Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves

by Garry Kilworth

  Next, he watched as the hunter found two large stones and began crushing what was left of the bird between them. He smashed and pummelled at the meat until it was in thin splattered slivers, which he was able to feed to himself a tiny piece at a time. There was no more vomiting. The hunter seemed to have solved his own problem for the time being.

  The man now stared back at the wolf. He seemed to have regained some of his former arrogance or, at least, confidence. With his hands he threw a shower of feathers into the air, letting them fall on his head and shoulders. He barked at Athaba: a triumphant sound. It was as if he had done something remarkable, like catch the birds himself, instead of just taking carrion from another hunter.

  ‘A raven-man,’ sighed Athaba. ‘And a happy one.’

  Then it was up on his feet again, a test of the injured limb, and the long walk continued. Behind him, the human hunter packed hastily and followed in the footsteps of the wolf. From time to time Athaba sniffed the air and smelled the closeness of the man. What was going on here? Why didn’t the man go in a different direction, one more to his advantage? If he, Athaba, had been the human, he would have headed south. Athaba was going west because he believed that his pack was somewhere in that direction.

  There were two possible answers. Either the man did not know in which direction south lay, which was unlikely, or he knew he could not survive alone. Perhaps he needed Athaba to show him the way across safe ground? Perhaps he believed he could not survive except on the wolf’s leavings? Whichever it was, the man had obviously decided that his best chance lay in following the wolf, at least until some better plan turned up.

  They circumnavigated the lake together. By the evening Athaba was exhausted. Yet he had travelled only a short distance that day. It was going to take forever to reach his home country. Surely death would overtake him first?

  He knew he was going to have to harden his spirit to stone if he was going to complete this journey. He sensed his pack was a long way off – just how far was beyond any reasoning – and he was going to have to take each day one at a time. There was no use in dreaming of reunions, or wishing for an end to his walking. If he let his spirit go soft on him, his stamina would fail and he would fall into despair. The thing to do was set himself targets – a far hill, a distant lake – and tell himself that once he reached each particular point he would reassess his position, set a new goal. That way the journeys were finite. There was a clearly defined purpose: to reach a target within his capabilities.

  He found a small plateau on which to rest.

  Along the horizon, the red mane of the sun brushed the dark landscape. Northern lights flickered in the sky like wayward fantastical fireflies. Athaba heard the clatter of rocks as the hunter finally caught up with him.

  The man knew his place, however. He stayed just beyond the plateau edge. His scent was slightly offensive to the wolf but it was getting more acceptable as time passed. The southern hunter had made a good start at growing back into nature, becoming more a part of the tundra and less a human carrier of the stink of civilisation. Tundra soil smeared the man’s clothing, his boots, his leggings. The scent of the moss was on him where he had lain in it. Clean wholesome tundra air was scouring his skin, filling his pores with its moisture. There were seeds in his hair and there was dirt between his toes and fingers. He was growing into nature, and nature was growing into him. Nature had a lot of work to do, to get this human fit for wolf nostrils. After all, the last ten thousand years had been spent softening this two-legged beast, removing all traces of the good earth from his person. There were millions of scrubbings, teeth-brushings, nail-filings, haircuttings, beard-clippings, shavings, tweezerings and orifice cleansings to correct. All this unhappy work had to be reversed. The man had to be blasted with grime so that his skin was clogged with dirt which was not so easily removed. He had to be toughened under the sun, in the wind and rain, to get rid of his tenderness. His hair had to grow, to collect dust on its follicles. His nails had to lengthen, gather soil beneath them. His lungs had to expel the smoke and fumes of the cities.

  Nature had made a start on this necessary process but still had a long way to go.

  In the late evening there were bothersome insects. Athaba could hear the hunter slapping at them and grunting. Then there was silence. Sometime after that, Athaba rose and padded over the distance between them. When he reached the hunter the man was lying on his back, his throat exposed, one arm draped over his eyes. He was fast asleep.

