Star Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  “Where did you find that?” Banja asked.

  “Abban told me how to hunt for them before we left at dusk.”

  “Abban?” Caila said. And they all turned and looked at the wolf pup. His ears twitched.

  My paw did see. For ears it has.

  And tiny rustlings in the ice.

  They sound just like little mice.

  I tap once, they tap twice.

  I know their breath holes can’t be far.

  Closer than the nearest star.

  A truly preposterous bird flew out from under the Ice Bridge. It had a large chunky orange beak that seemed to grow from its face like a strange chubby flower. Its head was black except for two large white discs on either side in which rather small eyes were set. Its cheeks billowed voluptuously, giving it a clownish appearance. The feathers of its chest were pure white, but its wings and back were black.

  “Greetings and salubrications.”

  “No, it’s ‘salutations,’ idiot, not ‘salubrications.’” A large group of the creatures waddled up.

  “Are they birds?” the Whistler whispered.

  “Of course we’re birds, you fool. Ask your little friend there,” the first bird replied, nodding at Abban.

  “Oh, yes indeed, they’re birds,” Abban replied.

  “And?” asked the Whistler.

  “And what?” replied Abban.

  “You always speak in rhymes — what happened? I thought you were going to introduce us. And you just stopped,” the Whistler said.

  “I can’t think of anything to rhyme with ‘bird’ except ‘turd,’ and my mum would be very angry if I said a disgusting word like that.”

  The bird snapped its beak in excitement. “Little friend, you just said it! ‘Word.’ ‘Word’ rhymes with ‘bird.’”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Abban answered.

  “So we’re wordy birdies. How about that?”

  “Except you’re puffins — huffin’ puffins,” Abban replied.

  At that same moment, Gwynneth landed on the ice.

  “Puffins! I don’t believe it,” she exclaimed. “I haven’t seen any since the Ice Narrows. I never thought you came this far west.”

  “Is this west?” one puffin asked.

  “I guess so, Dumpkin,” replied the other.

  “Dumpkin?” Gwynneth said. “That’s your name?”

  “So they tell me,” Dumpkin, the female, replied.

  “It’s just like the Ice Narrows,” Gwynneth said. “Nine out of ten puffins were called Dumpy.”

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t want to take the same name. A little diversity. We’ve —” The female puffin paused. “We’ve EVOLVED!” She hopped up and down. “How do you like that, Dumpster? Talk about big words! I call ‘evolved’ a fifty-capelin word.”

  “Dumpster?” Edme asked.

  “Oh, yes, forgive me. My manners!” She giggled maniacally. “This is my hubby.”

  “Hubby?” they all said.

  “Yeah, it means mate,” Dumpkin said. “It’s an old word.”

  “Old Wolf?” Dearlea asked.

  “Are you kidding me?” Dumpkin replied. “No, it’s an old word left over from the Others.”

  It was as if icicles had run down the animals’ spines.

  “Yeah, you know, the Two Legs.” Dumpkin glanced at Gwynneth and Eelon. “Present company excepted. I mean the two legs without wings. The Others.”

  Abban slowly approached Dumpkin and Dumpster and sank to his knees, then tucked his tail.

  “Oh, sweetie pie. You don’t need to do all that,” Dumpkin said. “You want some fish, of course. I don’t know how you’ve stood those lemmings for all these days.”

  Her hubby waddled forward. “I’m surprised you haven’t turned into one — lemme tell you!” Dumpster said with a chuckle.

  “Oh, great ice!” Dumpkin roared. “You are so funny.” She threw herself on the ice and stuck her feet up in the air while batting her wings. “That is a knee-slapper.” The bird convulsed with laughter. “Oh, oh, oh, oh” was all she could utter while she rolled around on the ice. “A knee-slapper! Lemme tell you, lemmings — get it?”

  “We don’t have knees, Ma!” a third and somewhat smaller puffin cut in.

  “Oh, Dumpette!” Dumpster exclaimed. “Did you hear my joke? ‘Lemme tell you’ I said — like, they are sick of lemmings. Do you get it?”

