by Maria Vale
Jumping up, I rummage through the worn canvas backpack for his spare clothes. Then I stand, my arms crossed, while he struggles first into his pants and then his shirt.
The sun slips down behind the serrated silhouette of the mountains to the west. On most nights, this would be the time when the Great North’s Alpha would start the æfensang, evening song, but the helicopter intrusions into Homelands have made the Pack afraid, and frightened Packs are silent.
“Do you think you could…?”
“What?”
“Help?” His arm is contorted, reaching for the hem of the dark Henley stuck to the damp skin above his shoulder blades.
I watch him straining for the bunched fabric. More proof, if I needed it, that this wolf has never been part of a Pack. Even in the Great North, a wolf who asked for help would likely be challenged. In Vrangelya, they’d be dead.
He looks at me expectantly with those different-colored eyes, the trick of genetics that guarantees he will never belong to a Pack. He will never be challenged for cunnan-riht, fucking rights. He will never fight for rank in a hierarchy. He will never be set upon by vicious dominants looking for a scapegoat. So what does it matter what other wolves might think? There are no other wolves; there’s only me.
And what do I think? After Vrangelya’s end, I spent a year wandering alone, looking for the Great North, and it nearly killed me. This wolf has survived years, maybe decades, on his own.
The Great North may have been weakened by peace, but this wolf has never known it.
I pluck at the shirt, gingerly extricating it, but as it starts to come down, I notice one other scar, made by a bullet like the one at his shoulder. An exit wound. It’s not the exit wound itself that’s odd. What’s odd is that the entrance wound and exit wound are aligned. If I put a dowel through the front hole, it would come out the back.
Now, if he had taken the bullet wild, the changes to his chest, the way it grows wider and shallower when he shifts from four legs to two, would mean that the scars would not line up when he was in skin. One would be at his nipple, the other under his armpit, an impossible trajectory for a human but not uncommon for wolves who have been shot wild and survived long enough to change.
Without thinking, my hand goes to the same spot below my shoulder.
He looks at me. Not like the wolves of the Great North, whose eyes always cling to the safety of my clavicle, but into my eyes. At least until his gaze drops pointedly to the scars of my waist, following the curving track of four claws that swipe from my left hip bone to my right breast. He sees the hard ridges and the soft flesh in between. His fingers go stiff, kinked, as though trying to imagine the feeling of the claws tearing through flesh.
When he looks back into my eyes, I see the same response I know he sees in mine.
Don’t ask.
“My name’s Frank Carter,” he says, pulling tighter on white ties at his waistband.
I say nothing.
“Generally, one says ‘Nice to meet you, Frank. My name is…’”
“The Alpha Shielder of the 12th Echelon of the Great North.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s your name.”
“Frank Carter’s not your name either.”
He looks at me sideways. “And what makes you say that?”
“Wolves identify each other by scent. Any other identification, the kind humans need, is faked. But the Pack makes good fakes. Not the kind with half-drunk serifs.”
“The Pack?”
“Yes, the Pack.”
“How big’s the Pack?”
“Big enough and powerful, and like all wolf packs, very territorial. I have not told them you are here, because you need some time to heal, but if they find out, you will be dead and I will be punished—and our punishments are painful.”
He holds out one hand to me. This time, I help without being asked, but as soon as he stumbles upright, he puts his arm around my shoulders.
“What?” He looks at me with his eyebrows raised. “I’m not going to make it back up by myself.”
“How did you think you were going to get back up?”
“I didn’t. I thought I was going to wash up, keep heading down until I got some reception, call my manager, tell him I was sick, and see if he would take me back. When he said no, I’d move on a little sooner than I’d expected.”
“And now?” I say, distracted by the hand settled somewhere between my left breast and my left bicep.
He settles his weight against me, and not just the weight of his arm but his entire body. His skin is warm. Or not really. It’s just less cold than mine. When he leans on me, it feels uncomfortably close. Certainly closer than Lorcan, who touches me as little as possible even when he covers me. Teeth. Cock. Occasional tickle of chest hair. Nothing else.
