Spirit Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  Was she someplace between earth and the Cave of Souls? she wondered. She felt she was in a different land, a different country, and yet there was a familiar scent she had saved from long ago and put in the jug with the blue glaze. It wafted out to greet her.

  That blue glaze was the devil to figure out! She had been explaining to Gwyndor how she had pulled borax from the old salt beds and mixed it with some moose scat. Oh, forget that, she told herself. It’s the scent inside the memory jug that’s important, not the glaze. It’s the scent contained, you crazy old fool! Her marrow trembled as the first wafts of sweet grass came back to her. Sweet grass! Even in her insensible state, her skittish eye began to spin madly.

  The odor of the sweet grass swirled up and flooded through her, taking her back to that moon so long ago, when she had just entered her second year. She had been born into the MacNabbys, a small clan with only two packs, but somehow she had lost them. She had not been born a malcadh. No Obea had come to take her away, she was sure of that. Obeas were said to have no scent because of their sterility, but the Sark had realized very soon how powerful her own sense of smell was. To her, the absence of odor was in an odd way as memorable as the most pungent scent. She would have remembered being carried off to a tummfraw by an Obea. She had therefore surmised that she had been some sort of embarrassment to her parents and had been left behind or had been misplaced somehow, accidentally on purpose. Wolf pups, always curious, were known to wander off. Perhaps she had and no one had come to look for her or tried very hard to find her. After all, she had been born very, very ugly.

  When, as a yearling, the Sark had discovered a MacNabby pack, she followed them for a while but did not approach. Her fur was mottled and ragged, and her eye had begun to skitter in its socket. The members of the MacNabby clan were exceedingly handsome. She feared that she might not be accepted. It seemed to her better to remain separate. So she had gone off.

  Not long after, the Sark caught sight of a MacNabby camp heading back east from the summer hunting grounds. There was a beautiful she-wolf among them with a pelt the color of pale amber, a wolf so stunning that she took the Sark’s breath away. The she-wolf was everything that the Sark was not, with well-formed haunches, an elegant muzzle, and the greenest eyes the Sark had ever seen. She was traveling with her mate and three pups, but every male in the pack was excessively attentive to her. More than once, the Sark saw the she-wolf’s mate take a nip at her admirers. He was the leader of the pack and it was not simply indecorous that these other males would flirt with their leader’s mate, but a violation of the gaddernock, the laws that governed the clans of the Beyond.

  The female, whom the Sark called Amber, did little to discourage the other males’ flirtatious overtures, which seemed to the Sark another violation of some sort. But what puzzled the Sark the most was how inattentive she was to her new litter of pups. She let them scramble off this way and that and it was always some other pack member who went after them. They were unruly little fellows, all male, and when Amber disciplined them, she was very harsh. More than once, her warning nips drew blood. She was not a good mother; indeed, there did not seem to be a single maternal bone in her body.

  Still, she fascinated the Sark. Amber was appallingly vain, so much so that she could hardly pass a lake or a puddle without pausing to stare at her own reflection. She would grow very still, as if her own beauty put her in a trance of some sort.

  Then one night, when the pack had stopped by a pond to camp, the Sark had an astounding revelation about who exactly Amber was. The moon was full and the lake looked as if it had been gilded in silver. Not a breath of wind disturbed its surface. It provided the perfect mirror for the beautiful wolf’s reflection.

  The Sark hid in the grass staring at Amber, wondering why she was so fascinated by the vain wolf. What is it about her? the Sark wondered.

  A breeze ruffled the surface, disturbing Amber’s image, and one of her pups came up demanding to nurse. Amber snarled, spun around, and gave the pup a sharp whack with her paw. The pup went flying through the air, then hit the ground hard. Just then, the wind changed direction and the Sark picked up Amber’s scent for the first time. It was painfully familiar, the scent the Sark had smelled with her first breath of life. This she-wolf was her Milk Giver! This was her own mother.

