Spirit Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  Mhairie and Dearlea dug in, their muscles quivering. Finally, they clawed their way onto the floe.

  Whole trees that had been upended floated by. There were also several metal objects that might have been torn from the forges of Rogue smith owls and had yet to sink. The debris was carried by wind or current, or shoved along by the immense blocks of ice. It was as if the world were passing them by, and in an odd sense it all seemed like a welcome distraction as Faolan’s sisters found their balance.

  “Whatever is that?” Mhairie asked as something sodden swept by.

  “Oh my goodness,” Faolan gasped. “I believe it is a scroll, or what the owls called a book. The owls wrote their stories on paper.”

  “Not bone?” Dearlea asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Where do you think we’ll end up?” Mhairie asked.

  “Lupus only knows! Just keep digging your claws in, and hold on tight,” Faolan replied.

  This was not Faolan’s first ice floe, as the laws of the clan wolves decreed that a malcadh must be cast out at birth, abandoned in a place where it would surely die. If in the rare occurrence the pup survived and found its way back to its clan, it was accepted back as a gnaw wolf. The place of abandonment was called a tummfraw, and the wolf who carried the pup away was called the Obea. Obeas were especially knowledgeable about the forsaken places they could leave malformed pups, places pups would die quickly, without suffering, such as moose trails, where pups were sure to be crushed.

  Faolan had been born during the icy brink of time between the end of the hunger moons and the beginning of the Cracking Ice Moon. Therefore, the Obea had taken him to a riverbank, where a chunk of ice was his tummfraw. When the watercourse had swollen over the banks, the ice had torn loose and Faolan had ridden an ice cart down a raging cataract of water until he finally, and miraculously, fetched up on the hind paw of the grizzly bear Thunderheart. She was grieving by the river because, two days before, her cub had been snatched by a cougar. Her milk was still flowing and so when Thunderheart adopted the tiny wolf pup, she became his second Milk Giver.

  Now Faolan was adrift once again, and his situation no less perilous. He had grown bigger and much stronger, but his grip seemed less firm on the ice. He wondered why. How could he be weaker now than when he was a newborn, his eyes still sealed as he had ricocheted down that river?

  “Faolan, look! Look at your paw!”

  A most peculiar feeling flooded Faolan’s marrow. His paw felt different, but he dared not look at it. Could it be? Could it mean —? It was unimaginable.

  The wolves had a prophecy that when the ember at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes was destroyed, all that was bent would be straight, all that was broken would be mended, and those that were born malformed would be suddenly right. Faolan risked a glance down at his paw. It was no longer splayed, misshapen, and ugly. He felt a sudden disorientation. The entire world had just been rearranged and his paw had as well. His cursed paw. His world reeled around him. He was no longer cursed, but was he blessed? He felt strangely unsteady on this new paw. He even felt a pang of … of … What? What is it? he wondered. Then it struck him. I’m incomplete! It was as if part of him were missing, as if this split-second change from cursed to not cursed had taken something vital away.

  If the ember had been destroyed as the Ring collapsed, the wolves of the Watch must have been relieved of their guard duties. This could be the only reason that his splayed paw had turned. The same would be true for all the gnaw wolves of the Beyond. Twisted limbs would be straightened, missing ears or eyes or tails restored, broken windpipes mended. The time of the Great Mending had come, but only as the whole earth was breaking.

  “Hold on!” Dearlea screeched as Faolan skidded toward the edge of the ice floe in shock.

  IN THE DIM LIGHT OF THE MYSTERIOUS cave on the border between the Beyond and the Outermost, consciousness crept back to the Whistler. The terrible shaking had stopped. He had fallen somewhere in the cave but nothing seemed broken. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a large boulder teetering on a ledge above him and gasped. He leaped to his feet and moved out of the way. But had he been the one to gasp? It sounded as if another creature had emitted the noise. He paused to listen, but the breathing he heard was surely not his own. His breath was ragged and when he slept at night, the other wolves teased him that his snoring sounded like a rock slide. This breathing was soft and even. How very odd.

