Forever Wolf

by Maria Vale

  I lay my hand on the hot, tight mass. My fingers feel like ice by comparison, and the wolf draws a deeper breath through cracked lips, but his eyes do not open. He is unconscious and alive, but only just.

  Leaning back on my heels, I suck in another hit of the clean, clear scent of Arctic wolf.

  It has taken me years to prove myself to Victor, but I came in the middle of a time of peace. Then the Shifter came, and all our Deemer’s worst fears have been borne out. Now he clings to Pack traditions like a superstitious old man spitting over his shoulder: fu-fu-fu.

  Still, this is not a Shifter or a human. He is a wolf, and a big one. If I can get him back to strength, I’ll talk to Victor. Then we’ll see.

  The route to Home Pond is hard enough on two legs without any other impediment, so I can’t possibly get medical supplies in time, especially since I’d have to carry them back through the dark, guided only by my weakened senses in skin.

  I look around the cave. It’s tidier than I remember from when I took Ronan’s foot in my jaws and helped drag him out. Bottles are lined up against one wall next to two backpacks. If the Pack had cleaned it out, they would’ve gotten rid of everything that was even vaguely human.

  I dump both backpacks to see what I have to work with.

  The smaller backpack is worn olive canvas and smells of Arctic wolf. Change of clothes, some protein bars.

  A cell phone that turns on when I push the button. No reception, of course. I turn it off again.

  Toothbrush. Floss for getting out those pesky bits of tendon that stay and stick when a wolf’s teeth go flat and crowd together.

  It’s like a go-bag for the Iron Moon.

  The other larger backpack clearly belonged to Ronan. I knew that even before I smelled tiny Golan’s fear. What wolf could know so little about his Pack? How could he not know that they would shred heaven and earth to find their pup?

  It is crammed with things he stole from the Great Hall, mostly food and a bundled collection of threadbare Packish clothes: two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, three Henleys, all bearing the names of schools within a day’s drive of Homelands. All XXXL. One particularly worn tee falls to shreds almost as soon as I look at it. I put it aside for bandages.

  In the front pocket is a flashlight and Ronan’s seax. On the back of the sheath, he carved his name along with a clumsily rendered α. Ronan was certainly big enough to be an Alpha, but size isn’t enough. He was too lazy, and when smaller Solveig, who wasn’t lazy at all, challenged him, she not only defeated him, but worse, she made him afraid. By the end, he had fallen to the bottom of the 14th Echelon beside Silver, a runt with a dislocated hip.

  He might have gotten his spine back and fought his way up the hierarchy again, but he drank. Even though alcohol does terrible things to our bodies, he drank.

  He’d been drinking on the day he died.

  The bottles are mostly water, as though water in plastic and shipped from exotic places is wetter and better than that of Homelands. I remember because as I was dragging him out, I stepped on a bottle that crackled and snapped loudly under my paw.

  There is also a glass bottle half full of—I read the label—Seagram’s Seven with several inches of brown liquid.

  Even with the bottle closed, the smell burns my nose, but I know what it is and what it’s good for.

  The Arctic wolf doesn’t move at all as I pull his injured leg out of the sleeping bag. I clamp it between my thighs so that when I slice through the length of his abscess with Ronan’s seax, he won’t jerk involuntarily and kick my teeth out.

  As soon as I twist off the cap, the Seagram’s hits the back of my nose hard and makes me sneeze. It also stings the inevitable small cuts on my hands when I pour some over the seax and more along the ridge of the infection. Then I clench the flashlight between my teeth.

  I measure where the cut should be. He’s probably going to die if I do this, but he is certainly going to die if I don’t. Thankfully, Ronan was at least wolf enough to occasionally sharpen his seax, but even so, as the knife goes in, this wolf’s body jerks.

  One exhausted eye swims momentarily up to consciousness. I know eyes that color, the pale, faded blue of old ice. I know the expression too. The one of confused betrayal. I look away and slice deep, then his body relaxes against mine. When I check back, that accusing eye is closed. Thick, yellow pus oozes from the opening. I irrigate it slowly with a mix of clean water and Seagram’s until it runs clear.

