Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves

by Garry Kilworth

  The lightning continued to flash and crackle across the heavens as he waited impatiently for the storm to cease. Sometimes it hit the earth and snaked along the ground as if seeking entrance to a lower world. He did not fear the lightning. It meant little to him except that it hurt his eyes occasionally, if he was staring right at a spot as it leapt to light. The thunder was disconcerting, but unless it was directly overhead, nothing more. He had known wolves who would shiver and shake in hidy holes while a storm was in progress, but he was not one of those.

  Towards evening, the sky began to clear, and a red soreness took the place of the bruises left by the thunder. The world smelled musty and earthy, the rain having brought certain vapours to the surface. Generally, it was a pleasant odour, as if the world had been dipped in a herbal lake and had emerged, not cleansed, but soaked in aromatic juices. Athaba began walking again, sniffing the air as he went, delighting a little in the change that had taken place. It was almost as if hope had been added to the atmosphere along with the new musky scents. He went up on his toes, deer-trotted for a while, his spirits replenished.

  That night he did not pause for rest, having considered his time spent under the rock hang as much the same thing, though of course he had not been able to sleep through the violence of the storm. He took time out only to hunt. There was a new urgency to his travels. He began to worry, not about what was in front of him, but what was behind him. He had been seen by men and they would blame him for converting Koonama from a human into a wolf. They would surely be out for revenge?

  Athaba knew that some men did not need very much of an excuse to begin a hunt. It all depended upon what type of community the human settlement was, that the man had been heading for. If they had time on their hands, there would be time to hunt. Athaba needed to put plenty of space between him and that possibility.

  When darkness came he followed a stream which he knew must have come from higher ground. Once he reached the mountains he would be safe from men.

  The waters gurgled and clattered beside him, possibly trying to tell him something, but no one knows the language of the landscape and Athaba simply used the sound as a guide. He tried not to dream of his journey’s end, but sometimes it was impossible to keep the pictures out of his head.

  PART FIVE

  The Feral System

  Chapter Twenty

  In the distance were the mountains, muffled by snow that had turned purple in the last of the day’s sun. They rose out of the tundra as if they had been pushed up overnight, their shoulders crackling as they hit the high frosty regions. Athaba headed towards these, his paws springing on the reindeer moss. He knew he was being chased, he had smelled them as he crossed that trough. There were men with guns and dogs behind him: they had been following him for some time.

  His heart was pounding a little in his chest, but he was strangely calm considering that this was the first time he had ever been tracked down by dogs. Previously, hunters like Koonama had just come across him by accident, and (in that instance) had captured him before a long chase had time to take place. No, he was not panicking. His adrenalin was high, naturally, but he wasn’t overwrought or even too excited. He knew he had a job to do if he was to keep ahead of his pursuers, and it would not help him to get too feverish.

  Soon the grasses and mosses gave way to lichen, then ahumic soils, and finally he was running across the stony area which served as an apron to the mountains. The larger pebbles, forced to the surface by the constant movement of the soil, slowed him down a little. They were painful on his pads and slipped from under his paws, so that he jarred his legs.

  He stopped and turned, looking back over the glacial valley, exposed without its ice sheet. The wind was crossways to the run of the valley and he only got whiffs of scent. They were definitely heading in his direction though.

  He found a shallow gulley which rose gradually at first, then more steeply towards the corrie that had been the birthplace of the glacier. This would provide cover as he climbed the ridge. It was cold in the gulley, which still retained snow. Without any further hesitation, he plunged on to this hardened snow and began travelling up the gulley. If they were tracking him with malemute dogs, the icy regions of the trench would not hold his scent for very long, and the malemutes were not really trackers. They could pull a sledge until eternity came and went, but their noses were not up to wolf standards. Nevertheless, he had a lot of respect for malemutes: they were not pampered house dogs. They worked, ate and slept out in the same conditions as the wolf, curling up in the open snow at night and dragging sledges by day, often through blizzards. Their strength was mostly in their legs and shoulders, rather than their jaws, but they were still a force to be reckoned with especially in numbers. Athaba had no desire to test the courage of these creatures.