  “Hello! Hello out there!” he called. And now his legs began to wobble. Something had possessed him, for that voice was not his, not his at all. His voice was always hoarse and jagged, but ironically his howling was the loveliest of all the wolves. Somehow the hole in his throat caught the air just right, giving his howl a deep resonance that shivered through the fur of all wolves who heard it.

  He decided to try a howl. He opened his mouth and felt the wind pass through his throat in a manner he had never experienced. It felt good and yet it was harder to control the sound. Well, that’s going to take a little work, the Whistler thought. He rocked back onto his haunches as it hit him. My hole is … is patched! It can’t be. The Whistler opened his eyes in amazement. The Great Mending … has it begun?

  The Whistler was suddenly desperate to get out of the cave, but everything was jumbled, passages blocked. Huge cracks fractured the walls. Oddly enough, none of the pictures, at least that he could see, had been damaged. Not a crack! He remembered the stirring images of the old wolf, the owl, and the bear he had found. That seemed to be part of some sort of very important story. But he couldn’t see them and now all he wanted to do was get out. Get out!

  He began to tremble. To die in here, in this dark place? No! Whistler threw back his head and howled, howled until his newly mended throat felt raw.

  “I am at last born whole, but the world has fractured. How can this be? How can it be?” he cried.

  DEEP IN THE OUTERMOST, THAT most lawless place where wolves ganged together in routs, an old wolf word that meant “viscious,” there was a den where two routs had camped. The yellow wolf Heep was strutting about wagging his newly acquired tail. He could not help but admire it and found it difficult to stop turning his head as if to check it was still there. To his mind, it was the finishing touch to his leadership here in the Outermost. In the year or so since he arrived, he had acquired more power than any other outclanner wolf. In part, he had to give credit to his time in the Beyond as a gnaw wolf in the MacDuncan clan. He had been the first wolf in many years who had actually come to the Outermost having experienced an extended period of clan life. Most of the other outclanners had found their way to the region as either lone wolves or young wolves whose mothers had died in their whelping dens. These outclanner wolves knew nothing of rank and were without organization of any kind. When Heep arrived, he was smart enough to realize that the outclanner wolves needed at least some kind of order. He set out to try to build what he called a society, but what he actually thought of as a force.

  He had built his force one wolf at a time and had so far been fairly successful in bringing two routs together. During the worst of the famine, it had been his idea to set up watches so they could prey on weak clan wolves when they fell into unconsciousness. Wolf eating wolf was not abhorred in the Outermost as it was in the Beyond, and in times of famine, the cannibalism had increased.

  So as the other wolves died, Heep and his two routs had thrived, even grown fat. For Heep, it was more than mere survival. In his strange, twisted mind, he relished consuming the flesh of the wolves who had abused him when he was a gnaw wolf in the Beyond. Each bite of their meat brought him an incredible, nearly maniacal surge of power.

  Heep was clever. He had even turned two clan wolves who had been following the Prophet. Finding them on the brink of death, perhaps hastened to that brink by outclanners’ teeth and claws, he had nursed them back to health. The wolves were eternally grateful, and naturally, they swore their allegiance.

  One of the clan wolves was a she-wo
lf whom he had rescued and taken as mate even though she was older. Now they had a pup; he was a father. It pleased him greatly although his son had much to learn. He was rather a mealy-mouthed little fellow, with a trace of the moldwarp about him. It would be intolerable if the pup didn’t grow out of it, but Heep would deal with that later. Heep’s sway over his followers was strong, but in his mind it had become even more powerful since the earthquake. That night, just hours before the quake, Heep and his rout had dragged the body of a wolf into the abandoned den of a cougar. The smell of cougar was still redolent in the air.

  “Sir,” Rags said, assuming a submissive posture — something the outclanners had never done in the past but were learning now. “May I do the honors?” Heep nodded at the large red wolf then turned and winked at his mate, Aliac. She had been helpful in tutoring the rout wolves in decorum. But what Rags did next was a lesson no clan wolf had ever learned. It was a new “tradition” that Heep had introduced and Rags, with his uncommonly long and very sharp fangs, executed skillfully. With one quick bite, Rags snapped off the tail of the dead wolf. Heep had no tail and he made it understood that every wolf killed was to have its tail removed and brought to him. And he did not limit himself to wolf tails. If he joined a craw, which was an outclanner blood sport in which they pitted two animals in a fight to the death, Heep made a point of collecting the victim’s tail. He had hundreds of them and he kept them in some secret place in the Outermost.

