Forever Wolf

by Maria Vale

  “They’re coming,” I whisper to Eyulf. “You have to go.”

  “Go? Why? Why should I have to go?”

  “I told you. Packs are very territorial.” I push the stick toward him, but he refuses to take it. “They do not tolerate strangers.”

  “Like you? Pox are vehrrreee tehrrrritohrrial,” he says, his voice rolling deep across his tongue. “You’re not from here. How come you’re a stranger who belongs here and I’m a stranger who doesn’t?”

  That’s it, isn’t it? But I don’t have time to explain why there will never be a place for him in the few minutes before wolves come and see the Bone Wolf, the harbinger of the beginning of the end and…

  “If you go now, I will find you and I will tell you why it has to be this way. But if they see you, they will hunt you down and you will die.”

  With a truncated howl, the approaching wolves tell Home Pond that they are nearing the place of the worrisome noise.

  “You’ve got to hide,” I hiss. “Go now, and I will find you.”

  It takes too long for him to scrabble up, and he only just finds the tree line when the two wolves, flashes of gray and tawny brown, emerge from the woods near the eastern edge of Beaver Pond. After a quick conspiratorial glance, they drop their heads, tuck in their tails, and lower their eyes as they lope around the pond.

  I stay silent. They can tell everything they need to already. Two traps. Coyote caught. Shredded metal. By not saying anything, I do not have to lie. I do not tell them that the reason I strayed so far from my perimeter detail was because this is the second time these traps have captured a living creature.

  One of the wolves sniffs the air near me, scenting the sticky blood freed by the hard, icy chain. I do not look at him but stand, my legs stiff, my hands clasped behind my back. Wolves should never see their dominants in distress. It makes them anxious.

  The two wolves rub muzzles against the remains of the traps, gathering the scent. They mark the area in the way of wolves before backing away at a low crouch until, at a respectful distance, they whip around and run for Home Pond.

  Other wolves will smell the news they bring and come. Wolves with work gloves who will take the pieces of metal back where they will warm up, and the Pack’s best trackers will see if they can identify the westend through the gloves I already know they wore.

  If they find the culprit, the Great North will hunt them down, not with jaws and claws but with writs and torts and whatever legal mumbo jumbo comes from an army of lawyers with way too much time on their hands.

  Chapter 15

  The wolves showed no sign that they noticed Eyulf, passing by his trail without a single twitch of a nostril. Missing the scent that snaps at me like a north wind in winter, pulling me almost in a trance to a rocky promontory midway up Westdæl that gives out over the Gin and the vastness of the High Pines.

  Eyulf leans back, his arms straight, his head bent to the side, staring into the distance. He doesn’t look at me but knows I’m there.

  “I’ve been to a lot of places that are called wilderness. None are like this.”

  He points with his chin toward the lower slopes of Norþdæl. “See? They’re almost ready. Must be beautiful in the spring.”

  It takes me a minute to figure out what he means by “almost ready” before I realize that he’s looking at the hardwoods that have taken on a dusky-purple tint like a watercolor wash. It’s one of the first signs of spring, but it hasn’t spread Offland yet. Those trees are shorter, the branches sparser, the spaces in between wider. And because deer are in the mood to eat anything remotely tender, the trees have been denuded of the tiny mauve buds.

  “And the place you come from, is it like this?” he asks.

  I feel the itch at the back of my neck, a prickling that if I were wild would mean my hackles were raised at being asked something so personal.

  “It is—was—colder,” I hear myself saying. “Barer. Though…for a couple of weeks, it was covered with flowers.”

  “What kind?”

  “Of flowers?” My mind pokes around the oubliette of my heart where all my memories are stored, trying to find a name for those rare bright spots against the gray scrub. Nothing. Not that I’ve forgotten; I just never knew. “They were low, mostly. Yellow, purple, and white. Mostly. But I don’t know what they were called.”

  “Pity.”

