Spirit of the Wolves

by Dorothy Hearst

  “You don’t have to do this, girl,” an old human said. He spoke kindly and placed his hand on TaLi’s shoulder. “A krianan doesn’t have to be a great hunter.” But he had called her “girl,” as if she were a child to be taken care of, not a leader to be followed.

  She smiled up at him.

  “I’m no great hunter,” she said. “But the wolves are. It’s just one of the benefits of being one with the world. One of many, and the least of them.” She spoke smoothly. She must have practiced that speech, I thought. I wondered if she was as confident as she sounded, or if she was pretending to be, as I did with Prannan. I looked at RalZun, who was smiling at her, and I felt a chill. I liked the old raven man, but he wouldn’t be the first to try to use us for his own ends. Was he willing to sacrifice us? To sacrifice TaLi to win his battle in Kaar? I shook myself. We were here, and TaLi was determined to hunt the rhino.

  The old human grunted and removed his hand from TaLi’s shoulder.

  “Let’s see what they can do, then.”

  Ázzuen, Pell, and Prannan were immediately at my side. A moment later, Lallna flopped down next to us. She was still spying on us.

  “You’d better not get in our way,” Ázzuen said as I lifted my lip at the Sentinel youngwolf.

  Lallna’s eyes were intent on the waving grasses. “I’ve always wanted to hunt one of these. Navdru and Yildra won’t let us.” She panted up at TaLi. “I might learn to like some of these humans.”

  I couldn’t have been more astonished if she’d said she wanted to be friends with a hyena. I looked over at her, taking in her taut muscles, her focused gaze. She could help us kill the rhino. Still, I didn’t want her thinking she could take charge.

  “It’s my hunt,” I said. “You follow me.”

  Her pale eyes rested on my face, a spark of defiance in them. I met her gaze steadily and lifted my lip to show a glimpse of fang. Ázzuen growled, too softly for the humans to hear, and Pell pulled back his lips.

  “It’s your hunt,” Lallna agreed, “as long as you aren’t the humans’ curl-tails.”

  I dipped my head to her. Immediately, I began thinking about how she could help us. She was fast, strong, and fearless. As much as I wished she weren’t spying on me, I was glad to have her as part of the hunt.

  “You’ll be with Pell. The two of you can distract it and dodge away.” It was the most dangerous task, and Lallna knew it. She grinned at me and tensed her haunches. Pell was watching me carefully. I didn’t have to say anything to him. He would make sure Lallna didn’t interfere with the hunt.

  TaLi was watching me, waiting. She couldn’t understand us, but was perceptive enough to know when we were communicating with each other. She looked curiously at Lallna, whom she’d never met. Unlike many humans, she could tell one wolf from another.

  “We should come back later,” BreLan said to TaLi. “It knows we’re here now.”

  TaLi shook her head. “We’ll drive it back to the woods and kill it there,” she said.

  “ToMin tried that already,” DavRian said. “He got a gored leg out of it.” ToMin was one of Kaar’s best hunters.

  “ToMin didn’t have the wolves,” TaLi said.

  She hit the blunt end of her spear on the ground hard, three times, calling the hunters together.

  “Like the auroch, Kaala,” she said. I licked her hand. We’d hunted the auroch by angering it. When it lost its temper it made fatal mistakes.

  TaLi spoke to several hunters, and they trotted into the field. We followed, keeping our eyes, noses, and ears focused on TaLi.

  “Now!” TaLi shouted, and several of the humans ran at the waving grasses where the rhino hid.

  It actually growled. I’d never heard prey growl before, but it did. Then it bellowed like twenty elkryn, and charged. The humans dodged, agile and quick. They poked at the rhino with their spears, then jumped away. The humans who had not run in surrounded the beast at a distance, holding their spears and spear throwers ready.

  “It has the thickest hide of any beast I know,” Pell said. “The humans will have to have perfect aim and strong arms.”

  “Go,” TaLi said to us. We ran. Pell loped past the humans and flattened out to run under the low belly of the rhino. Lallna yipped. She charged behind the prey and grabbed its tail in her jaws. She hung on as the rhino kicked and bucked. When she fell off, she rolled away and tried to grab its tail again.