  But on that particular evening, just as Rags was about to present the dead wolf’s tail to Heep, the earth began to shake violently.

  “Out! Out!” Heep shouted. The den’s ceiling shuddered above them, and Heep feared they would be smothered. The rout wolves streaked from the den. Two wolves were crushed by tumbling boulders and another disappeared into a gash that had opened in the earth.

  “Aliac! Aliac!” Heep cried.

  “I’m safe! Safe here with Abban!” she shouted back.

  The air was thick with pulverized rock and grime as the earth continued to belch forth its innards. But suddenly Heep had become aware of a strange feeling in his hindquarters, a prickling as if he had backed into a thorn bush. Even as the earth heaved beneath his feet, he whipped around and blinked. The earth shook his brains and the air was thick with dust, but he had seen an unmistakable bump forming on his rump exactly where a tail would have grown. This cannot be! he thought. But the bump had grown, lengthened, and soon a white tip poked out. “I am growing a tail!” he gasped. “A tail at last!” He knew what this meant. The earthquake had destroyed the ember and the prophecy of the first king Hoole had come true. That which was broken was being mended. The whole world was broken, but he was mended. He had a tail!

  Death and suffering surrounded him, but Heep had never been so happy in his life. He had a tail! In the days after the earthquake, he became mesmerized by it. He practiced constantly flicking it this way and that way. And when no one else was looking, he tried tucking it between his legs in a gesture of submission just for the fun of it. He used his tail to swat his son, which Abban found preferable to being struck by his father’s paw. Heep forced his mate, Aliac, to spend countless hours grooming it. He loved that the tip of his tail was white and not the same color as the rest of his pelt. He felt it made a very striking, more commanding, impression.

  This, of course, was his mistake. Quietly the other outclanners sniggered behind his back. His vanity was eating away at his marrow, they said. And they were right.

  Myrrglosch, a young pup who had been at the Ring for less than half a moon, peeked out from the rubble of the earthquake and blinked. “Oh, Lupus!” he breathed. How can this be happening? Not now, not after all we’ve been through!

  A wind like a wall of cold bore down upon the Ring, stinging his face as he peeked out. Behind it, a great white mountain taller than any volcano crumbled through the smoldering remains of the Ring. Was this what was called a glacier? The H’rathghar glacier! Myrr thought, cowering against the trembling earth. It was like a beast, a huge gnashing beast of bristling ice. A white grizzly! He had heard a skreeleen story about such a beast that appeared to stomp and chew up whatever was in its way. Its leading edge now was so close that it obliterated the sky.

  Myrrglosch opened his jaws to scream but the air filled with a great hissing steam as the ice met the last remains of the volcanoes. It snuffed them out, shoveled them into the screaming earth as easily as a bear trampling through a low bush.

  Myrr grew dizzy at the thought and he collapsed in a faint.

  He was not sure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke, he was sure he was dead.

  Am I a lochin? He licked his paw and he could feel. Or was he teasing himself? He twisted his head around and nipped his own shoulder.

  “Youch!” he barked. He’d bitten so hard he’d drawn his own blood.

  “Guess I’m alive,” he muttered and began to weep enormous tears. He couldn’t help it. Too much had happened in his short lifetime. First his parents had abandoned him and he wasn’t even a malcadh! He was a perfectly formed, healthy pup, so plump and perfect his mother had called him “Cutie Pup”! But then something awful had begun to happen. The strange wolf with a mask and helmet had appeared, calling himself the Prophet, and Myrr’s parents had fallen under his spell. They seemed to forget about the clan, then food, then even their own little pup.

  Myrr would never forget that day when he left his parents. He would never forget the bland staring look in his mum’s green eyes when the Prophet had been exposed as false in front of her. She hadn’t even reacted, and when Myrr begged his parents to pay attention, to snap out of the spell, they had walked away from their only pup as if in a daze. That was when Faolan had picked Myrr up gently by the nape of his neck so he and Edme could take Myrr back to the Ring, where he would be cared for properly.

