Firstborn

by Tor Seidler

  “But I have to apologize for what I did,” he said. “What can I do?”

  I thought a moment. “Most creatures respond well to gifts,” I said.

  He must have remembered what Frick had told him about a coyote’s diet, for after the next snowfall he tracked down a weasel with snow-white fur. He caught a nice, plump vole as well. With both victims in his mouth he trotted off to the southeast before daybreak. There was no sign of the coyote on the knoll, but Lamar left his offerings in a shallow cave under the topmost cliff. Two mornings later he went back with a shrew and two mice. The earlier offerings had disappeared. It was impossible to know if they’d been taken by the coyote or another critter, but he kept making these errands for three weeks, always getting back from the knoll before the other wolves woke up. Blue Boy’s territory was so secure that the pack didn’t bother posting a sentinel at night, but one morning Blue Boy was up when we got back, awakened by the distant roar of a mountain lion.

  “Where were you?” Blue Boy said, narrowing his eyes.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Lamar said, “so I went for a walk.”

  “And you?” Blue Boy said as I landed in my aspen.

  “Just out stretching my wings,” I said.

  I was no more fibbing than Lamar was. He hadn’t been able to sleep and had gone for a walk, and in following him to the knoll I had stretched my wings. But the little half-truth made me uneasy. Since throwing in my lot with wolves, my first loyalty had always been to Blue Boy.

  Later that day, while the others were taking their post-hunt naps, Lamar managed to catch a rabbit, which he buried in a snowdrift. That night he was so exhausted, he slept in till well after sunrise, but the following night he went over the hill again. When he heard the haunting howl, he howled back. This time, after a long silence, the coyote resumed her howling.

  Lamar raced back to where he’d buried the rabbit, dug it up, and carried it, stiff as a bone, to the knoll. He deposited his gift in the cave and retreated a short distance away. The snow glistened around him till a cloud covered the moon.

  Soon a sweet voice came out of the darkness.

  “You want to lure me down to kill me?”

  “No!” Lamar said. “Not at all.”

  “Then why are you bringing me food?”

  If she could make him out in the moonless conditions, it didn’t sound as if she recognized him from her brief glimpse in the hot springs. I could understand his not wanting to fess up and turn that sweet voice bitter.

  “Your howl sounded so sad,” was all he said.

  “If you’re not out to kill me,” she said, “would you mind proving it?”

  “How?”

  “By leaving.”

  Lamar left.

  Two nights later he returned to the knoll with another offering—a creature he’d killed that looked like a weasel but with a bushier tail. He laid it in the cave and again waited a short distance away. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and when the coyote appeared at the top of the cliff, her golden fur and delicate snout and shining eyes were plainly visible.

  “I hope you like marten,” Lamar said.

  “I suppose I should thank you for the food,” she said, making no move to descend from her citadel. “I haven’t felt much like hunting lately.”

  “Where do you like to hunt?”

  “This time of year Kyle was partial to the hot springs. Have you ever been?”

  “The hot springs?” he said uneasily.

  “If you go, be sure not to stay too long. The pools give off a gas that makes you woozy. Once we even saw a buffalo stumble to his knees. Kyle liked to pretend the gas had killed him and lie there like a corpse. One time a badger came snuffing up to him, and he grabbed it.”

  “Very clever. Is Kyle . . .”

  “He was my mate. But he’s dead.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Lamar said.

  After a while he asked her name, but she didn’t reply.

  “I’m Lamar,” he said. “Where’s the rest of your pack?”

  “We don’t have packs,” she said, and with that she vanished.

  When Lamar and I got home, he collapsed under my aspen.

  “Oh, Maggie,” he groaned. “She has no pack. Thanks to me, she’s all alone. She has no one!”

  I didn’t say it, but it occurred to me that, in a way, she had him.

  Two nights later he took her a field mouse. He retreated to his usual spot, and it wasn’t long before the coyote appeared at the top of the cliff.

  “My name’s Artemis,” she said.

  Artemis! Another wonderful name my parents hadn’t thought of. Lamar repeated it aloud, clearly enthralled by it.