  Athaba nosed into the backpack and retrieved the remaining bits of his bird. He took them back to his own place on the plateau and crunched the bones to get the last of the meat. A splinter went up into the roof of his mouth. This made him panic at first, wolves had bled to death on bone cuts in and around the mouth, but after a long time of working at it with his tongue, he loosened it sufficiently to enable him to spit it out. He should have remembered about the danger of bird-bones. He knew it all along, but it is difficult to obey old rules under new circumstances.

  When he woke, Athaba limped across the top of the plateau. The sky was as clear and deep as an upturned lake above his head. A falcon circled above and then wheeled away to the south. Down on the shining tundra ahead and below was a crazed pattern of brooks and becks, cutting the land up into patches. Dwarf alder swept downwards in a rush of light green to the tangled masses of grey fern below, as if it were trying to drive a wedge into the lowland plants.

  The man must have been watching and waiting for the wolf to stir because he followed in its tracks immediately. When Athaba descended from the high ground to the marshes again, the man was not more than ten lengths behind him. The hunter’s breath was laboured and his civilised feet slipped on rocks smoothed by glaciers during a time far off, during the new red dawns following Firstdark. Engines of ice had cut grooves over this remote world before men had even begun to hunt wolves with spears, let alone drop on them from the sky in machines. Man and wolf were travelling a landscape cracked by the frosts of a million long dark winters, incised by the reaches of northern ice that had since retreated, worn smooth by rumbling giants and imbedded with massive rocks that were now left stranded.

  When they reached one of the streams, the man stood and stared down into the water. Athaba knew he could see fish: greybacked shapes that moved amongst the stones. The backpack was taken off and placed on the ground and the hunter entered the cold waters. He stood, poised for a few moments, before snatching at the fish. After several attempts, he was still empty-handed. Athaba watched him, wonderingly.

  Then the wolf went to the water’s edge and mouth-speared a grayling within a short time. He ate the fish slowly, his eyes on the man downstream. A second fish followed the first. By now the hunter, was standing with his hands on his hips. His expression was a cross between admiration and fury. Athaba speared a third fish and let it flop around on the bank. He kept his eyes half on the man and half on the gasping fish. Gradually, the hunter moved towards him. When the man was three lengths from him, Athaba swallowed the fish, almost choking in his efforts to get it down quickly.

  There was a cry from his raven-man, as if to say, ‘Will you leave me no carrion? Will you eat every morsel before my very nose?’

  Athaba entered the stream for the fourth time, stabbed, stabbed again, stabbed yet again, and came out with a fish. He held it in his mouth until the man had backed away, hope shining in his eyes. Athaba left the water and dropped the fish on the bank. Then he deliberately lay down beside it.

  The hunter began creeping forward again until Athaba lifted his head and stared hard.

  Finally, the human could take no more and began shouting and throwing rocks. Athaba picked up the fish and splashed into the stream as the hunter came running forward, all fear of the wolf swallowed by his hunger. When the man got close, Athaba accidentally dropped the fish into the water where it shimmered back to life. The hunter threw himself on top of it, struggling to get his hands on the wriggling piece of silver. Once, he almost
had it, but it slipped out of his fingers and flashed away on the current, leaving him on his knees.

  Athaba shrugged at this peculiar behaviour, and continued his journey, well fed.

  The temperature dropped during that day and the wind rose. When they came to a gravel plain, the man fell to his knees. Athaba thought he was finished, had walked himself to a state of exhaustion, but he was suddenly aware that the man had found something. A howl of triumph came out of the human mouth. The hunter began popping things into his mouth and then searching around amongst the scree on his hands and knees.

  Athaba knew then what his raven-man had discovered.

  Birds’ eggs.

  He began limping forward, anxious to be on his way. The hunter looked up and there was consternation in his eyes. Athaba knew he had given the human a dilemma. The man could either stay and search amongst the stones for more eggs or follow the wolf. Athaba knew that the southern hunter had no real sense of place or direction. He was relying on the wolf to lead him. The man finally seemed to compromise.

