Lone Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  A hush filled the cave. It was very rare that a chieftain invoked the privilege of the Sayer. But Duncan MacDuncan just had, and the word of a dying chieftain carried great weight.

  As Faolan was led away from the chieftain, he took one more glance at the fire. He blinked and hesitated. In the flames, he spied a pattern that was familiar—a swirl of bright orange and yellow buried deep at the base of the smaller flames hovering just above the coal bed.

  I see it—the same spiral that marks my paw. By my marrow, I see it in the fire of the gadderheal!

  CHAPTER SIX

  MHAIRIE’S DEN

  MHAIRIE SLID DOWN THE SHORT steep tunnel to her den. She was so happy to have her own private space. The new litter of pups that her mum, Caila, had delivered four months before had made everything so crowded. So she and her sister Dearlea took turns living in this solitary den while the other helped Caila tend the new ones.

  The pups were at that most difficult age. Old enough to get into trouble but not old enough to get out of it. They were fascinated—as all young pups were—by the tantalizing whiteness at the mouth of their den. They thought the white light that flooded the opening was a wall and not simply the light of day. Mhairie wondered if she had felt that way when she was their age. But she could hardly remember.

  Caila had chosen a whelping den with an especially long tunnel. “Keep them from the light as long as possible,” she said to her mate, Eiric. “I can’t go chasing after them if they get out, and you know they always try as soon as their milk teeth come in.”

  Sure enough, when their milk teeth broke in, chaos broke out! Especially with six! The worst part was their howling. Mhairie wasn’t sure why, but wolf pup cries were nothing like the melodious howls of mature wolves. For at least six moons, their howls were sharp barks, like the clash of hard rocks tumbling against one another in a slide. When the earthquake of the previous winter had struck, at first it sounded to her like ten thousand pups storming out of their whelping dens. And then there were the pups’ whiny whimpers when they begged. Not as loud as barks, but annoyingly squeaky.

  Mhairie wondered if she would ever be able to be a good mother. It was so exhausting. How does Mum stand it? she wondered. But Caila did. And who would have thought that Caila would give birth to six lively pups at her advanced age? Not a malcadh among them.

  But now Mhairie felt a terrible loneliness and anger. Why had that gnaw wolf gone and spoiled everything for her? When she came back, the wolves, the outflankers in the MacDuncan clan who had sent her to run with this byrrgis, were visibly disappointed. Alastrine, the point wolf of the chieftain’s pack, tried to soothe Mhairie in her thick musical brogue, for she was also the skreeleen of the pack. She delighted in using the old wolf phrases that had come with the wolves on the Ice March from the Long Cold more than a thousand years earlier. “Don’t worry, my dear heart. Don’t greet.” Greet was an old wolf word, which meant “to fret.” “You’re so young. Younger than I ever was when I ran with the outflankers. Another day, another hunt, another byrrgis, dearie. Be patient.”

  He wrecked everything was all Mhairie could think. That moldwarp, beslubbering, canker-livered gnaw wolf. She dredged up from her brain every vile wolf curse she could think of and was muttering them into the darkness of her den. These were words that would have earned her a muzzle-flinging nip from her mum. She could almost feel Caila’s jaws clamping down on her and hurling her across the cave.

  But it wasn’t just that Faolan had demolished her first-ever run with the outflankers. There was more to it, and she was almost as angry with herself as with the gnaw wolf. What was it about this wolf that had gotten under her pelt like a summer tick and annoyed her almost as much as her younger brothers and sisters? And yet, just as with her younger pup siblings, she felt a need to look out for Faolan. Or to beat him like the wrath of Lupus and turn his bones to dust!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE PAW OF THUNDERHEART

  FAOLAN SET OFF IMMEDIATELY after being escorted from the gadderheal. Adair had led him to the edge of the Carreg Gaer’s territory and had given him directions for finding the other packs of the MacDuncan clan, as well as instructions in the rituals of contrition. Faolan listened, but his mind was occupied with something else. The words of Duncan MacDuncan echoed in his ears.