  “Yes,” she sighed, and flicked her eyes shut as if one more second of these insufferable parents was going to drive her to do a head dive through the ice.

  “A real knee-slapper.”

  “But as I said, Ma. We don’t have knees.”

  “Oh, so we don’t!” Dumpkin rolled back onto her feet. “All this time I was trying to slap my knees. No wonder I couldn’t. Well, Dumpette, our friends here are hungry for something other than lemmings.” Dumpkin began to giggle again.

  “Pull yourself together, Ma,” Dumpette said. Her voice was thick with boredom.

  “No!” She snapped her orange beak. “You pull yourself together, dearie. Hustle those tail feathers and get out there and start diving. These dear, sweet animals need some fish — capelin to go with that seal.”

  “All right, Ma.” Dumpette gave her mother a withering glance but shot off into the air and could soon be seen diving under the ice.

  “I’ll go, too, sweetie,” Dumpster said.

  “Bye-bye, Dumplings!” Dumpkin waved her wings. She turned to the others. “Adorable, aren’t they? I actually love it when Dumpette gets sassy. She didn’t do it this time. She was just plain bored. I prefer sassy to bored. That bored thing she does is so … so … boring.” She sighed. “Oh, well, kids will be kids.” She sighed again, then waggled her wings. “I’m going to go out there and help my Dumplets fish,” she announced, and spreading her wings awkwardly, she lifted her plump body into flight.

  The blood from the seal stained the ice. The sun rose behind them, casting a pink hue over the bridge and silhouetting the chunky forms of the puffins against the dawn.

  “What is it?” Caila asked her pup. Abban stepped forward to look at the puffins diving for capelin.

  “Line them up one by one, then eat them in the rising sun!” Abban chirped.

  And that is exactly what they did. It was a feast that morning. The fish were rather small, perhaps a quarter the size of a salmon. They were of a drab greenish color, except for their sides, which were shaded in silver and white. Their bones amounted to nothing, and they were salty on the tongue.

  “Amazing they can do anything with such tiny bones,” the Whistler commented. “I’ll have another if there’s enough.”

  “Oh, plenty,” Dumpette replied.

  “Do we have to eat the eyes?” Myrr asked.

  “The eyes are the best part, dear,” Dumpkin said. “Quite delicious. Soft, but when you first bite into them they bounce around a bit in your mouth. Just chew them up. Yum!”

  In no time at all, their bellies were full.

  Soon they fell into the habit of finding good places to sleep during the morning hours, the winds from the previous night persisting in fitful gusts until midday. They would rise just after noon and, with new energy, tackle the pressure ridges ahead. Then at night, when the wind rose again, they would climb down one of the massive sloping pillars of the Ice Bridge and slip out onto the Frozen Sea and make their way toward the Distant Blue.

  When they slept in the mornings, they always posted a guard. On the first watch of this day, Mhairie and Dearlea walked the boundary lines of their encampment.

  “Mhairie, have you thought what it might be like when we get to the Distant Blue?” Dearlea asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It has to be different in so many ways.”

  “I know. New stars, new … new hunting formations maybe.”

  “Does it worry you, Mhairie?”

  “Of course it worries me. I was trained as an outflanker for a byrrgis. If there are no byrrgises, what shall I do?
In this new formation that Edme calls the Fortress, we’re all outflankers, more or less.”

  “But if there is game, big game not lemmings, there will have to be byrrgises.”

  “I hope so.” Mhairie’s voice almost cracked.

  “I’m afraid of something, too,” Dearlea said.

  Mhairie stopped pacing. “What’s that?”

  “You forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “I was chosen as the next skreeleen. But we have not had a skree circle since we left. No stories have been howled. It’s been more than two moon cycles now.”

  “But … but … it’s all been so hard, so different. Getting here to the Ice Bridge and then the pressure ridges and Abban falling into the sea and coming back cag mag. There has hardly been time for a skree circle. Everything has been hard.”

  “When has it ever been easy for wolves? Tell me that. Don’t you see, Mhairie, if we don’t keep telling the stories, we shall forget them. And if we forget them, our marrow will leak away, our clan marrow will vanish.”