  The pup remained motionless on the ground. The Sark could tell by the angle of its body that his spine had been broken and he was dead. Amber went calmly up to the crumpled body and sniffed it, then picked the little pup up by the scruff of his neck, carried him to the far edge of the lake where the water was the deepest, and dropped him in. There would be no trace of her crime.

  So this is my mother! thought the Sark. And she is a murderer! The Sark’s skittish eye flooded with tears. How can she be this way to her own pup, a beautiful, perfect pup, not a hideous, bobble-eyed, lop-eared pup as I must have been?

  She had just witnessed by the bank of the pond an ugliness the Sark could have never imagined. The wolf she called Amber, whom until moments before the Sark thought the most beautiful wolf she had ever seen, was grotesque. She had an ugliness inside that almost stank, it was so hideous. Her own mother — Amber — was a malcadh. Her form was perfect, but her soul was twisted. And for the first time, the Sark realized that although her own body was far from perfect — indeed grotesque — it was just the outside and had nothing to do with what was inside her, the place where her true wolf nature lived. She could not change her form, but she could make sure that her inside never became as deformed as that of her mother. It was perhaps a blessing that the Sark’s appearance was slightly monstrous, as no wolf would attempt to mate with her. She dared not pass on her mother’s twisted spirit to any pup.

  The Sark watched as Amber stepped back from the water’s edge and waited until the ripples retreated from the place she had just dumped her son’s body. When the surface was still as glass, she bent her head to observe her reflection for one last time before heading back to the pack.

  This was the Sark’s strongest sweet-grass memory, one of the earliest she had whispered into a memory jug. And although the blue-glazed jug was broken, there was the whisper of scent from the shards, gurgling up as if from a spring. How can this be? she wondered in her strange state. But the shards had reassembled themselves in her mind, pieces of a shattered puzzle that had once again come together. And then the Sark caught the scent of an owl nearby, a familiar owl. I can smell her…. Gwynneth. Something inside the Sark laughed. But owls can’t smell worth a pile of caribou scat. She’ll never find me here with my beloved memory jugs, slipping my pelt at last.

  The Sark was wrong. Gwynneth didn’t smell her, but her sharp ears picked up the terrible ragged breathing and she entered the cave. When she saw the Sark, lying in a pool of blood so deep that the shards from her memory jugs almost floated around her, Gwynneth screamed. She screamed as no owl had ever screamed before.

  EDME FELT HER MARROW CURDLE and little Myrr stopped in his tracks and began to shiver. “What is that screeching?”

  The five wolves had decided to head across the Slough, determined to find the Sark although their hopes were dwindling with each dead animal they encountered. Faolan was desperate. Ever since he had stated with such certainty that they must go west to the Distant Blue, he had become deeply apprehensive. What if the blue land that he had once glimpsed had been some sort of delusion? When he had stood on that cairn on the Blood Watch, he had been exhausted, weak from hunger, weak from fighting off vicious outclanners. The Distant Blue could have been a figment of his imagination, a hallucination brought on by famine. Yet in his marrow, Faolan felt there was a truth to that looming blue place and it beckoned strongly. The Sark would know for sure. Faolan would find his dear friend, and they could set off for the Distant Blue together. He would never leave her behind, not with the whole of the Beyond broken and dying.

  The terrible screeching seared the air again. There was something almost hauntingly familiar about it —


  Faolan was seized by sudden fear. “We have to travel fast.” He set a pace approaching the press-paw speed of a byrrgis. A sense of urgency coursed through him and the others could barely keep up. Poor little Myrr lagged so far behind that Edme turned around and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck the way a she-wolf carries her youngest pups.

  This is so embarrassing! Myrr thought as he swung from Edme’s jaws. What would my mum say? The thought shocked him.

  He had not thought of his mum or his da in a while, not since he had been brought to the Ring almost a moon before. He couldn’t bear to think of how his parents had turned away that last time. It was as if his parents had stared right through him, and then just turned their backs and walked away. But he remembered them now. Before his parents had gone cag mag, his mum used to carry him this way all the time.

  I shouldn’t think about her, he told himself. It will only make me sad. Edme is kind, Faolan and his sisters are kind. Don’t think about Mum ever, ever! Not even the good memories. We’re going west now. Things will be better. We’re going west!