  One of the humans fell on his rump. The rhino turned on him. Other humans standing nearby shouted and pelted the rhino with rocks and spears, trying to distract it, while Tlitoo and Jlela flew at its face. It would not be diverted. It lowered its head and charged the fallen human. TaLi had made a mistake. It wasn’t like the auroch, which lost its temper and behaved foolishly. Anger seemed to make this beast even more focused.

  Ázzuen realized it, too. “Hurt it,” he said. “Make it pay attention.” Pell, who was close enough to hear, whuffed in agreement.

  The human had scrambled to his feet but was still in the path of the rhino. Ázzuen and I leapt on the beast and sank our teeth into it. By the time my fangs made it through the thick fur, they barely cut into its hide. Pell grabbed its belly from beneath, allowing the rhino to drag him. Lallna, watching us, made a flying leap and scrambled onto the creature’s back. None of it seemed to do much good.

  TaLi saw what we were doing and shouted to the other humans. They dashed in and began slicing at the rhino with their spears. Lallna tumbled from its back but managed to grab hold of its tail again. Pell was still hanging onto its belly, and the humans struck it again and again. Finally the rhino turned from the fallen human, bellowing in pain. It smelled of blood and rage.

  Now what? I thought. The beast was distracted, but it was furious—furious with the humans around it, furious with us. But not crazed like an auroch. It was intent on killing someone.

  TaLi was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out her words.

  “Get it to the woods, Kaala!” Pell barked. He had finally released the rhino’s belly and lay panting with exhaustion.

  I allowed myself to fall off the rhino’s broad, shaggy back. I hit the ground rolling and came to my paws. Pell was at my side; Ázzuen stood a wolflength away, while Lallna continued to dart under and around the rhino. Several humans continued to harry the beast. TaLi shouted at them, trying to get them to herd the rhino toward the woods.

  “Remember the plains-horse hunt,” I said to Ázzuen and Pell. Ázzuen immediately sprinted off while Pell looked at me. “We herded six horses together over the winter. Just follow what we do.” He looked annoyed, but whuffed in agreement.

  Ázzuen and I darted behind the prey, one on each flank.

  “Take Lallna and get its front legs,” I said to Pell. He ran past Lallna and spoke to her. Then the two of them were at the beast’s forelegs. Ázzuen ran behind it, nipping at its rump. The idea was to trap the prey so it had no choice but to run where we herded it. It had been easy with the horses. They usually went where we wanted them to go. The rhino did not. It kept escaping our trap. It swung its huge head, its horns barely missing Pell and Lallna, then ran off in the wrong direction. It was clever prey.

  BreLan was the first human to figure out what we were doing. He gathered others and several of them ran with us. Together we herded the beast to the woods. The rhino lowered its horns and tried to turn. Then the ravens flew at its back and together we drove it deeper into the woods.

  It was harder for us to move among the trees than on the open plain, but not as difficult as it was for the rhino. I expected it to rampage as it had on the plain, but it looked at me and spoke for the first time. Some prey spoke to us and some did not. I hadn’t known if the rhino could.

  “Why do you help them?” His voice was low and grating. “It is not the way. It is not the way of hunter and of prey.” He swung his head from side to side, snorting gusts of air. “You should fight them. They will kill you as easily as they kill me. There used to be many of us. Many, many. Until t
hey slaughtered us all. That’s why I kill them. They will destroy all of us.”

  Three humans rushed in. The rhino lowered his horns to gore them, but he couldn’t turn quickly enough. The humans jabbed their spears into him. He bucked and ran, trying to maneuver among the dense trees. Ázzuen, Pell, and I wove between the trees, appearing wherever he wasn’t looking. Lallna hurled herself at him, biting at his eyes, and barely missed being gored. A shout sounded from overhead. Several humans had climbed into the branches to hurl sharpsticks from above. Three lodged in the rhino’s neck and he stumbled and then fell.

  “Do not help them,” the beast growled to me. “They take away more than they give.” His voice fell to little more than a grunt.

  Wolf and human attacked again, and before long, the rhino lay dead, his life fleeing his body.

  But his warning remained behind.