  “We don’t have clans now. It’s hard to think of clan marrow the way we used to.”

  “Then, what are we on this bridge?”

  “We are nine wolves, three pups, two bears, an owl, and now two eagles,” Mhairie replied.

  “Is that not a clan of sorts?”

  “I suppose so,” Mhairie conceded.

  “Clans have stories. Clans make stories. Will there be stories to tell in the Distant Blue? Will any creatures want to listen? There was so much we had to leave behind.” Dearlea’s voice dropped off. “I hope stories are not among them.” She gave a great sigh, then muttered something that was barely audible.

  “What did you say?” Mhairie leaned in closer.

  “Nothing,” Dearlea murmured. Her tail drooped, her ears hardly flickered. She felt lost in some storyless place where skree circles seemed as odd as puffins. Where words disappeared or were reduced to just a few. Would they become like the puffins, who could only think of names that all sounded alike? Were those preposterous-looking birds really so dumb that they had lost their ability to name things? If language was swallowed by the unknown, the vastness of the unknown, if things could not be named — then there was no hope. Dearlea was a namer as much as Mhairie was a hunter, an outflanker. What would she do in this new world?

  ZANOUCHE WAS NOT AS YOUNG as she used to be. Her hearing had dulled, and the roar of the wind did not make it any easier. The wolves from the Outermost, Heep’s rout, were huddled beneath the overhang of a pressure ridge. A fierce gale was blowing, and clouds seemed to slide down from the dome of the dark night like boulders. Zanouche flew over the lip of the ridge. Turbulence did not faze her. With her immense and powerful wings, she could negotiate any draft. Lightning cracked the sky, and the electric veins of white sent a shudder through the wolves.

  “It’s a curse … a curse,” a wolf below her howled.

  “By my tail, it ain’t no curse!” Heep’s voice scalded the night. “I’ll get her back. I’ll get him back, and when I do — Lupus, when I do — I’ll kill her before that pup’s eyes. That will show him.”

  Show him what? Rags thought, but dared not speak the words aloud. Rags, a large red wolf, slid his eyes toward the yellow wolf as he staggered onto a promontory. A mad wolf, that one, Rags thought.

  Heep braced himself against the wind and turned his head toward the moon, which seemed to blink as clouds raked across it. His eyes took on a reddish glare. In the moon’s inconstant light, he began to howl his imprecations and foul curses, always waving the tail that had been restored to him during the time of the Great Mending.

  How I would love to bite that tail clean off, thought Rags. Had not Heep’s mate, Aliac, whom Heep now cursed, threatened just that when she had left with the pup? If Heep was not mad before, her leaving had driven him to a level of insanity that made the wolves of the rout quake with fear. And now they were alone with Heep on an Ice Bridge to nowhere. They knew not where they were going, just that they were headed away. They had no name for what was ahead.

  Rags was certain that Faolan’s pack knew their destination. For Heep’s rout, this journey was a quest for vengeance — no matter where it took them. Vengeance was all the yellow wolf thought of. Vengeance flowed through Heep’s veins and hardened his marrow.

  “I’ll find you, Aliac and Faolan. I’ll chase you into the perditious flames of the Dim World, where the vyrr-wolves tend the hearths. The grot boils in my blood and quickens my marrow!”

  Rags had seen many awful things in his life in the Outermost, but for the first time, he was truly frightened. As he watched the mad wolf bellow at the moon, it was as if a trickle of light had seeped into his head and illuminated his brain. He will lead us to our death because of his vengeance. He is as blind as an old wolf with the milk-eye sickness, this one. As dumb a brute as a musk ox.

  From a past he could not quite grasp, dim memories came to Rags, memories of wolves with craft and true cunning, wolves who hunted in byrrgises and not the savage skelters of the Outermost. He shivered with loneliness.

  Zanouche glided high above Heep, wondering if she could swoop down and pick off this wolf. He wasn’t a large wolf, really. Larger than a coyote, yes, but she and Eelon had killed coyotes by picking them up, flying high, and then dropping them on hard ground. Usually the coyotes died instantly. If not, they were so broken that she could make short work of them. Could she and Eelon take care of this soulless creature together?