  A hobbling chase began, with the human trotting after the limping wolf, at the same time pausing occasionally to snatch an egg from the ground. The birds began to mob both creatures but that was the least of their worries. One was anxious to cover ground and the other to fill his belly. Occasionally, the human swung his pack at the carking birds but it was a half-hearted gesture, like swatting at clouds of gnats.

  While Athaba rested, lying on his side on a warm rock, the man was having trouble with his bowels. There was no mistaking sound or smell. The hunter’s diver bird meat had turned to water in his guts and he was groaning amongst the rocks.

  A blood-red sun stayed with them, black clouds like dust storms over its face. The world smelled musty like a creature after a long sleep. At the end of the day man and wolf were nowhere on a vast landscape. They had covered but a fraction of the distance between them and their two respective goals.

  During the night the wind rose in fury and came screaming over the flatlands with grit in her teeth. Man and beast sought refuge amongst the scant cover, in a small copse of stunted birch that had withstood many such hurricanes. The sapling-sized trees that had stood for twice a hundred seasons bent under the onslaught of the wind and broke it where they could.

  There was not much sleep to be had with the rocks and stones rattling over the world.

  In the night, there were dreams. Pups ran amongst his legs, jabbed at Athaba’s mouth to make him disgorge their next meal. He was a father, doing fatherly things. There were howlings, pups learning the complex songs of their ancestors. The scene then switched to Athaba as a pup, composing his own original howl, taking this howl to his mother. His mother, wrathful, unforgiving, for wolves do not presume to invent new howls, new songs. It was against the laws of the pack to offer new compositions. The ancient songs were there for a purpose and all things new were regarded with suspicion. Did he think he was above his ancestors?

  Athaba dreamed of his brush with mysticism: the burial of his father and other events. His problem had always been that he had been born with more spirit than other wolves. Not the spirit of courage, though he had some of that, but the spirit of the infinite. He had always been ready to acknowledge that not all things could be explained in practical terms, that there were aspects to life and death that could only be felt, experienced by the spirit or the soul, and could not be subjected to reason and logic. There were things to be either accepted or rejected that could not be accessed through the intellect.

  It was this acceptance of a mystical side to nature that had kept Athaba going thus far, when many wolves would have turned their faces to the prison wall and slipped into death.

  When he awoke, the wind was raging through the copse, almost flattening the dwarf trees with trunks no thicker than a man’s thumb. Nearby sat the hunter, curled like a fossil left lying on the wastelands. He was whimpering in his sleep.

  Did humans dream? It was something Athaba had not considered before. It was possible, he supposed. They were animals after all, in body if not in spirit. There, another whine. He was surely dreaming – just like a wolf.

  Athaba had thoughts about moving on, but a fit overtook him and he was left so weak after it he decided to remain where he was for the time being.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wolf began the next day’s journey in the terrible wind, shouldering his way forward, anxious to make some headway despite his sore feet and aching hindleg. Man followed him, seemingly reluctant, for his complaining could be heard even above the noise of the wind. They struggled (not together for Athaba could not conceive of them as being anything but independent beings) over the landscape like two insects, making slow progress. Once, when the wolf looked back, the man seemed on his last legs, hollow-eyed and pale. There was little possibility of finding food that day and the human was obviously growing weaker. The wolf expected that the man would die soon.

  The wind seemed to rob Athaba of all his energy. It forced air up his nostrils so that he kept catching his breath. It blew grit and sand into his eyes so that he had to walk with his head down, in a submissive posture. Despair gnawed at his determination like a carnivore. He found difficulty in ignoring it. The wind was a mother to wolves who relied on it for survival, but like most mothers she chastised her young on occasion.

  Then something happened which could be called a miracle, except that unusual circumstances make possible that which might not take place under normal conditions.

  Athaba, his scent and sound hidden by the high wind, stumbled upon a herd of caribou sheltering in a hollow. His immediate, instinctive reaction was to bring the nearest one down, before it could bolt. Running alongside his prey, he leapt up at its throat as the caribou herd tried to scatter, his teeth sank in and he gripped the flesh firmly. He hung on grimly until the unlucky beast’s struggles ceased. The rest of the herd had stampeded, but he had acted instantly and his reward was a feast of meat. He could hardly believe it himself. His fangs were soon at work on the underside of the creature. When the man came, the innards of the caribou were exposed.