  What most wolves would do now, what I should do now, is debride him, clean him with my mouth and sensitive tongue, but I haven’t debrided another wolf since Mitya. Leonora says that westends won’t do it because they find it disgusting.

  I won’t do it because of the almost unbearable intimacy of it all, the touch of lips to skin, of tongue to blood. Of giving comfort that is so much more profound than, say, sex, which is nothing but a tree, a towel, and the duty to procreate. Debriding is comfort and healing and belonging.

  Instead, I wrap my finger in the shredded T-shirt dipped in whiskey and run it through the cut, cleaning it out, searching for whatever bit of hide or fur or rusted metal keeps it from healing.

  A tiny sound, a half a groan, burbles up from his chest, and a burning-hot hand touches the back of my head. At first, I think he’s going to grab my hair and yank me away, but he doesn’t. He leaves his hand there until the third pass with the third alcohol-dosed rag, when I pull up a large gluey wad of fur.

  Then the hand goes limp and falls to the ground. The wolf’s breath comes deeper. I pour more alcohol and water into the gash.

  He doesn’t wake at all when I repeat the whole thing with the back side of his thigh.

  Seagram’s. Knife. Rags. Seagram’s.

  Tearing more straps, I wrap his mangled leg before sliding it back into the sleeping bag.

  Then I put everything back, starting first with Ronan’s bag. I was wrong. This isn’t all stuff he’d stolen. There are things like—I turn a tube upside down—mousse à raser and baume après-rasage in a scent called myrrh that makes me gag. A razor, which is odd: Homelands wolves do not shave because if done too close to the Iron Moon, it compromises the guard hairs.

  Wolves also don’t wear jewelry, except for the neck braid that symbolizes mated wolves’ commitment to Pack and land and each other. There is a metal cuff with the words Alpha male. Clearly a human thing. He certainly never wore it at Homelands. Too afraid of the half-dozen Alpha females who would line up for a chance to remind him that the words alpha and male do not necessarily follow and should definitely not be etched in steel.

  How, I wonder, could someone like Silver, who is the wildest of us all, have a shielder who was so… I try to think of the westend word for it but can’t think of anything that comes close to the Old Tongue… Manweorþung. Man-esteeming?

  Then I put everything back. The Arctic wolf’s bag was carefully packed. Aside from the clothes, toiletries, and phone is a wallet with a few dollars, a work schedule at the Walmart Supercenter in Malone, and a fake ID. Not even a good fake. I can tell because the Great North knows how to fake documents.

  Frank Carter, it says in a serif font. From Kearsarge, Mich.

  A broad, flat metal box with colored pencils, eraser and sharpener, and a spiral-bound notebook. The pages are plain and heavy and lightly textured and filled with drawings. Not filled, crowded, clotted with drawings. Mostly black and gray, which explains why those two pencils are so much shorter than their fellows. Some are no more than the roughest outlines—a few lines to hint at a river when the water is low, a somber cathedral of mountains, the dappling of fall hardwoods, mist rising when warm rain hits ice.

  Explicit detail is reserved for smaller things: the bark of paper birch, the winter skeleton of Queen Anne’s lace, a constellation of striders on dimpled water.

  Each drawing is labeled with a place—Ontario. Manitoba, Alberta, Wi
sconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan—and a date.

  I am aware enough of the patterns of our lives to see the pattern in this life too. A day before or after the Iron Moon spent recording what he sees so that when he moves on, he remembers.

  At the front of the journal is the Roman numeral VII.

  How long have you been alone, wolf? We are much more social than westends. We need more structure, care for our young longer, take losses harder. Usually lone wolves don’t last long. That’s why exile is really a death sentence.

  How long have you been alone, and how did you survive?