  Do you know what a gaddergnaw is?…a contest to select a gnaw wolf—the best gnaw wolf—for the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes…. You have it in you, Faolan…. 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!

  A high-ranking wolf sending off a shamed gnaw wolf normally would have given him a sharp, almost stunning blow to the top of his muzzle, but the slap that Adair administered qualified somewhere between a pat and a thwack. Indeed, it almost missed Faolan’s muzzle entirely, for Adair could not bear to look at Faolan. He sees moon rot in me, but Duncan MacDuncan didn’t. Duncan MacDuncan saw something else!

  “Be on your way, gnaw wolf,” Adair snarled. “Learn from your disgrace! Roll in the scent of your shame. And save any dreams you might entertain of the gaddergnaw. For while you are on your trail of shame, the gnaw wolves’ preparation for the competition will begin in earnest.” He paused, then added nastily, “And you shall miss out!”

  And so Faolan set off into the darkness with his bone of shame gripped in his mouth.

  There is a time of night when the world seems almost empty. There is an overwhelming hollowness after the moon has slipped away to another world, and the constellations have slid to another Beyond. The stars expire one by one like the last small breaths of illumination in the darkness, and the night goes dead before the first weak glow of the dawn.

  Faolan had not traveled far before Alastrine’s first howls scored the night. He stopped in his tracks. So the chieftain had passed. A shiver went through Faolan from his raised hackles to his tail, still firmly tucked between his legs. He fell to his knees and put his paws over his muzzle. This was the first true act of humility that Faolan had made since he had been with the wolves.

  Soon braided through the howls of the skreeleen was the fine filament of Cathmor’s voice keening the loss of her mate. What a terrible time to die, thought Faolan. For during these emptiest hours in the hollow of the night, there was not a sign of the star ladder to the heavenly constellation that the wolves called the Cave of Souls. Those stars had slipped away to the west already and in a few nights would disappear entirely for the three winter moons that would soon be upon the wolves of the Beyond. For those few remaining nights, Cathmor howled her thanks. Had it been the time of the winter moons, Duncan MacDuncan’s soul would have had to wait until spring to climb the star ladder and enter the Cave of Souls.

  The skreeleen’s pitch changed to howl the summoning, calling all the MacDuncan packs to head to the far west, where the night was still young and the star ladder could be found. They were to travel at triple press-paw speed to catch it. For the next three nights, the wolves would gather there to howl the morriah, the lament for their dead chieftain. Gnaw wolves were excluded from this ceremony. Therefore, Faolan’s charge to visit all of the packs and perform his rituals of contrition would be delayed. He had wanted only to get it over with, but Duncan MacDuncan was the one wolf that Faolan had truly admired. In his marrow, he felt a keenness for the old chieftain that he had never come close to feeling for any other creature except Thunderheart.

  Thunderheart! The name exploded in Faolan’s mind. He had not been to the place where he had buried her paw since he had joined the MacDuncan clan. To touch the bone of the paw that had cradled him was now what Faolan wanted most in the world. Just being near that bone would give him comfort.

  He veered sharply south and headed toward the river from which Thunderheart had rescued him. She’d told him that the word fao meant both “river” and “wolf.” Lan meant “gift.” And when she had dredged him up from the swollen turbulence of the river, she
had thought of him as the river’s gift to her. She had just lost her own cub to a cougar, and her milk was still running. So she became Faolan’s milk mother, and nourished him. When Thunderheart died, Faolan had taken the largest bone from his milk mother’s paw and carved on it the story of their golden summer together, of swimming behind schools of trout and standing in the rapids at the time of the salmon spawn and scooping fish from the roiling waters. It was all there on the bone. The kill of their first caribou, the summer den, the winter den. He had buried the bone on a shale slope of a high ridge near the salt lagoons. It was a spot a fair distance from any of the wolf packs. Faolan had not wanted any wolf to see the bone he had carved. It was his story, his memory, and to him it was sacred. The wolves had a code, a law, a rule for everything. This was Faolan’s code. And by my marrow, he thought, it is right!