  “You’re kind of a strange wolf,” Artemis said, cocking her head to one side.

  “Frick says I’m not very wolflike sometimes,” Lamar admitted.

  “Is that your father?”

  “He’s in my father’s pack.”

  “The pack belongs to your father?”

  “My father’s the highest-ranking wolf,” Lamar said, sitting up a little straighter. “Frick’s . . . I suppose he’s at the bottom.”

  “You’re in a hierarchy?” she said.

  He looked blank.

  “That means some wolves are ahead of others,” I told him.

  “Oh,” Lamar said. “Don’t you have hierarchies, Artemis?”

  “Coyotes don’t believe in them,” she said. “We just have couples.”

  The next morning Hope suggested Lamar go ahead of her on the way to the hunt, but he shook his head.

  “It’s time,” Hope said. “You’re much bigger and stronger than I am now.”

  “She’s right,” Blue Boy said.

  But Lamar obstinately refused to go ahead of her. Artemis’s views on hierarchies must have made an impression on him.

  When I joined Lamar on the south side of the hill that night, Artemis’s howl sounded a little less mournful, more like the musical howl we’d first heard back in June. But as he was about to howl back there came a crunching sound in the snow.

  “Hope I’m not barging in,” Frick said, casting a glance at me as he sat beside Lamar. “Isn’t that a coyote?”

  “Is it?” said Lamar.

  “Not as yappy as most, but I think so. I don’t suppose you know where she lives?”

  Lamar hesitated before admitting he did. “Though please don’t tell my father,” he added.

  “It’s between you and me and Maggie,” Frick said. “Do you know this coyote’s name?”

  “Artemis. She’s the one who ran out of the hot springs. I killed her mate.”

  “Ah.” Frick listened to the distant howl. “Did you apologize?” he asked.

  Lamar shook his head.

  “Well, I don’t suppose it matters. After all, wolves and coyotes don’t mix.”

  Two nights later Lamar took Artemis another vole. When she appeared atop the cliff, he asked if she thought it was true that wolves and coyotes don’t mix.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  “It’s a rule of nature.”

  “Couldn’t we be friends?”

  “You want me to be friends with a wolf?”

  “Well, with me. Though . . .”

  “Though what?”

  After studying the snow at his feet for some time, Lamar blurted out, “I’m the one who accidentally scared you and Kyle at the hot springs. I’m so sorry.”

  He must have decided that apologizing did matter. Or maybe living a lie had eaten away at him. But when he lifted his eyes Artemis was gone.

  The next night he returned her howl, but she didn’t answer. Two nights later he took her a shrew. He waited till dawn, but she never appeared at her cliff top. Night after night Lamar took her offerings and waited hopefully for her to appear. But it was always some other creature—an eagle or a badger or a raven—that eventually showed up and grabbed the food.

  Finally Lamar went three straight nights without
taking her anything. On his next non-Frick-warming night he slipped away from the others and slumped under my aspen.

  “No more trips to the knoll?” I said.

  “It’s not fair to her,” he said forlornly. “If I go, she stays away. It’s her home.”

  The leafless aspen was swaying gently, but after a while the breeze died away. Lamar stared off into the distance, his ears cupped. All was snow-muffled silence till a sigh escaped him.

  I was stunned by the pinch that quiet sigh gave my heart.

  12

  IT WAS ALMOST AS IF there was a similarity, some real connection, between me and this wolf. It was a disconcerting thought. Blue Boy’s prowess and power were awe-inspiring, and Frick’s breadth of knowledge was surprising, but I never imagined I’d experience a feeling of actual kinship with a wingless creature. Yet something about this young wolf yearning for a coyote reminded me of myself when I was younger. Though, in fact, Lamar’s situation was bitterer than mine had ever been. I’d been bored with my mate and deserted him; Lamar had unintentionally murdered Artemis’s.

  While Lamar was suffering from unrequited love, his parents were like a couple of lovebirds. Even while stalking prey, Blue Boy hardly left Alberta’s side. One day they actually played a game of tag on our slope. Blue Boy was usually “it,” and when Alberta caught him, she would give him a slathering with her tongue.