  I shook myself, tossing away the rhino’s words. Prey would say anything to survive, and now that he had stopped moving, he was nothing more than good meat. And another way to prove our worth to the humans.

  I don’t know who was panting harder, wolves or humans, as we stood around the dead beast. Lallna was already trying to chew through its thick fur and hide while the rest of us stood staring at the animal.

  HesMi watched both me and TaLi. Lallna glanced up briefly from her futile meal to stare at me. She was waiting to see if I would be submissive. I forced my tired legs into action and climbed atop the dead prey, then stood tall, claiming it. I heard a sharp whuff of breath from Ázzuen, but TaLi just smiled up at me. Tlitoo quorked approvingly and flew into the woods with Jlela.

  First one and then another human started laughing. When I jumped down from the beast, a large human leaned over me. I expected him to thump me on the ribs the way male humans sometimes did, but instead he picked me up. I panicked for a moment, thinking he might throw me to the ground, but he just turned once with me in his arms and set me down before I could get over my shock.

  “I like your wolves!” He grinned at TaLi. Then he picked the girl up and twirled her much the same way. When he set her down, several other humans thumped her on the back. HesMi watched them, smiling. Lallna, who’d finally managed to tear off a piece of meat, grinned at me. Pell dipped his head to me and slipped into the woods and away from the humans.

  Unlike the humans in the Wide Valley, the Kaar hunters didn’t seem to mind that we claimed our share of prey. They seemed to expect it. In the hours it took the humans to cut through the hide of the beast and begin to strip it of meat, we gorged ourselves, feeling comfortable enough to eat our fill among humans. Every once in a while there would be an altercation over a piece of meat, but it was settled quickly as it would be in any pack. I caught DavRian’s aggrieved expression and lifted a lip at him. He watched me for a moment and a sly grin crossed his face. He whispered to IniMin. They were waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. I took another bite of rich, fresh meat.

  By dusk, the humans had cut away most of the meat and loaded it onto the sleds they used to help transport large loads. Ázzuen had an endless fascination with these sleds, which the humans made by tying, bending, and weaving wood and vines together in intricate ways, and he was chewing experimentally at the place where a taut cluster of vines was tied to what looked like most of the trunk of a young aspen. I was more interested in what remained of the rhino carcass. The humans left good bones behind and some good greslin. We could tell the Sentinels and they could come back for it later.

  Prannan trotted to me, his tail waving. Ázzuen, meat-heavy and tired, staggered over to where BreLan was loading meat onto one of the sleds.

  DavRian and IniMin stood then, moving quickly enough to make me nervous. They jogged to where HesMi was standing. They each carried one of the lit branches the humans used to light their way at night. I was far away from them, and they didn’t seem to realize that our hearing was better than theirs.

  DavRian pointed at Ázzuen. “That one was attacking MikLan. Later I saw it standing over him while he was sleeping, waiting to kill him, but it saw me and ran away. The boy left but it stayed behind to try to kill someone else. It’s the one we called ‘Child Killer’ in the Wide Valley. If it bites someone, he’ll be as much wolf as human. And the more time they spend together, the more he’ll become like a wolf.”

  It had been Marra he’d accused before. He couldn’t even tell one wolf from another.

  “That one’s a ghostwolf.” IniMin gestured to Lallna, whose silvery fur did glow when she stood in the moonlight. She was so intent on tearing meat off the remaining rhino bones that she didn’t look up. “It’s a spirit that can suck the life out of a man while he sleeps.”

  “And then there’s Bloody Moon”—DavRian looked at me—“the most dangerous one. They all follow it.”

  HesMi looked skeptical, but several other humans frowned in concern. I trotted over to Ázzuen.

  “I heard them,” he said. “They’ve been saying that about me since DavRian saw Marra and MikLan playing.” He looked at the humans around us. “A lot of the humans believe him.”

  Lallna crept up behind us, laughing.

  “Ghostwolf?” she gulped. “And you’re Bloody Moon?”

  “It isn’t funny,” I said. “It could be dangerous. It’s why Marra left.”

  “You knew he was going to try something, Kaala,” Ázzuen said. “You knew they’d try to stop TaLi from succeeding.”