  Athaba wondered vaguely if the hunters had any kind of mechanical back-up. A vehicle would not be able to follow him up the mountain, but they might have thought he was running the length of the plain below. He hoped they had thought that. A frustrated hunter whose quarry keeps doing the unpredictable will often give up before time.

  He continued climbing. Below him the mat vegetation spread over the valley. A month ago it had been covered in clouds of black fly, so thick they were like dark smoke; and before them the even denser and larger cumulus-like towers of mosquitoes. Both these insect swarms had driven Koonama crazy. They had not bothered Athaba as much as the wolfman, except in his ears and around his mouth. Now these two pests were gone and the air over the distant tundra was clear and sweet and cold. When he looked back, the figures were moving swiftly across the brown flatlands, rich with the colours of berries. There were about five of them. One of them had two dogs on leads.

  Only two? Well, that was something in his favour. They wouldn’t risk letting just two dogs go after him on their own. Obviously they were just using them to follow his spoor. Wait until they hit the cold rocks and snow where any scent was faint and transient.

  When they reached the bottom of the mountain, he was up on a ridge and travelling quickly. A chip of rock zinged away just to his front and then he heard the sound of the shot echoing around the spurs and gulleys. One of them at least had a high-powered gun. When he kept on running in the same direction, another shot shattered a stone in his path. He swerved and took a line down by a rockfall. A ptarmigan ran out from behind a boulder, but this was no time to think about food. If he was not swift and single-minded he was going to die.

  At the next mass of detritus he lost his footing and skidded down the scree, hurting his old hindleg injury. The men were behind the ridge now, and unable to get a sighting, but he had no doubt they were following very quickly. It might have been an idea to double back, except there were enough of them to leave one behind as a rear guard, so Athaba abandoned that idea. It was not worth the high risk. What he had to do was get them stumbling about amongst the foothills while he was back down on the flat and running. In that way he could put considerable distance between them. What he wanted was to cross over to some point away from the direction they had come, in case there were more back there, possibly with a vehicle.

  His head was clear and he knew what he was doing. There was still no panic, despite the guns. His life depended upon remaining cool and thinking his way carefully through the problem. Ragisthor would have approved of that. Funny, he had not thought of his old mentor for such a long time. It was the chase that had brought him back into Athaba’s head. The memory of that time when he and Ragisthor had encountered hunters together.

  At the bottom of the other side of the ridge, he limped out on to an autumn snowfield where a huge herd of some half-a-thousand or so caribou were keeping cool. They saw that he was preoccupied and not interested in them, so there was no stampede at that point. The wolf crossed behind the herd, aware that he was a dark target against the snow, but hoping to get on the other side of the caribou. One or two nervous ones skittered around a little as they caught his scent, but there was no panic. The
y would be aware of him and ready to take flight, should he change his course.

  The herd would shield Athaba against a sighting by the hunters and though the caribou would no doubt bolt when the men came blundering down the ridge, the subsequent confusion could only work in his favour. The dogs would certainly become uncontrollable for a short time as they smelt the fear of the caribou and heard the drumming of the hoofs, the cries of terror.

  The grassy slopes formed a wedge that drove a green point into the grey ridges. Athaba wanted to be back amongst the rocks where his colour would help hide him and there was cover to use. Out on the snowfield he was an easy target.