  But what would that solve? Surely another one of these savage outclanners would rise up to take his place. Would that wolf be as poisoned with hate, as consumed with revenge as this yellow one? And if that wolf was as mad, would she and Eelon have to kill him as well? This bridge was the only link between the old world of the Beyond and the new one, the one that Faolan and his followers called the Distant Blue. She and Eelon had appointed themselves protectors of Faolan and his friends. They wanted to help this brave brigade of animals find their way to the Distant Blue.

  Zanouche remembered the first time she had ever seen Faolan, when she was flying high above the river in the Beyond. He was but a yearling then. She had watched surreptitiously as his grizzly Milk Giver had taught him to swim. There was something about him at the time. Even though he was young, he seemed to have an inherent nobility. When she had returned to the home nest in Ambala, she told Eelon about the pup.

  You say his pelt is silvery? Eelon had asked.

  Yes, bright as the moon, she had replied.

  And he has a turned paw?

  Yes, I saw it when he clambered out onto the banks.

  This is astonishing! Eelon had exclaimed.

  Absolutely astonishing. He was swimming with a huge grizzly who was caring for him as if he were her own cub.

  Not astonishing in that way, Zanouche.

  What do you mean?

  I flew over that pup when he was on his tummfraw. I could have picked him off.

  Most of the animals in the Beyond had, at one time or another, taken an abandoned wolf pup set out to die. At the end of the hunger moons especially, it was a common practice to feed on malcadhs.

  But you didn’t take him. I remember now. You said you sensed something about him and you just flew on.

  Yes, and now you’ve seen the same pup. He’s alive!

  Most definitely alive, Zanouche had replied.

  And now this horrendous wolf Heep and his rout of savage wolves were out to destroy Faolan and his followers. But Zanouche wondered if she and Eelon were the gatekeepers to the Distant Blue. Who were they to decide who could come into this new world? Suppose one of the wolves in that contemptuous rout of sheer savagery had the possibility of becoming perhaps not a noble wolf but a decent one? Perhaps deep in its marrow a strain of righteousness and fairness might lurk. Was it up to Zanouche and Eelon to decide who could proceed across this Ice Bridge to the Distant Blue? There was something unseemly about their making such decisions. Or so it appeared to Zano
uche.

  She looked down. The yellow wolf was frantically whipping his tail in the wind. His howling scorched the night. The clouds had cleared off, and the full moon blistered the sky with its whiteness.

  THE CLOUDS HAD BEGUN TO ROLL in thickly. The puffins started to cluck and squawk as they became increasingly unsettled throughout the morning, and then Dumpette, who had been out on a scouting flight, skidded into a somersault landing on the Ice Bridge and squawked, “Storm coming! Storm coming!”

  “When?” the Whistler asked.

  “Now, maybe, or later —” She paused and blinked several times. “Or in between perhaps.”

  “That’s, er, helpful,” the Whistler replied.

  “Hole up, that’s what’s helpful!” Dumpette squawked.

  And so the brigade holed up, and it was none too soon. From their snugs in the pressure ridge, they peeked out to see the storm advancing like a solid gray wall of slashing rain and sleet.

  “It’s going to be a wet one,” Edme said. They could all smell it in the air. Somewhere far out there, the Frozen Sea had melted and the roiling winds had sucked up moisture from the open water. It struck fear in them. Wet meant warm, and what would happen if the Ice Bridge began to melt?

  The storm reached its greatest intensity on the evening of the second day. The wolves dared not stick their noses out, but despite the slash of wind and ice, the puffins always managed to bring them fish. They thoughtfully placed them within a paw’s grab, so the animals would not go hungry. The birds would always leave a few extra fish for Abban. They seemed inexorably drawn to him and his odd ways.

  The wind howled incessantly, and more than once, the travelers thought they heard the sound of cracking ice. During the night, they heard a terrible snap. It was the kind of snap that reminded them of the snap of a caribou’s spine when they brought it down. Except this was a thousand times louder. Faolan and Edme both sat up straight, their ears shoved forward, their hackles raised.