  “I know,” I said. I was tired. “We’ll have to keep impressing HesMi.”

  “You will, Kaala,” Prannan said, blinking sleepily. “And we’ll help you.”

  I looked into his trusting eyes. Ázzuen was watching me, too, waiting to see if I needed him.

  “We’ll keep listening to what DavRian says,” I said. “And we’ll keep hunting with the humans.” We still had fourteen days until Even Night.

  I plodded over to TaLi and, as darkness fell and the humans lit more of their fire branches, I let her lead us back to Kaar.

  17

  Darkness brought quiet to the village. As soon as they dragged the rhino meat to safety, the villagers of Kaar settled in, making their meals, setting up guards around their homes, and sitting around their fires repairing tools and talking.

  I grew more and more anxious. DavRian was making up stories about us, and some of the humans would believe him. The rhino’s warning nagged at me, and I still feared that the humans would blame us for bringing him to the village. But most of all, I couldn’t stop thinking about the strange little wolves Neesa had shown me. She’d said the humans preferred them to us, that they’d lost the wildness that was wolf, and thus were a threat to wolfkind.

  Yet my love for TaLi didn’t make me want to be submissive to the humans or give up my will, and the humans of Kaar didn’t seem to mind that we weren’t their curl-tails. I wanted to know what it was about the streckwolves that made the humans prefer them to us, and to understand why they were so dangerous. And, I had to admit, they intrigued me. I felt drawn to them as I would to a packmate.

  With Even Night only half a moon away, and both Milsindra and DavRian trying to thwart us, I needed to know everything I could about the little wolves.

  I smelled Pell and Ázzuen in the woods just beyond the village. Prannan and Amma sat by one of the fire pits next to JaliMin, watching as two humans stretched out a piece of rhino hide and scraped at it with one of their tools. The boy was feeding them small pieces of rhino meat, a look of enchantment on his face. I didn’t see or smell Lallna anywhere, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t skulking somewhere. I needed an excuse in case she came looking for me. I padded over to Prannan and Amma.

  “We’re going to look for a smallprey copse Neesa told me about,” I said loudly.

  “We’ll stay here,” Prannan said. “It’s almost time for JaliMin to sleep.” He licked his muzzle. JaliMin gave him another piece of meat. Prannan gulped it. Amma pawed at the boy, who burbled a laugh and held out a piece of cooked rhino. Amma gobbled it from hi
s hand, and licked his face.

  I started to say something to them—that their place was with their pack, or that they shouldn’t go to sleep just because the humans did. But they seemed so happy to be with the boy, and they could tell Lallna my lie if she came looking for me. I touched my nose to Prannan’s face and then to Amma’s and trotted out to find the others.

  They were sitting by the small stream just beyond the village. Ázzuen was glaring at Lallna. Pell was trying not to laugh.

  “Tell her she can’t do it, Kaala,” Ázzuen said to me.

  Lallna crouched down in a patch of moonlight. The moon was almost half full and her fur shone in its light.

  “I’m a ghost wolf,” she said, her face stern. “I’m going to haunt the humans.” Then, unable to hold her serious expression any longer, she slapped both forepaws on the ground twice and ran into the stream and out again, laughing.

  “It isn’t funny,” Ázzuen said, seeing my muzzle twitch. I couldn’t help it. DavRian sounded so stupid calling Ázzuen “Child Killer” and me “Bloody Moon.” And especially calling Lallna “Ghost Wolf.”

  “It’s important, Kaala,” Ázzuen said. “If DavRian keeps provoking their fears, the humans will hate us. Like they started to in the Wide Valley.”

  A rustling of leaves interrupted him and we turned to see Lallna’s tail disappearing into the bushes that bordered the village.

  “Stop her, Kaala,” Ázzuen said. I hesitated.

  “Oh, for the love of the Moon,” Pell said. “When’s the last time we had some fun?” His tail began to wag.

  Ázzuen watched me.

  “I can’t stop Lallna from doing anything,” I said.

  “You can if you assert your role as leaderwolf.” His eyes were intent on me. “When are you going to, Kaala?”

  I blinked at him. I had enough to do without trying to assert authority over Lallna and Pell. But he had made me uneasy. I followed Lallna.