  The hunter saw the caribou and made a loud sound, lunging in shoulder to shoulder with the wolf. Athaba’s reaction to this was to snap at the intruder viciously but the man defended himself, holding his backpack in front of him like a shield. In the other hand was his hunting knife. There was a brief struggle, with the hunter holding out the pack and using it to push Athaba away from the soft meat. Athaba’s impulse was to attack the nearest object to him connected with the man, whether it was a vital organ or not. That object was, of course, the backpack which he ripped and tore with his teeth. With wild eyes the man fended off Athaba’s irritable lunges but seemed equally resolved that his own hunger should be satisfied, whether it cost him an arm or even his life. Athaba yelled. The man barked back. The smell of the meat was overpowering and driving both of them to a frenzy. Then the shouting and barking stopped. Both man and wolf were determined to get their share of the prey. With the wind still screaming around them they gave up their quarrel and fell to the meat again. Athaba grumbled and ate, aware of the proximity of the man, but was now more interested in filling his belly.

  The human went to work, hacking at the stomach of the beast until he had freed it. He retreated with the sac of the quarry in his left hand. The backpack was ignored and now lay by the caribou. Athaba worried it just once more, then concentrated on feeding himself.

  When Athaba glanced over his shoulder he saw that the hunter had slit open the stomach of the caribou and was feeding himself hand to mouth with the contents. The wolf knew that the recently grazing caribou’s belly would be full of partly digested lichen. The human seemed to like this warm sludge and gobbled it down as if it were the best food he would get out on the wastes. Athaba had heard of local hunters doing this very thing when they had been short of food for a few days.

  It was a passing consideration. Athaba fell to again, gnawing at the entrails and satisfying his own nee
ds. Once he had finished the soft meats, Athaba stripped the skin from the thighs and began chewing on the more solid meat. At last he had a feast at his disposal and could gorge himself to contentment. This was the way things should be, with meat to spare. When this meal had digested, he planned to cache some of his kill, despite the fact that he might never pass that way again.

  When his hunger had been dealt with, Athaba rested beside the carcass, using it as a break against the wind. The man cautiously retrieved his backpack and, when he thought Athaba was not looking, cut some meat from the shoulder of the caribou, lay down some distance away from Athaba. The wolf recalled their little struggle over the meat and how angry he had been at the intrusion. His feelings had not been aroused because another creature was taking from his kill. It was a matter of precedence. It was his kill and therefore the human should have waited until Athaba had eaten, had taken the choice pieces. In any case, the man was a ‘pack inferior’ and therefore had to be kept in his place. Athaba’s strong sense of rank told him that subordinates who took liberties should be disciplined on the spot. No hierarchy had been discussed between the two creatures, obviously, but Athaba knew he was the superior beast at this point in time. All the strength was coming from him. All the decisions were coming from him. He was the hunter, the pathfinder, the leader. The man should have known that and kept his place, which was to eat after Athaba and when the wolf had eaten himself into a near stupor. Instead, the man had barged in with his offensive body odours and frantic clawing for the best bits of meat. It was no wonder that Athaba had been incensed. Such behaviour was unacceptable. If the man wanted to be headwolf, he would have to assert himself in ways other than fighting for the choice pieces of the kill. He would have to show that he had skills useful to the pack.

  The gale showed no signs of dying: in fact it increased in strength. There would be no more walking until it had spent itself. They settled in, the man building a wall of stones to keep out the wind: a kind of half circle about shoulder-height to a wolf. Athaba watched this activity with mild concern. Was the human bringing his civilised ways to Athaba’s world? If protection was necessary, it was usually obtained from some natural object, like a hollow in the ground or a boulder, or in Athaba’s case, the caribou carcass. It was not usual to fashion artificial defences against the elements, even though the materials came from the natural landscape. Athaba wondered whether he ought to reprimand the man, but then decided that the stupid creature would not understand why he was being punished, so it was all a waste of time.