  Pity?

  “They say,” he says, still staring across the shielding expanse of gray and pine, “that the colder the land, the more passionate the thaw.”

  At that moment, the peach-and-gold line of the sun gives way to lavender, and Evie starts evening song. Æfensang. It begins as it always does, with the Alpha howl moving through the lower registers, strong and secure and open. It is meant to reassure and bind her wolves. Anyone who is wild joins in—higher, more staccato—weaving their voices around the deep power of their Alpha’s call.

  After a rough intake of breath, Eyulf closes his eyes and lets the sound envelop him. I did the same thing my first evening at the Great North. We’d never sung in Vrangelya. Why would the hunted call out to the hunters?

  I was sitting in the medical station that first evening, waiting to be checked for fleas, when the unabashed, unafraid cry rolled through the cool, early evening air. I did exactly the same thing as this wolf: closed my eyes and let wave after thrilling wave wash over me and lick me clean.

  It was then that I knew why they called it Deore Norþ, and I also knew that I would do anything to make sure that there was a place left in the world for wolf song. I knew I would pit my hard body and my harder will against anyone who would dare do here what had been done in Vrangelya.

  Wulf sang ahóf, holtes gehléða…

  The wolf raised up his song, the companion of the forest…

  Only Evie fully understands the warp and weft of the chorus of voices. Only our Alpha can truly read in it the mood of Homelands. By picking apart the harmonies, she knows where her wolves are and that they are safe. She calls again to make sure she hasn’t missed anyone.

  She doesn’t worry about those who are in skin. We are safe enough. I let the sound embrace me and remind me—in a way that nothing else can—what it is that I am responsible for, something so much larger and more important than myself.

  Eventually, Evie stops, followed by the rest of the Pack. Except for the high-pitched sound of the pups in the barely audible distance, who are too caught up in the joy of communion to notice that it has ended. Then with a final roo-oop, they fall silent too.

  The still wolf next to me sighs. “So that was the Pack?”

  “Yes.”

  He raises his hip slightly and hooks his finger, retrieving something from his pocket. “You going to tell me why?”

  I don’t remember the last time I bothered with why. The last time I’ve bothered with more than a few barked words—plus or minus the Alpha stare. I dig back, looking for a why that will explain things to this wolf who knows nothing about who we are until I wind up near the beginning, when humans decided that the uncultivated woods and the unclaimable mountains and the untamable wild were not magic as they had once been but evil. And that wolves were the perfect symbol of everything incomprehensible and uncontrollable both in nature and in themselves. Something that must be destroyed.

  So many of our stories came from this dark time as we tried to make sense of what was happening to us.

  He is quiet for a long time after I’m finished, sitting with his nose against his fisted hand.

  “And in what part of your fairy tale does hell’s all-seeing immortal guardian wolf go ‘Ooo, bunny’ and desert his post?”

  “It’s not about reason. Packs are always teetering on the edge of extinction, so they’re suspicious of everything. What they believe, what they know, is that the smallest thing can push them over the edge.”

  “But you don�
�t believe it?” he asks, putting his palm to his cheek.

  “No.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because—” A stick falls on my head from a saw-whet building a nest in the branches above. “Because I have seen the monsters who will end us, and they’re nothing like you.” I start to disentangle the twig from my hair. “What do you have in your hand?”

  “This?” He unfurls his fingers from a small, dark-gray ball. At first, I think it’s an owl pellet, but then I realize what it is.

  “Is that mine?”

  “I like the way it smells,” he says, and then pushed by some primal instinct, rubs his cheek into the felted mass of dark-gray fur.

  I lunge, but he’s got long arms and his reflexes are scary fast and there’s nothing but air in my hands, my body falling on top of him, uncomfortably aware of every steel-sinewed inch.

  Scrabbling backward, I rub the underside of my arm.

  “What is wrong with you? You were shedding. It’s not like you need it anymore.”