  I sit back, my legs crossed, my hand to the just-touched hair at the crown, and breathe in the scent of cold. It’s so vivid, so present that I almost feel that if I open my eyes, I will be surrounded by my pack. Not by this new pack that hasn’t been “new” for decades, but by Vrangelya. Big and hard and, to my young eyes, so invincible. And I would see Mitya. Not like this. Not an injured adult, but little and hopeful in a land that never rewarded that kind of thing.

  I don’t know how long I sit there watching the slow rise and fall of the body in front of me, sucking in the undeniable and necessary smell of cold. It must have been a while, because wolves howl the midday song, reminding me that I have responsibilities, real responsibilities, to the warm Pack down below.

  Putting three bottles of water in front of him where he can’t miss them, I get ready to change.

  Astille, guðling…

  What was the song? And who sang it? And why is it bubbling up from my memory like muck from the bottom of a disturbed pond?

  Astille, guðling, þu eart gesund mid me.

  Sona, biþ se mona her something, something.

  Still, little warrior, you are safe with me.

  Soon the moon will be here, something, something.

  Astille, guðling,

  Still, little warrior.

  Chapter 5

  Too many Offland wolves are treating their time home as something called a “vacation.” A vacation is a human concept meaning, as far as I can recall from Leonora’s explanation, that an individual suspends their contribution to the survival of the Pack while others pick up the slack.

  Well, not in the 12th they don’t.

  We have been assigned to expand the cold frames in case the Offlanders are still here during harvest season. The echelon is distracted and must be made to focus on their work so the corners are properly squared and the insulation fits without interfering with the lie of the lids.

  “You forgot the washers. So you’ll have to redo the bolts.”

  “All of…?” Reinholt asks. “Yes, Shielder.”

  They take the blessing of this sanctuary for granted.

  Tonia throws worms at Lorcan, who giggles, his scent taking on a smell I know too well.

  When I suggest they stop throwing worms and just go into the woods and fuck already, Lorcan slams his hammer down, splitting the wood. He is a child who wants to be liked and doesn’t understand why I don’t want to play. He is very strong of body—he is Alpha, after all—but he is weak of marrow and doesn’t understand that being liked is not an Alpha’s purpose.

  I hand him a new piece of pine. “Now you have to cut it again.”

  It doesn’t matter. I am disliked enough for both of us.

  I am the last to leave, screwing in the final lids and making sure everything is tight and well made and that the tools are clean and dry and hung in their proper places. The 12th has already bathed and is probably in the Great Hall, eating.

  For now, I sit at the roots of a tight grouping of speckled alder and wait for the line to the Bathhouse to shorten. I am downwind and out of eyeshot, but I can hear the Offlanders grouse about the work or the crowding. I listen, ready in case tempers fray and complaining turns to bloodshed.

  Zelda, the 4th’s Gamma, complains about her new roommate, saying that she is difficult and severe. Micclum scripende.

  Very… What would the westends here say? Dark, maybe? Hard. Hard is better.

  “Ha-ha,” titters a familiar voice.

  “Ours is scripendost!” one of my roommates says with another laugh.

  “Whose cabin are you in?” Zelda asks.

  “The 12th’s Alpha Shiel”—her voice falters—“der?”

  “Varya the Indurate?” whispers some subordinate wolf from the 7th.

  “Oh, shut up!” hisses Zelda. There is a whispered conversation that I can’t hear and don’t need to. I know my reputation. I know what the Great North whispers about me.

  Three minutes later, two of my roommates run, half-naked, toward the cabin, muttering angrily about who should have cleaned up the dried-milk spill.

  So now, without me doing anything, the refrigerator will be cleaned and there are two fewer people in line.

  Someone takes the last clean towel, and a fight breaks out. The towel taker is led away quickly because a wolf removed his tooth with her fist. If he doesn’t go to medical and have the tooth reset quickly, the missing canine will interfere with his hunting. His bedfellow, who had been sniffing around a receptive male, reluctantly leaves the line.

  Now four fewer people in line, and those who remain are furious. One starts arguing with the 6th’s Beta who is in charge of crowd control. “Dinner will be over before the rest of us get a chance!”