  Faolan had climbed up onto one of the few promontories in the Slough. Now he could see that the source of the terrible screaming was, just as he’d feared, an owl. Gwynneth was flying in circles over the Sark’s encampment, her head tipped back as she shreed her grief to the sky.

  “She is dying, dying! What can I do? I bring her food and she will not wake to eat. I would carry her in my talons to the ends of the earth, but she sleeps on.”

  Now Faolan understood. The Sark was close to death! Faolan turned to the others and howled the terrible news, “The Sark! The Sark is dying.”

  Gwynneth lighted down when she saw her friends approaching the encampment. “You’re safe! You’re here!” She was about to say, “Thank Glaux,” but then she remembered she was angry at Glaux and angry at Lupus. “I’ve tried everything. I killed a wing-lame grouse and tried to squeeze the blood into her mouth. I found some of her ointments for the cut on her flank, b-b-but … I can’t explain it. The bleeding has almost stopped, and yet I cannot seem to bring her back. She’s someplace, someplace where she cannot hear me or see me. She’s away.”

  Faolan and the others followed Gwynneth into the cave.

  “Look,” Gwynneth whispered. “You can tell that her eye still spins beneath her eyelid, just as it so often does when she’s awake.”

  “She must be seeing things,” Mhairie said softly.

  “Or smelling things,” Faolan replied as he looked about at the thousands of pot fragments. He turned his gaze back to the Sark. The pool of blood around her had dried. “Despite her twirling eye, she seems, well … I don’t know. At peace.”

  “Her breathing has eased some, I think,” Gwynneth said.

  “If we could get her well, we could take her with us,” Faolan said.

  “Where are you going? Where is there to go?” Gwynneth asked, recalling Banja’s words.

  “West. We’re going west.”

  “To the Blood Watch?”

  “Beyond that,” Faolan replied.

  “To the Outermost?” Gwynneth asked in a hushed voice.

  “Beyond even that.”

  Gwynneth’s beak dropped open. “Faolan, what have you seen?”

  “NO!”

  The five wolves and the owl startled.

  “Who said that?” Gwynneth asked.

  “Me, you fool.” The Sark’s eyes slid open. Her pelt had shrunk on her until every bone seemed ready to poke through.

  “Oh, dear Sark, we thought we had lost you!” Gwynneth flew up to hover above the Sark’s head and waft her with her wings.

  “Quit batting your wings around my head,” the Sark rasped. Her breath was still and the words came out like the jagged shards of the shattered memory jugs on which she lay.

  “You need to rest, get well.” Edme edged close to her.

  “Yes, Sark, we’ll get you some food. There seems to be more small game about.” Faolan approached and kneeled close to her ear.

  “Don’t get me anything! I have all I need right here.” The Sark stirred slightly on the fragments of pottery.

  “But those must be uncomfortable,” Edme said. “Don’t you want us to move you to a pelt? We could find some of the old pelts from your bed, put them under you, and then when you’re rested, we’ll all head west.”

  “West?” the Sark asked.

  “Yes,” Faolan said. “It came to me that —”

  But the Sark cut him off.

  “I am not going anywhere, nowhere. I’m fine right here. I want no pelts, only my pots shards.”

  “B-b-but —” Gwynneth protested. “That’s impossible! You need to rest, to get better!”

  The Sark looked up at Gwynneth, her gaze gentle for once. “Why is it impossible? I am doing the most possible thing.”

  “You’ll die!” Gwynneth wailed.

  “Exactly, the most possible thing. I shall die right here, right here. None of you understand, do you, dear creatures?”

  They all shook their heads. Understand, dear creatures? Now Gwynneth was truly worried, for the Sark never used terms of affection or tenderness and her voice had lost its rasp and become quite tender.