  As was expected, when the men appeared on the far side and began descending, the caribou took off, first scattering, then pulling together and thundering the length of the dip in the wedge. There were barks from the men and Athaba hoped they might be more attracted to the idea of shooting caribou than a lone wolf, but he heard no shots. The hunters were determined, it was obvious, to get him. He was their goal and they were going to let nothing stop them. Men were not persistent without a reason. They would kill at a whim, but they would not follow a single creature over tough terrain, ignoring other more attractive kills, unless there was something very strong giving them a purpose. He wondered if his guess had been right, that they were angry because he had turned one of their kind into a wolfman. It was possible. Anything of that nature was possible. He had not heard of it happening before. There were those stories of human babies reared by wolves, but in those cases the wolves had helped an infant to survive. He had changed an adult from a hunter into a subordinate pack member: a hunter who looked unhuman in his musk-ox cloak and skin covered in sores and wild matted hair.

  Athaba’s leg was jarring on the stony ground now and becoming more painful by the minute. Had he been on the flat and his leg uninjured, he might have made a speed which would leave the humans standing – providing there was no vehicle – but in the mountains the going was rough and sometimes slippery. He could still keep well ahead of the hunters, but they were persistent creatures. They would keep coming and keep coming until he was boxed in, in some canyon, or out on a plateau with a sheer drop at the end.

  He passed an area where there were recesses in the rocks, not quite caves. There was a thought that he might hide in these until the hunting party had gone home, but then if they were really that determined they might bring dogs up here and sniff him out.

  Athaba decided against the caves and went for another ridge which had possibilities on the other side. If he could just find a narrow crevice in the rocks, which would allow a wolf to squeeze through, but not a man, then he stood a chance.

  He scrambled up to the saddle, only to find that the ridge dropped away on the other side in a sweeping slope, with no cover whatsoever. Not even a for or piece of moraine was available to hide behind and get some sort of a breather to enable him to reassess his position.

  The ridge fell away to a spur to his left and he decided to follow this down. It was no use climbing higher, up into the snows and the steep-sided walls of the mountain. He had to keep going over the ridges, looking for some situation that might save him. When he was halfway down, he scented one of the hunters. Probably the one they had left to prevent any doubling back. After waiting there for a while and realising that Athaba was not going to be fooled, he had come round the bottom of the two spurs and was waiting for the wolf to descend.

  The party was behind him and the back-up man in front.

  There was only one thing for it, and that was to throw himself down the talus and hope he did not injure himself.

  He went down on his bottom and began the slide in a dignified manner, but soon lost his grip and tumbled head over heels until he landed in the shale at the bottom.

  The hunting party had just made the top of the ridge, further up, and they saw him and began barking to their back-up man, no doubt trying to convey the information that if he ran around the bottom of the spur he would trap the wolf between them.

  Athaba shook himself and began sprinting for an outcrop. All of a sudden he felt a rush of exhilaration. The adrenalin began flooding through his system. He was going to make it! On the far side of that outcrop he could see that the foothills fell gently away again into another valley. Wide tundra stretched out before him. If he could make that and not worry too much about his hindleg, he could certainly outrun the men’s guns. They would be exhausted by now anyway, and there could not possibly be any vehicle in that direction when they had come from the opposite side of the hill. He was going to make it.

  He passed the outcrop going at speed and was soon out on the mosses of the tundra, feeling the grasses whipping at his legs. Men were such oafs when it came to hunting. Without their machines …

  At that moment, at that precise moment, he heard it. The terrible swishing clacking sound from the sky. A man was coming down from the clouds. The air machine swept down like a monstrous hawk, ready to stoop on the running wolf. Athaba felt the cold black shadow move back and forth over his body, as if this bird of prey were toying with its quarry.

  Athaba was determined to keep on moving. He would die in mid-stride. They would not find him waiting for the bullet.

  The machine passed overhead for the last time with a roar and a clatter, turned, and hovered alongside him as he ran. The grasses flattened submissively around him. Athaba glanced up and saw the rifle being aimed. Behind the man with the gun was a familiar figure, watching for the moment of the kill.

  Koonama!

  The wild face with its wild eyes stared down on him, long unkempt hair flailing in the wind created by the machine. Bony fingers, white at the knuckles, gripped a rail. The mouth was open, a red gash in the grey and ginger hair.