  He arrived just as the first thin, red slash of dawn light bled above the horizon. The sun rose, then faded to pink and dissolved into the flawless blue sky of morning. It did not take Faolan long to find his bone. When he heard the first click of his dewclaw against the bone, he began to dig delicately with his mouth, sheathing his teeth, and finally using just his tongue to lift the bone from the earth. He licked off the dust, and his eyes filled as he saw the markings on the bone that told the story of what had been his life. He swung his head from the paw of Thunderheart to the bone of shame that Heep had carved. He wanted to fling that horrid bone of shame into the deepest part of the river, throw it into a fire, throw it straight down to the Dim World. But he felt a calm steal over him suddenly. It was as if a phantom paw stroked the fur just beneath his jaws, the most sensitive region on any wolf.

  Faolan licked the paw bone, and his finely etched lines stood in beautiful relief against its whiteness. He felt almost outside his own skin, his own pelt, hovering just above himself. He watched himself swim just behind Thunderheart in search of fish, then saw a tiny pup who was supposed to be digging for roots and bulbs begin nosing instead at a small hill of sandy dirt. Seconds later, the cub had uncovered an ant’s nest and was yowling his head off. His muzzle was stinging ferociously. Thunderheart raced toward him and scraped off the nasty creatures with her own rough tongue. He would welcome back the stinging fury of those ants if it meant he could be with Thunderheart and feel the rasp of her tongue, hear the thunderous beating of her great heart.

  O Thunderheart, I long to see you,

  feel your booming heart in my blood.

  O Thunderheart, you’re always with me,

  though far away beyond the river

  in the stars of Ursulana.

  O Thunderheart, I’ll seek you always,

  when my time comes.

  In a night long away

  we’ll meet in the heavens of wolf or bear.

  By my marrow I shall find you there

  no matter where you may wander.

  I am your pup, your cub, forever!

  And though he sang to Thunderheart, all the while he also thought of Duncan MacDuncan, the wolf who had told him he had no sense but did have a chance—a chance to be a better wolf.

  Later, as night fell far from where the lone wolf keened his song for his milk mother, the chieftain’s mate, Cathmor, wailed her grief into the northern wind. On this the second night of the morriah, she saw a luminous gray mist at the very top of the star ladder of the spirit trail that led to the Cave of Souls.

  “The lochin! Lochin!” she called. She knew in her marrow that there was now a gulf between her and the luminous spirit of her mate as deep as any sea, as wide as the distance between the earth and any star. But she would look for that mist every evening as the iridescent spheres of dew drifted down through the pearly light of the moon. The lochin was how the spirits of the dead lived on in the hearts of the ones they had left behind, making their marrow tingle until the time when they, too, climbed the star ladder to the Cave of Souls.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE TRAIL OF SHAME

  THE MACDUNCAN CLAN WAS comprised of five packs of wolves. Faolan had already performed the ritual of contrition at the pack of the Carreg Gaer in front of Elpeth, Stellan, and Mhairie, the outflankers. But there were three other packs he must visit with the bone of shame before returning to his own. They were the River Pack, the Pack of the Blue Rock, and the Pack of the Fire Grass. The Blue Rock Pack was on the border with MacDuff territory. It would be a whole day’s run at half press-paw from where he was, and then if he started early the next day, he would be able to travel west to the River Pack. Faolan really wanted to get that over with fast, for he could just imagine Heep’s pleasure in seeing Faolan having to grovel with the bone of shame in his mouth.

