duncan MacDuncan’s breath was hot and slightly fetid. It was the breath of a sick wolf. He spoke low and tapped his tail as a signal that the others were to back away. He wanted a private conversation.

  “Me? What do I think?” Faolan asked. He shoved his ears forward with new alertness. His tail lifted a very tiny bit. He hadn’t been asked what he thought about anything since he had arrived in the Beyond.

  “Yes, what do you think about the gnaw-bone?”

  He looked up at the chieftain. Duncan MacDuncan’s eyes were a rheumy green. His muzzle twist was unkempt. Only clan chieftains and members of the Watch were permitted to wear the twisted braid. “Well, my lord, I am sorry to say every scratch, every mark the gnaw wolf Heep carved is true. I violated the order. I am deeply sorry.”

  “Oh, I know that, and I’m glad to hear you’re sorry. But what do you think of the workmanship, the craft?”

  Faolan was shocked. He slid his eyes up and gazed into the faded ones of the old chieftain. Was a lowly gnaw wolf like himself really permitted to comment on anything, let alone another gnaw wolf’s ability?

  “I…I…” Faolan stammered.

  “Now, for Lupus’ sake, don’t say the word ‘humble.’ Just give your opinion, lad.”

  “I don’t think it’s that good, my lord. He carves too deep for one thing, and every line is the same—the same depth, the same width.”

  “Hmmm” was all the old chieftain said. He sighed and then commenced a racking cough. Cathmor came up to him and began licking his muzzle and lightly stroking his fur with her paw.

  “What am I supposed to do with you, lad?” the chieftain whispered hoarsely.

  “I don’t know, my lord. I am not a very good gnaw wolf.”

  “No! No! That’s not the problem at all. You’re a frinking good gnaw wolf.” Faolan was not sure exactly what “frinking” meant, but he thought it was one of the minor curse words that was shared with the owls, for Gwynneth had used it several times. “But you’re a pathetic pack wolf. You don’t understand, do you? This whole pack, clan business.”

  “I guess not, my lord.”

  “Guess not? I know not. There is no guessing about it.”

  “So I must leave.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not a good pack wolf. I guess I’m just a lone wolf.”

  “That’s not your privilege. I do the saying around here!” Duncan MacDuncan roared. It was as if a current went through the cave, and every filament of fur on every wolf’s hackles suddenly stood straight up.

  In a low, hoarse whisper, Duncan asked Faolan, “Do you know what a gaddergnaw is?”

  Faolan shook his head.

  “We have not had one in several years. It’s a contest to select a gnaw wolf—the best gnaw wolf—for the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes. It will be a hard contest, lad. They choose one wolf, and on rare occasions two, and never two from the same clan. So it makes the competition all the harder for you. And for Heep.” He paused. “You have it in you, Faolan.”

  Duncan studied Faolan carefully as if he were looking for the wolf that might lurk inside, as if in the bright green light of this young wolf’s eyes he might see the reflection of a traveling wolf from another time. “You could be selected. You have fine teeth for carving and you have strength. However, you have no sense. But the gaddergnaw, Faolan—this could be your
chance!”

  MacDuncan now staggered to his feet and, lifting his tail painfully, wagged it once, twice, then a third time to summon the other wolves closer.

  “The gnaw-bone has been read. There is clear evidence that the gnaw wolf Faolan is guilty of a most serious infraction of the gaddernock code as it is applied to the byrrgis. He has challenged the order. He has admitted his guilt as well as his profound regret. From my private conversation with him, I can say that he knows deep in his marrow that he can do better, that he can become a clan wolf.”

  What private conversation was this? When did I ever say that? Faolan wondered.

  “And so,” the chieftain continued, “from the time of the Ice March, I invoke the privilege of the Sayer. I say that this gnaw wolf shall stay in the clan. He shall resume his lowly position as gnaw wolf in the Pack of the Eastern Scree. He shall be required to visit every outflanker of every pack of the MacDuncan clan, present this bone gnawed by Heep, and perform the third-degree submission and veneration rituals, as dictated by section thirty-two of the byrrgnock code of the gaddernock. Following the contrition rituals, he shall gnaw a bone of contrition to be left with the pack outflankers. Thus shall he gain absolution.”

  Duncan paused now, his legs trembling with fatigue from standing, his chest heaving from speaking. His mate, Cathmor, touched his flank. “Please, dear, rest.”

  He growled, “Rest! There is eternity for resting! I have one more announcement I have to make—an important one. I have received a message from Finbar Fengo of the Watch. We have agreed that another gaddergnaw must be held.”

  A murmur of excitement swept through the wolves. Tails began to wag. It had been years since the last gaddergnaw.

  “All the clans shall gather here in the Moon of the Singing Grass. This is what I, Duncan MacDuncan, chieftain of the clan of the MacDuncans, say.”

  And let us hope, Duncan thought to himself, that indeed the grass will be singing and not still locked under frozen ground. His eyes were more filmy than before, and a terrible rattling wheeze shook his frail body. He sank onto the pelts, weak from his efforts.