  “Mating season,” Frick explained, eyeing Lupa wistfully.

  Raze was eyeing Lupa too—more suggestively than wistfully. Lupa acted oblivious, but she did catch Raze’s eye for a moment.

  Raze moved his sleeping spot nearer to Lupa’s. One evening he scooted so close their tails touched. She pulled hers back. At around midnight Raze tried to snuggle up to her. She shifted away. He gave her a nudge and walked down the slope, away from the other sleeping wolves. For a while Lupa stayed put, but eventually she got up, shook the snow off her fur, and meandered down to where he was. This was very near my aspen, but I doubt they gave me a thought. I barely existed to either of them.

  “Don’t you like me?” Raze said in an undertone.

  “Only the alphas can mate,” she said.

  “I heard different.”

  “We were a ragtag bunch then, hardly a pack.”

  “What if we took off and started a pack on our own?”

  “Just the two of us? We’d never make it.”

  Lupa went back up the hill, though not without a little extra sway in her walk. When she settled down in the snow, Raze’s gaze shifted to Libby and Ben. It was Lamar’s night to warm Frick, so Libby and Ben were curled up together.

  I suspected he was thinking of wooing them to join his new pack, but with Libby he never got the chance. In early March, temperatures soared above freezing, and one day, on her way across the Lamar River, she broke through the ice. It was even quicker than with Rider. One second Libby was there—the next second she was gone forever.

  Everyone was distraught, especially her mother. But at least Alberta had something to distract her from her sorrow, for she couldn’t long hide the fact that a new litter was on its way. Ben, on the other hand, seemed truly lost. I’d been so taken with Lamar that I hadn’t paid much attention to his siblings, but no one could have missed how inseparable Ben and Libby had been. Now Ben had no one to play or spar with. When Lamar offered to spar with him, Ben muttered that it wouldn’t be a fair contest; Lamar was so much bigger. Hope did her best to pay more attention to him, but then tragedy struck her. The warm snap was just a tease, and when temperatures plummeted again, everything turned very icy. One morning, on the way down the path from the overlook, Hope lost her footing and slipped all the way to the bottom, impaling herself on a branch jutting out of a fallen tree. The other hunters were well out ahead, leaving only Lamar and Ben to race down and pull her off. The puncture wound was near her heart.

  “Take her back to Frick,” I cawed, remembering how he’d saved her when she was a tiny thing.

  Ben helped sling her across Lamar’s back, and Lamar carried her home. Hope was panting so heavily that I was afraid she was breathing her last, but when Lamar gently deposited her in the snow near the den she managed to speak.

  “You’re good”—she gasped —“at carrying runts.”

  Frick was sleeping in, as he always did on days when Lamar went on the hunt, but the sight of Hope’s serious wound transformed him. He sprinted into the woods. I’d never seen him move so fast. He came racing back, slid to his knees by Hope, and gave her what looked like a long kiss.

  “Chew,” he said when he broke away.

  Hope chewed. Leafy bits leaked out of her mouth. Frick must have dug up some healing herbs he’d buried in the woods and transferred them from his mouth to hers.

  Frick nursed her through the dangerous phase. But it was clear she was going to be out of action a while, and with another hunter lost and game growing scarcer and scarcer Lamar got no more days off. He didn’t get any nights off from Frick-warming, either. Raze had suddenly taken Ben under his wing—if you can use such an expression with wolves—and the grateful young wolf insisted on sleeping by his new mentor.

  As things got worse, the wolves went back to their old habit of hunting at night. Much as I disliked it, I went with them, but they had no more luck in the dark than they’d had in the daylight, and I was glad when they lapsed back to their morning schedule.

  The first thing Hope did when she was on her feet again was suggest to Lamar that she take over Frick-warming duties.

  “The truth is, I need warming myself,” she said, averting her eyes shyly. “Part of my recovery.”

  With April as cold as January, Hope and Frick took to sleeping so closely entwined they seemed like one wolf. Lamar was free again to slip over the hill at night and listen for Artemis. But although there were plenty of wolves howling, and the odd coyote, Artemis’s musical howl was missing.