A cardinal calls. Whip whip chupchupchupchup.
Chew chew chew chew chew comes the answer.
“Do you know what an endling is?” the wolf asks.
I shake my head, trying to remember when I took his hand in mine and wrapped my free arm around his waist.
“It’s the last of its kind. There always has to be one. The one who calls but is never answered. That’s what I thought I was. The endling werewolf. I know, not werewolf, but still the last.” He smiles faintly. “Then you answered.”
He didn’t call and I didn’t answer. I just happened to be the wrong wolf in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will patch him up, but then I will send him away and I will guard this land to make sure that nothing and no one ever gets in again.
“D’you smell that?” His eyes swim, too tired to focus. “Smells like mmm.” I didn’t catch that last part. “I wasn’ paying attention. What rabbid dozn run when a wolf comes?”
I pull him tighter and drag him those last feet until he can crawl into the cave and collapse onto the open sleeping bag. Arranging his body as best I can, I zip the sleeping bag around him. At the top, I pluck his hair away so it won’t get caught between the teeth.
“Eyulf,” he says. “That’s all. Just Eyulf.”
I look at the white strand between my fingers. The cardinals are still at it in the woods lower down. Whip whip chupchupchupchup. I’ve only bothered with my rank and echelon. Chew chew chew chew chew. But now it doesn’t really seem like an answer.
Silently, I mouth the two syllables of a name I haven’t said since I first came to the Great North. When I’d told Nils and Alexandra my name was Varya Timursdottir, even though I’d lost the right to my Pack name.
“Varya. That’s all. Just Varya.”
“Varya,” he murmurs. The sound of that name and the smell of cold peel my nerves bare.
I sit for a moment until his breathing slows and his eyes flit around under the fine translucent skin, and I wonder at the cruel irony that led him to be named “lucky wolf.”
Chapter 14
There is one thing I am sure of when I wake up to the hazy purple-gray of early morning. Based on his increasingly incoherent ramblings about rabbits, Eyulf was clearly able to scent the Pack when he was caught.
No one sets a trap near Homelands.
I circle the peak of Westdæl, my nose to the ground, searching for any smell—blood, rust, iron, sepsis—that might indicate which way he came. If it had only just rained, the scent might be stronger and closer to the earth, but days of rain have washed it away.
At the very bottom, where the westernmost border of the Great North’s territory meets up with human land, there is a line of the Pack’s inevitable signs. They aren’t the rough WESTENDAS, AGAÞ ONWEG I’d imagined when I was young. Instead, they are bright-yellow plastic and read:
POSTED
PRIVATE PROPERTY
HUNTING, FISHING, TRAPPING, OR TRESPASSING FOR ANY PURPOSE IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE
LAW.
Then they give the name and cell of not one but two Pack lawyers: ELIJAH SORENSSON (JD, LLM) AND JOSI DIANASDOTTIR (JD)
In most parts of Homelands, it’s not the lawyers who discourage interlopers; it’s the land itself. The Great North clears no deadfall and maintains no paths and marks no hazards and never cuts back its witch hobble. This land is, as the law says, entirely “unimproved.”
I can’t find any sign of Eyulf’s passing or a trap near the boundary with Westdæl, nothing along the empty and exposed length of the Gin. I head farther east along the border of Norþdæl, where I meet up with two wolves from the 7th and 8th assigned to patrol the precious sanctuary of the High Pines.
Their eyes do not meet mine, and they twist in the air, quickly heading back the way they came. I watch as they disappear into the firs, their tails tucked firmly between their legs. As soon as they’re gone, I continue my search all the way to the border and look to the lands that westends think are wild.
There the deer have become bold, eating away the vegetation and making the land more comfortably accessible for things on two legs and too uncomfortably exposed for things with four. It’s a very different place without wolves. Fewer plants, fewer animals. More packaging. Pringles, primarily.