  The two Watch wolves brought him directly into the gadderheal at the Ring, to the Fengo himself. Finbar had looked at him kindly and called him “a bit of a miracle,” using the Old Wolf term for small miracle, myrr glosch. Somehow it had stuck — the best part. Myrr for miracle. The pup had had a name once upon a time. A name his parents had given him, but now it seemed as dim and distant as his parents. It was as if it, too, had walked away from him on that day.

  Everyone had been so nice to him at the Ring, especially Edme when Faolan had gone off with his sisters. But where was everyone now? Stop crying! he ordered himself. He had things to figure out. He had lost track of time. Where were the others? What had happened outside?

  Cautiously, he crept from his hole. The entire northern and eastern side of the Ring was covered with the glacier. But the other half of the Ring was charred and buried under burnt rubble. It was as if the Ring had been sliced into two, with half of it black and the other half gleaming white. He took another two steps carefully forward.

  In the short time Myrr had been in the Ring, it had become familiar territory to him. There had never been a pup at the Ring in all its history, and he was quickly adopted by everyone from the gruffest old Rogue collier owls with their beaks blackened from diving for coals to the taigas who instructed the new gnaw wolves. They all loved him, fussed over him as he made his rounds on starry evenings to watch the dazzling eruptions of the volcanoes. He almost had wished he had been born a malcadh, so that he could have competed to become a Watch wolf. The wolves’ terrible deformities did not bother him in the least; in his eyes, each one was perfect. But now as he crept a bit farther out from his hole, he wondered if there was a single friend left alive. And please, Lupus, he prayed silently, if there is just one, let it be Edme. He had never met a sweeter wolf.

  Myrr tried to walk, but the ground was so uneven that all he could do was stumble through the wreckage of the Ring. There were chunks of ice and overturned boulders, boulders that had once served as meeting places for the daily business of the Ring. And everywhere there were bones, bones that had tumbled and scattered from the cairns where the wolves stood their watches. The gadderhe
al, where the court of the Watch wolves met, was now sealed beneath a pond of burbling lava. But where was the colliers’ perch, where owls often waited outside the gadderheal to speak with the Fengo? Where was the bone pit where fresh bones were kept until ready for carving? Where was the taigas’ lodge where the new gnaw wolves came for their lessons? Where were the grooming beds where the off-duty Watch wolves would gather to pick burrs or cinder flakes from one another’s pelts and exchange stories?

  The landscape had been splintered. Dead wolves and the bodies of singed owls lay everywhere. Was there a living creature? With each step, Myrr feared finding Edme’s body, her head crushed like Colleen, the silver wolf with no ears, or Twistling, the brindled wolf with the funny paw. Her back broken like Snowdon, his strange tongue protruding from his mouth.

  Myrr wasn’t sure what had happened first, the quaking of the earth or the onslaught of the glacier that had come charging down upon the Ring, its edge bright and glaring and sharp as an owl’s talons. And now the Ring was crushed. Everything that had been there yesterday was wrecked today — shattered, cracked, and crumbling. The only defining features were the upended remnants of the caves and dens that served as lodges or gathering spots for the wolves and owls. The bones the wolves had carved, the tools the owls used in their forges, stuck out from the ground like the skeletal remains of lives long gone.

  The worst places were the ones where lava spills had seeped out from the crushed volcanoes. The victims of the lava were trapped in the thick flows, frozen in the hot black liquid into postures of terror and eternal anguish. The destruction was so complete, so thorough — that was what was most shocking. How did I escape? Why should I survive? Myrr thought. He had not been caught by ice or lava or smashed by a boulder or burned by the torrents of flames that ripped from the volcanoes’ craters. Just then he heard a small mewling sound. He whipped his head around, but he couldn’t find the source. Everything was so confused. There were rocks he had never seen before, and the ones that he recognized were out of place. He was standing by a large slab that he was sure had formed the roof of the gadderheal, but it had slid down a slope and was in front of … That must be Edme’s den! His hackles bristled as hope and fear shot through him. Could she still be alive?