  “What’s wrong with me? What is wrong with you?” I snap, feeling a rising wave of panic. “You can’t rub your face with my fur. You don’t… You can’t mark yourself. It has to be offered. It has to be offered.” I put my hand up, protecting the back of my jaw, where the scent is strongest. “Wolves who mark each other belong to each other. They are responsible for each other. I belong to the Pack. They are my responsibility. I will never belong to a wolf again.”

  He strokes the fur in his hand, then lifting his hips, he sticks his finger into his pocket, pushing that piece of my wild deep inside.

  “Again?” he asks quietly.

  He can find his own way.

  * * *

  River-rounded stones slip under my feet, and I steady myself on the trunk nearby. I mark it in mind, because it’s just the kind of place where ungulates will easily lose their footing. A place to herd deer and bring a quick end to a hunt.

  “Varya!”

  Crows caw overhead. The grans say to pay attention to crows, because they bring news from Offland, if you know how to read it.

  “Varya!”

  I’ve always paid closest attention to the practical things, but I squirrel away the other things, too, such as the names the Pack insisted we know in order to acknowledge that every living thing has a place in Homelands.

  “Varya!”

  Maybe I don’t know the names of any of the flowers of Vrangelya, but I know everyone here. I know that soon the ground will be covered with white-and-yellow bloodroot. Tiny explosive trout lily. Mounds of green-framed white trillium. Rue anemone in the palest pink. All blooming in the short frame between the thawing of the ground and the leaf-out that will block the sun.

  “Varya!”

  It’s what happens in spring when all of Homelands calls out:

  Look at me.

  Listen to me.

  Love me.

  Make life with me.

  “VARYA!”

  “Stop yelling. Someone is going to hear you.”

  He collapses against a tree, holding his leg, breath leaking out between gritted teeth.

  “I want to clarify something,” I say coolly. “Just because I agreed to tell you about wolves does not mean I agreed to tell you about me.”

  His sweats are streaked with mud and the brighter green of moss from more than one fall.

  “You should be more careful. What happened to your stick?”

  “It slid down the hill. I couldn’t go back and get it.”

  Drops of bright blood have started to soak through the leg of his pants.

  “You’ve opened it up again. Come. I’ll change your bandage.”

  This time, I’m ready for the weight of his arm across my shoulder. What I’m not ready for is the way the wind picks up from the north and blows the wolf’s white hair across his face and onto mine. I smell the electric sharpness of his skin, combining with the hard, icy fragrance he stole from my fur.

  Exhaling sharply, I clear away the combined scent of two wolves belonging.

  Chapter 16

  “Can I ask you a question?” Eyulf says.

  I peel off the blood-soaked bandage.

  “Does that mean no?”

  “Wolves don’t waste time on rhetoric. Either ask a question, or don’t ask a question. It’s ‘May I,’ by the way.” I hold out my hand for the antibiotic. “Take the lid off.”

  “You really have no sense of humor, do you?” he says, unscrewing the top.

  “No. Put your fingers here.” I wrap the top layer of gauze tight around both leg and fingers. This way, when he pulls his fingers out, it will stay tight, but not like a tourniquet. “You had a question?”

  He raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth, then closes it again.

  “I change during the full moon—”

  “You change during the Iron Moon. Humans call it the full moon. Wolves call it the Iron Moon.”

  “I change during the Iron Moon.” He pauses, listening to the sound of the words on his tongue. “But I don’t go back and forth like you do. Like you’re changing socks.”

  “It’s not at all like changing socks. And I’m done with the antibiotic. They call those changes sawolþearf, soul-needed.” Or that’s the way Nils explained it when he showed me around Home Pond. Some wolves were in skin, but so many, so many, were wild. They’d run up to Nils, huge heads lowered, when he introduced me. Then they snuffled around with their wet noses, while I stayed frozen stiff so that I wouldn’t throw myself sobbing onto their rough, warm, richly fragrant fur.