But no traps.
I head all the way to Endeberg, the final mountain in this northern range—and still nothing. Then I head back, nose to the ground.
The Arctic wolf sits on a stone, his leg stretched out in front of him. He has a sturdy branch with a Y at the top propped beside him, the notebook on his lap.
“I know where the trap is. If that’s what you’re looking for.”
He closes his notebook and puts a pencil back in the metal box. It rattles as he drops it into his backpack.
“It’s not far.”
I cock my head to the side.
He slings the backpack over his shoulders and fits the branch under his arm like a makeshift crutch. Then he starts hobbling, not west and north, the areas nearest to the humans, but rather to the south and east.
With each step deeper into Homelands, my fury rises, until unable to stand his slow progress, I swirl around on my hind legs and shoot off in the direction he’s headed.
“Wait, Varya!”
I can’t wait. It’s one thing if traps are laid Offland, or even in Westdæl, where Pack rarely go. But he pointed toward the interconnected waters of Clear Pond and Beaver Pond, and those are frequented by wolves—and even juveniles and pups sometimes. Maybe not so much now, because the water is mostly frozen, but very soon they will be good hunting grounds for the beavers and rabbits and ground squirrels that our young favor.
As I clear the ridge, the ember in my chest bursts into flames. A silent coyote circles the ice, scraping at the steel jaws that hold his bleeding mate.
Someone has dared to set a trap in Homelands.
With a choked howl, I run down the hill. One way or the other, I will deal with this. Either with fingers if there’s a chance she can survive, or with jaws if she needs to be freed in another, more final way. Her mate looks helplessly toward me and flees to the camouflage of a nearby buttonbush, while she crouches low, as far from the iron jaws as she can get.
Now I’m close enough, and I throw myself on the ground, already leaning into my hips. I don’t know that she will survive, but if she doesn’t, her nurslings will die too. During the seemingly endless span of the change, I hear nothing but the sound of my pulse raging at the westend who dared ignore our signs, dared walk a half mile in, dared to set a trap.
And dared to do it twice, because the trap Eyulf tripped has been reset.
My change isn’t entirely finished when I run the rest of the way down the slope. Or not run, really. Careen, my bare feet rolling on loose stone and sliding down moss-covered rock, blinking and popping my ears until I finally tumble over a chunk of gneiss tossed here by some unfeeling glacier solely to trip me into the snow-covered edge of Beaver Pond.
“Varya, stop!” Eyulf screams, scuttling desperately down the hillside with one leg and his makeshift crutch. It’s a plea made as loud as his hollowed-out voice will allow. But it’s not the volume that stops me. It’s that the two words have summoned a memory to the top of a mountain made of them. A little bird flittering on the icy ground of another land. Of another voice in another language.
Oþstand, Varya!
Stop, Varya.
“Westends will waste a little life,” Yefim had said, “to take a bigger one.” I remember watching the little bird with a red cap that I now know was a redpoll flittering just out of my reach. Taunting me with my hunger.
A few weeks later, another bigger bird flittered just out of reach of our starving Omega dying in a larger trap. Illarion did what was needed and killed him.
What rabbit doesn’t run when a wolf comes?
One that’s trapped.
The trap holding the coyote is not large enough or powerful enough to have mangled the wanderer’s leg. It was about the right size to catch and mangle a rabbit.
I back away, careful to step only into my naked footprints.
There are sticks everywhere. This isn’t called Beaver Pond for nothing. I tear one that looks good and strong from a frozen pile of them and begin poking the ground with it.
Most of the earth is still icy hard, though I know the qualities of ice well enough to identify the thin ice above the fresh water runoff. I move forward slowly, pushing at all the likely places. Then at the less-likely places. But it is an unlikely place, a patch of snow dotted with dried sedge that erupts with a loud crack.
Snow, dirt, and grass fly into the air. The stick shatters in teethed jaws that even I know are not legal.