  “I am here with my pot shards, on a bed of fractured memories slowly coming back together. This is my heaven, my Cave of Souls.” She looked at Gwynneth. “My Glaumora.” She reached out with a palsied paw and touched Faolan’s shoulder lightly. “And my Ursulana.” Her breathing became more labored and her eyes rolled back into her head. She shut them tight and then opened them once more, seemingly startled. Her spinning eye grew still as she framed Gwynneth and Faolan, the only two creatures in the Beyond that she was truly close to. Then she shut her eyes for a final time. A thin filament of wind blew through the cave as the Sark of the Slough passed from this life to the next.

  They were all silent for a long time, the wolves erect with their hackles raised, Gwynneth wilfed to the slenderness of a sapling branch.

  Finally, Faolan spoke. “Let us leave as quietly as possible. Heed where you walk. No shard should be disturbed. Not a one.”

  As they were leaving, Myrr turned around for one last look. He had heard all about the Sark in his short life. Wolves feared her and yet many went to her when they were sick. It was said she was a witch of some sort. They said she knew fire and that was wrong, dangerous, a violation of the Great Chain that linked the wolves to the Cave of Souls and to Lupus. Only owls, like Gwynneth, were supposed to know fire.

  But Myrr saw that none of the wolves here feared the Sark at all. They knew her in a way others did not. No one in his clan had ever talked of the Sark’s memory jugs, and that was what intrigued Myrr the most. What were these jugs and how did they work? The Sark was so bound to them that she chose to lay down on their sharp pieces. What were her exact words? I am here with my pot shards, on a bed of fractured memories slowly coming back together. This is my heaven, my Cave of Souls, my Glaumora. But how could that be? Myrr had only wanted to scrub every memory of his parents from his mind. He was determined to forget them. He hated them!

  The Sark’s chest was absolutely still. Why would she choose to die like this, on this pile of rubble?

  “Come along, Myrr,” Edme said gently. “And careful not to disturb the shards.”

  “I don’t understand,” Myrr said, his voice cracking.

  “What?”

  “These jugs … these memories …”

  Hearing this, Faolan turned around. “That’s really all we are, Myrr — memories. Or call them stories. On the outside we look like fur and bone, or owls with feathers and wings and gizzards. But in the end, we’re simply stories. Long, long stories.”

  I want to forget my story!

  “Come along, dear, I’ll carry you like before if you like,” Edme offered.

  “No!” Myrr could not let her carry him. It would bring back a memory that would be as sharp and painful as a snow thorn in his paw pads. “I can walk fine.”

  THEY HAD BEE
N TRAVELING FOR some time in a northwesterly direction, and although the glacier seemed to have missed the Slough entirely, they could now see it quite clearly as they approached its ragged edge. Faolan called a halt. He peered out across the expanse of ice that seemed endless. The glacier did not appear to be moving at all anymore, but the vast stretch of it stood between the wolves and their destination.

  “I don’t think we have a choice. We’re going to have to go across it if we are to get to the border, to the Cave.”

  “It looks solid,” Mhairie said. “I don’t see any cracks.”

  “You never can be sure. It can be deceptive,” Gwynneth said. “I spent a fair amount of time in the northern kingdoms as a youngster. Snow can form a crust over the cracks and the crusts break. You can fall into a deep crevasse.”

  “What’s a crevasse?” Myrr asked.

  “It’s a deep open crack in a glacier. Deep enough to swallow a grizzly.” She wilfed before their eyes.

  “What is it, Gwynneth?” Faolan asked.

  “Nothing,” she lied. The memory of Oona sprawled in that deep crevasse haunted her. Faolan looked at her narrowly and she sighed. “Look, I didn’t want to tell you. But before we met up in the Slough, when I was traveling near Crooked Back Ridge — well, what had been a ridge — the ground was riddled with deep cracks. I found Oona in one.”

  “Oona!” Edme and Faolan both gasped.

  Gwynneth shut her eyes tight as she recalled the image of the vultures diving into the crevasse, scavenging the remains of animals who had plummeted to their deaths. “It was horrible. The crevasse that Oona fell into was wide, wide enough for the wingspan of a vulture. Wide enough for a grizzly. There were so many animals dead at the bottom. It was a feast for carrion eaters.”