  Lamar pinned his hopes on the next full moon. And it turned out to be such a lovely, clear night that, perched near him in the poplar sapling, I almost felt like howling myself. But Artemis didn’t.

  “What can it mean, Maggie?” he asked anxiously.

  I figured she’d either been killed or found a new mate, but I didn’t have the heart to share my theories.

  “Maybe she has laryngitis,” I said.

  This idea cheered him up, but only briefly. “She couldn’t have had it this long,” he said.

  His doleful expression was hard to take, so I set my misgivings aside and flew off into the night. The moon was bright, visibility excellent. When I got to the knoll, I flew around to the far side and spotted Artemis curled up alone under a snowy bough.

  I zipped back to Lamar and reported that she was semi-hibernating.

  “Oh, thank you!” he cried.

  The next morning Lupa took Hope aside.

  “You have a sweet nature, Hope,” Lupa said.

  “Thank you,” Hope said.

  “But a wolf can carry sweetness too far. I realize Frick nursed you back to health. But if you want to show your gratitude it’s enough to listen to his yammering. Just because you’re wispy and don’t have a very lustrous coat doesn’t mean you have to settle for cuddling with a monstrosity.”

  “I don’t think he’s monstrous at all,” Hope said. “But I know you used to be a couple. If it upsets you that—”

  “Good heavens, no!” Lupa cried.

  When Hope and Frick cuddled up that evening, Lupa gave Raze a look out of the corner of her eye. He ignored it. He ignored it the next night, too. Maybe he was playing it cool because she’d wounded his pride by turning him down earlier.

  In the middle of the month snow fell day after day without a break. Hunting was impossible. I braved the blizzard for a couple of trips to the dump behind the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, where humans came even in the winter. As for the wolves, they just loafed around conserving their energy—though one afternoon they all suddenly sat up, their whiskers quivering alertly. A moment later my aspen shive
red. In fact, everything shivered: the lodgepole pines, even the snowy ground.

  “What is it?” Lamar said.

  “An earthquake,” said Frick.

  There were two aftershocks. But eventually the wolves settled down, and the snow kept falling monotonously. As the days went by, everyone got scrawnier except Alberta.

  By the time a sunny morning finally came, Alberta was too pregnant to go on the hunt, so she stayed home with Frick. I went off with the others. From the promontory it looked as if a puffy white quilt had fallen over the Lamar Valley. There was no trace of the river, and the late snowstorm had driven even diehard elk, deer, and pronghorns south. The only creatures in sight were buffalo swaying their great, shaggy heads back and forth, trying to clear away snow to get to the meager grass underneath.

  “Looks like bison or nothing,” Raze said.

  “You’ve felled them before?” Blue Boy said.

  “Sure.”

  I just knew this was a whopper. After telling it, Raze pointed out a big bull standing apart from the others, his nostrils snorting great clouds of breath sideways in the frozen air. Raze suggested Lupa, Lamar, and Ben approach their target from upwind while he and Blue Boy station themselves downwind. The newly fallen snow hadn’t crusted over, and Lamar sank in so deep I doubt he saw what happened. I did, of course. The bull smelled the three approaching from upwind and plowed off in the other direction, according to plan. Then Blue Boy leaped onto his shaggy neck. But Raze didn’t. The buffalo snorted angrily and gave his mighty horns a shake, sending Blue Boy flying.

  As the buffalo plodded off to join his herd, I shot down near where Blue Boy lay. The snow around him was turning crimson. I let out a horrified squawk, and the wolves quickly converged on him.

  “Sorry,” Raze said. “I slipped.”

  “Did his horn get you, Father?” Lamar cried.

  “Just grazed me,” Blue Boy muttered.

  It looked to me as if the buffalo had gored him badly, but Blue Boy ignored Lamar’s offer to carry him. He made it back to camp under his own steam, though he left a trail of blood in the snow. Alberta took one look at him and did something unheard of. She herded him into the whelping den. The sun disappeared along with them, and soon snowflakes were falling again.