A low rumble moves through my human chest, enraged that someone would try to do to the Great North what had been done to Vrangelya. This trapper took great pains. They carved out a depression and drilled a hole into frozen ground. They set spike and chain. They covered the tray with plastic and then buried the whole thing in dirt and a neat covering of white snow and then…then they carefully stuck in pieces of grass.
And they did it here. In the Deore Norþ.
The coyote struggles to her remaining three legs, moving as far from me as the trap will allow. She is dehydrated and cold and desperate to get back to her young litter. Traps are so indifferent that way. Young, old, or nursing.
“What are you going to do?” Eyulf asks, breathless when he finally arrives at the edge of the pond.
“Free her. Be careful. The ice is thin there.”
“I can see. It may be kinder to kill—”
“She’s got a mate waiting”—I lift my chin toward the male waiting anxiously behind the spare gathering of buttonbush still dotted with dark seeds—“and pups somewhere. There is a chance she won’t die.”
I’m glad to see her fighting, snapping at my hand with her little jaws until I wrap my fingers around them. I ignore the scrabbling of her claws against my bare skin as I force open the trap, releasing her leg.
“Astille, guðling,” I whisper. Hush, little warrior.
My arms wrapped tight around her struggling body, I take her toward the gray ice, where snowmelt from Westdæl still runs clear before joining the murky beaver water and becoming undrinkable. Slamming into it with my bare heel, I squat down while she scrapes with her hind legs at my torso. At first, she rejects the frigid water cupped in my hand. I suppose it does, after all, smell like wolf. Finally, thirst overcomes her, and her soft tongue laps against my palm.
Scoop by scoop, I dribble the water into another creature’s mouth. Not too much: it’s too cold and she needs food too. By the third, she has drawn closer to my body, clinging to the heat of my body. Her muscles relax, her broken foreleg dangling.
When I set her down, she doesn’t snarl or bite or run the straight shot to her mate. Instead, she hobbles slowly
toward the buttonbush, even stopping to look back along the length of her flanks.
That’s not good.
We never say that we are “human,” only that we are “in skin.” It is a tacit acknowledgment that we are, in essence, wild and that the layer covering our true natures is thin and superficial. I may have helped her, but I cannot allow her to go on believing that things that look like me or smell like me are safe.
So I lunge. Even with my pathetic flat teeth, my bite hurts, sending her racing for her mate as fast as she can.
But now, because I bit her with those pathetic flat teeth, I have tongue bunnies.
“What’d you do that for?”
Sticking out my tongue, I carefully pick away the long hairs, while the coyote’s anxious mate parallels her, smelling her, nosing her leg and the spot on her shoulder where a creature that smells like a wolf and acts like a wolf but doesn’t look like a wolf bit her.
“It is against the law to tame prey. To take away their fear and then kill them is a crime.”
There’s a snorted laugh as he carefully braces himself against the big rock. “Really? And what law would that be?”
“The only law that counts here.” I take the chain of the smaller trap in two hands and pull. “Pack law.” It comes out, the chain clotted with frosty mud. I drop it and turn to the larger trap.
There’s a hole drilled next to it that stinks of frozen deer chum. I wrap the chain around my hand. Predictably, whoever set these drilled the chain of the bigger trap deep. The frigid metal cuts into my skin.
Settling my bare feet firmly on either side of the ground, I wrap the chain once more around my hands and bend my knees. Extending my legs, I haul the thing inch by inch out of this frozen land and then drag both traps to the rock.
“Watch out.”
As soon as he hops away, I swing the chains and the traps and slam them again and again against the rock. Stone chips fly, and the metal bends and finally breaks. In the end, they are both warped and broken like picked-over carcasses scattered around my makeshift anvil.
The Pack calls. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrashed at the traps so hard, because now the wolves are worried. They call from the direction of Home Pond, asking questions that I can’t answer at this distance in this form. Then their calls move closer.