  I nod to Victor, who is not wearing bath shoes or carrying a towel. “Is there some problem here, Alpha?” In the absence of any Alpha-ranked wolf, he calls me Alpha, as is right.

  “A squabble, but it is over now, Deemer.”

  He looks at the band of discontents standing in the churned-up earth. “So, is this what the Great North has come to?” he says loudly and rhetorically. “A group of wet mutts standing in the mud?” His voice has something to it. Scorn? Sarcasm? Anyway, something peculiarly human.

  The Offlanders, who are used to privacy and easy access to running water, murmur their assent and listen to the Deemer who speaks to their concerns.

  The Pack, he says, is a chain that is only as strong as its weakest link, but we have too many weak links now. The runt, who should by all rights have no say at all, has the ear of the Alpha. He says. The Shifter who has been responsible for peeling back our protections and leaving us vulnerable to his father is a full-fledged member of the Pack. He says. And now the Alpha has allowed a westend þe wat to live. A human who knows. With one quick yank, the Pack will fall apart.

  He says.

  Wolves from the 6th run in with towels. Two others leave the Bathhouse, but the slavering horde that used to be a line seems to have lost interest, so I stretch and stride past.

  “Alpha?” says Victor.

  I bend my head in deference to his station, but I will not give up a turn at the Bathhouse in order to join a mob.

  Tossing my sweaty clothes into the big hamper, I turn to one of the showers. Two wolves look away.

  “What do you think?” says one. “You had enough?”

  “Yeah, we should get going. We have…tomorrow…” the other says, his voice petering out.

  They nod at me, their eyes not lowered so much as averted.

  I nod back, but I doubt they see.

  None of the wolves of the Great North will look at the scars across my belly. No one else has them, but they all know what they are. They know they don’t come from any fight. They know that a Clifrung, a clawing, is a punishment just one step short of the ritual flesh tearing by which the Pack ends a wolf’s life.

  They know that no wolf was allowed to clean the wounds or care for them, so that they would mark me forever as Wearg. They also know that I was marked this way when I first came, only a juvenile, to the Great North. That I had already lost the right to my Pack name and was no longer Varya Timursdottir.

  The juvenile who dubbed me Varya the Indurate thought she was being so brave and rebellious
. She couldn’t possibly know how little I cared.

  I was already Varya Wearg: Varya the Bloodthirsty. Varya the Outlaw.

  See, now that is saying something.

  Only Nils, who was Alpha when I came, knew why the Alpha of Pack Vrangelya had ripped his claws through my flesh. Perhaps Nils told John before he died. Perhaps John told Evie before he died. I don’t know. They never asked, and I have no interest in telling.

  Armed with a rough-bristle brush and a bar of the soap wolves use so that our particular scent isn’t obscured, I stand under the icy water, rasping at my skin until I feel nothing.

  It’s too dark to return to Westdæl on two legs, but I will go back in the morning.

  Chapter 6

  First thing in the morning, I head to the Great Hall and pull together things that the Arctic wolf might need. Water pouch. Ground pad. Antibiotics. Gauze. It will be a while before he is healed enough to go through the change without reopening everything. Unable to hunt, he will need food. In another room in the basement, still-shiny wire shelves carefully bolted into walls and floors and to one another carry row after row of dried and canned foods: beans, rice, fruit, vegetables. The things the Pack eats when they’re in skin and can’t hunt but will not eat old flesh and carrion the way westends do.

  Shoving boxes of food willy-nilly into a backpack, I hide what I’m doing from no one, and no one asks.

  The coffee is on, and juveniles are in the kitchen making something—date-walnut scones from the look of it—for breakfast.

  Gran Tito glances toward me but says nothing as I rummage through the cupboards looking for more food. Instead, he taps on the long scraped-oak table surrounded by juveniles to bring their attention back to him. Usually juveniles knead dough while the adult wolf reads. But it’s still called a Knead and Read if they are chopping dates and reciting texts. The previous Alpha, John, taught literature, and Evie, his mate, insists that the Great North be well read.