  “Forhwi?” I’d asked Nils. Why? Why would they risk so much to be wild?

  “Hit biþ sawolþearf,” he’d said, not understanding my terror. It is soul-needed.

  “Soul-needed?” Eyulf laughs bitterly. “I’d really like to know what it was about the West Fargo truck stop or the basement of a Pick ’n Save or the bathroom of an Earls that made my ‘soul’ decide it needed to be a wolf.”

  “Your soul didn’t decide anything. You triggered it.”

  “No I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Turning into a wolf is not like changing socks, and it isn’t arbitrary either.” I hold out my hand for the gauze. “Did anyone ever see you?”

  “No. Didn’t happen that often.” He looks at his all-too-human fingers. “Just often enough to remind me that I’m not fit for human company.”

  I roll the last of the bandages into a neat column and put it away. It used to be safer: one sighting of a wolf changing would be discussed, then discredited and finally dismissed as folklore. Now humans film everything, and that one sighting could be seen by millions overnight.

  It isn’t good for this wanderer to be a monster in both worlds, belonging to none, but it’s worse for the Pack if the wanderer can’t control his change.

  “You have a trigger, and we’re going to find it. Mine is here.” I push my thumb deep into the lower part of my hip. “But they can be almost anywhere. Do you remember anything about what you were doing when it happened?”

  “Not really.”

  “‘Not really’ doesn’t mean ‘no.’”

  “It means I only remember one time. The other times, I wasn’t doing anything, and next thing I know, I’m a fucking wolf.”

  “‘Fucking’? You sound just like a human.”

  “You don’t say ‘fuck’?”

  “Of course I do: I fuck, you fuck, he/she fucks, we fuck, they fuck. But a fucking wolf is a wolf who is fucking.”

  “Strangely enough, that’s exactly what I was doing the one time I do remember. At least trying to. Until I changed.” He pulls his backpack to him, looking distractedly through it.

  “Human?”

  “No, I changed into a wolf.”

  “I know that. Were you fucking a human?”


  “Jesus, of course she was human. What else am I going to meet?” He opens the front pocket wide. It still smells of sharply industrial chocolate and mint. “And you don’t have to make that face.”

  “I’m not making a face.” I nod toward his bag. “What are you looking for?”

  “Yes, you are making a face, and food. I wasn’t expecting to be here this long.”

  I open the big bag I brought from Home Pond. I am not particular about what I eat, so I didn’t pay much attention to what I got from the larders, and Eyulf’s face falls when he opens the containers of freeze-dried egg yolks, chia seeds, and dehydrated tofu skins.

  “So what exactly happened when you fucked the human?” I start searching through boxes, trying to remember what kinds of things are actually popular.

  He chokes on one of Gran Tito’s soy chips.

  “Let’s make a deal,” he says, desperately swigging water to wash down the masticated soy chips turning to concrete in his mouth. “I will try, I mean really try, to stop using ‘fucking’ to mean general shittiness if you will stop using it to mean sex.”

  “Fine.” Ah, cheese chews. “Do you want one?” He shakes his head. “What exactly happened when you sexed the human?”

  “It’s like talking to a fucking alien,” he says, even though I had said sexed as per our agreement.

  He seems to have misunderstood. All I needed to know was what muscles he was using when he sexed the human, but he starts going into unnecessary detail, and because my teeth are soldered shut around the hardness of the cheese chew, I can’t stop him.

  Then I realize that I am content with my cheese chew and listening to this wolf who smells cold and belongs to nobody but me talk in his too-wild voice about things that are not strictly necessary but are a testament to his resilience.

  I eventually disengage my jaws enough to correct him but don’t bother.

  He seemed to have spent most of his time in the lower reaches of Canada and the Upper Midwest, and sometime in his wandering, he came to the Upper Peninsula. He isn’t sure exactly when, but it was before he started keeping notebooks to help him remember.