  What was this? Retribution? Revenge? For what? Without Athaba the wolfman would have been captured by humans long before now. For leaving him, possibly, to the fury of his kind? That was it. Koonama was trying to get back into the good graces of his human pack. He had gone back to his megas and offered them a sacrifice, to show he wanted to make amends for his treachery. He must have told them he would deliver the wolf that was responsible into their hands.

  Their eyes locked and Koonama barred his teeth in triumph, the way humans did on such occasions.

  What have I done to you that deserves this? thought Athaba.

  Now the wolfman watched as the gun was pointed, the trigger squeezed, and the … the dart struck his headwolf’s flank. It dangled from Athaba’s side like a dead hornet.

  A now familiar dizziness overtook Athaba.

  Not again, he thought, as he staggered the last two or three paces, the sound of the machine drowning out his howl. Not again!

  He fell on his side, panting, as the machine began descending just a few lengths away. Athaba tried to retain some strength in his body. He wanted to be conscious when Koonama leaned over him, so that he could rip the throat out of his erstwhile companion. He wanted it to be the last thing he ever did. After which, they could shoot him. Better to die than be imprisoned again. Better …

  Chapter Twenty One

  Athaba awoke to find himself once more in the prison-cage that he vowed he would never see again. Perhaps not the same prison, but one very similar. Once more he was fed and watered through the bars and once more he fell into a pit of despair from which he believed he would never emerge. The days slipped by, each much the same as the last, until almost a month had passed. Then, one day, he had a visitor.

  It was Koonama.

  The wolfman’s appearance had changed so much that Athaba hardly recognised him. All the hair had gone from his face and he was fatter and looking much healthier. The sores had all but disappeared, but where they remained there was some sweet-smelling mud covering them. His skin glowed, his eyes were clear and bright, and for some reason he kept crinkling the skin around their corners, and around his mouth. He stood by Athaba’s cage and growled and barked at him in a soft tone, for all the world as if he were trying to
talk to him.

  Athaba wanted to kill his erstwhile companion.

  Koonama was in fact no longer a wolfman, but a human complete. The wolf did not understand these men creatures at all. If a wolf had become half-man, other wolves would never accept it back into the pack, no matter what it promised or produced in order to make amends. There were no half-measures amongst wolves. Once your loyalty had been diluted even just a little – a raindrop in a pond – you were finished. But here were the humans, taking one of their traitors back, just as if he had remained faithful to the species every moment of his life.

  In fact it was obvious that he was welcome! There were many gestures displayed which Athaba had observed during his last period of captivity: such things as backslapping, teeth-showing, loud repetitive barking, hand touching shoulder, hand lightly striking shoulder, hugging. Koonama had a female with him who constantly did the hugging thing and kept touching his head-hair. She also made clucking noises at Athaba but the wolf ignored this mockery.

  Again, Koonama supervised the carrying of his prison-cage out to an air machine, and accompanied Athaba into the sky. Athaba idly wondered whether they were going through the whole thing again, but this time he was not drugged and would try to watch what happened when they dropped out of the clouds and hit the earth. Perhaps he was caught in a cycle of events from which he could never escape? Perhaps he was really dead? Maybe that first time he had been shot and killed and this was the world that you went to afterwards? There were no Far Forests, only a kind of locked circular movement which took you across the tundra up into the air and across the tundra again, for all eternity. That was surely it.

  He was wrong.

  The machine touched down lightly this time. The prison-cage was lifted out and Koonama stayed by it until the sky man was back inside his machine. Then Koonama opened the door and gestured for Athaba to come out. Athaba was very suspicious. Was he being set up like a target for guns of other huntsmen? He bristled and moved to the back of the cage. Again, Koonama made a gesture which Athaba interpreted as ‘come outside’. Then he thought, what choice do I have? I can either rot in this cage or go out and face whatever is there.