  Faolan had been thinking all this as he traveled the trail of shame. Soon in the long blue dusk, a raggedy wolf trotted out toward him. The wolf made a strange noise that was neither a bark nor a howl but a kind of strangled whistling. Faolan knew instantly that it must be the gnaw wolf from the Blue Rock Pack. He had heard about this wolf who had been born with a crookedness deep in his throat that made his every utterance sound like a whistle. Thus his nickname, the Whistler.

  The only time a gnaw wolf was expected to show submission to another gnaw wolf was on the trail of shame. Faolan immediately prostrated himself before the Whistler, a pale gray wolf who seemed painfully thin.

  “I did not expect to arrive so quickly. I didn’t know I was so close to the honorable Blue Rock Pack,” Faolan said after dropping the bone from his mouth.

  “You aren’t. I was just out hoping for a hare. They are often where the lichen eaters graze and much easier prey.”

  “I’ve heard about lichen eaters but never seen one,” Faolan replied. “Their meat is supposed to be very tasty.” He knew they had antlers and appeared nearly identical to caribou but were smaller and seemed to have a taste for lichen as much as for the grasses that caribou fed on. The Whistler definitely needed easy prey, from the looks of his bones, which appeared to be nearly jutting through his pelt.

  “You can rise up now,” the Whistler said.

  “Are you sure?” Faolan was trying to do everything just right. He would become the best possible gnaw wolf he could, so he could leave the clans behind and beome a member of the Watch.

  “Yes, please come. They are expecting you.”

  Faolan was taken aback. No wolf had said “please” to him since he had been taken into the clan. He tucked the bone snugly under his chin and began to walk. But then he stopped. This poor wolf looked as if he hadn’t had a decent meal in months.

  “What’s the problem?” The Whistler turned around.

  “Why don’t we go track down some of those lichen eaters. I’ve never hunted them. And you look as if you could use a good meal.”

  The Whistler twitched his ears. “You know how it is in a big pack like the Blue Rock. I’m last to eat after twenty-five others.”

  “Twenty-five! How do you get even a bite?”

  “Often I don’t.” He sighed. “I mostly go after hare. Small stuff. Not very satisfying. No fat on a hare, you know.”

  “I know. So let’s go after these lichen eaters. There’s time. You said I’m early.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, you think just the two of us could do it? Take down a lichen eater?”

  “Well, if we succeed, it’s going to be a lot tastier than a hare. And two have a better chance than one,” Faolan answered.

  “I certainly could use some real meat. I think we might be able to pick up a trail yonder.” He nodded toward a dry creek bed. “They often travel through that way.”

  “Let’s go,” Faolan said.

  They found the trail immediately.

  “One of them might be limping,” the Whistler said after a few minutes. “It’s setting down its east foreleg unevenly.”

  Faolan was impressed. The Whistler was clearly an observant wolf and knew how to read tracks.

  It was hardly a herd, just four lichen eaters traveling together, two females, a calf, and an elderly male.
The male had a deep wound in its hock and was indeed limping. It seemed to Faolan as if he would be an easy takedown. The strategy was simple. Split the male off from the others and chase him down. Faolan and the Whistler were working well together and gaining on the old male by playing a bluff strategy in which they would run him hard for a period, then ease up and feign loss of interest. This gave the prey a sense of false security so that it became less vigilant, perhaps even stopped to take a rest. Faolan had the feeling that this was just about to happen, when all of a sudden, they heard a commotion in the brush on a hillside. A big healthy buck came charging down a slope, stopped a short distance from them, and pawed the ground. Lichen eaters were generally fleet and small of build, but this one was huge. There was nothing small about him. The buck began dipping and raising his immense rack of antlers. Faolan had seen caribou do this. It was an aggression display that often preceded territorial conflicts or mating battles among male members of a herd. But he had never seen it used in confrontation with predators.

  “Uh-oh!” the Whistler groaned. “We better get out of here!” But Faolan wheeled about, dug in his four paws, shoved his ears forward, and snarled at the buck, who was lowering his head as if to charge.