Lone Wolf

by Kathryn Lasky

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look sick, sick like…no, not the yarpie barpies. Isn’t that what you call it when your pellets go soft on you?” The Sark didn’t wait for an answer but regarded the Masked Owl with a renewed intensity.

  Great Glaux, Gwynneth thought, how could she tell? This really was a wolf wise in the way few were. Not that the other wolves were dumb, but the Sark was like one of the healers at the great tree, to whom owls came when they were seriously ill. Well, there was no use trying to hide anything. Gwynneth had to talk to the Sark about what she had found on the ridge. It would be a relief. A pellet seemed to fly up from her gizzard.

  “Oh, pardon me, ma’am. I didn’t mean to yarp right here!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” replied the Sark. She picked up the pellet in her mouth and plopped it on top of the moose patty. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Mind what?”

  “Me using your pellet. I have a hunch this combination could be—how should I put it?—quite dynamic in the kiln. You don’t know how long I have been trying to get a turquoise matte glaze.”

  Gwynneth had no idea what the Sark was talking about. But there was one thing that both Gwynneth and the Sark had in common: They were both artists. “Sure, help yourself,” she said.

  After the Sark had put the moose patty and the pellet in the kiln, she turned back to Gwynneth. “Well, now that you’ve yarped your pellet and are looking a tad better, come on inside and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Gwynneth took a deep breath.

  “I’m here about—a malcadh.”

  “You don’t say…” The Sark turned around from fluffing a pelt she had dragged nearer to the fire for Gwynneth. The skittish eye grew still. “Why would an owl be interested in a malcadh, except of course for the obvious?”

  Gwynneth’s feathers puffed up with indignation at this last remark. “Because a wolf was interested in that malcadh before any owl, fox, cougar, or moose,” she snapped.

  The hackles of the Sark’s fur rose up in a small cyclonic flurry. “What are you saying? The mother came back?”

  “No, not the mother. And the pup was not prey for any other animals. It was not eaten.”

  “Are you saying that…” The Sark gasped and seemed unable to go on.

  “Yes. The malcadh was murdered.”

  The Sark’s skittish eye went into a spinning frenzy, and her legs began to wobble. “You can’t be serious!” But even as she spoke, she knew that this Masked Owl was telling the truth. For a malcadh’s life to end this way—it was not a natural death.

  “I have never in all my long years…” The Sark’s breath came fast and she eased herself onto the heap of rabbit pelts. “All right, tell me what you saw, what you heard.” She knew well the extraordinary information that owls could gather through their ear slits. “Tell me everything.”

  And so Gwynneth did. The fire had begun to gutter out when the Sark finally got up to get some more kindling.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a bonk coal?” Gwynneth offered, simply to break the long silence with which the Sark had greeted her story.

  “No,” the Sark growled. “Why waste a good bonk coal on a hearth fire? I have fur, remember. I don’t need such a hot fire in my cave.”

  After tending the fire, she settled down again. “This is very bad, very bad indeed. And you have no idea who this wolf might be?”

  “None. That’s why I’m here. I thought you might know.”

  “The only wolf, or kind of wolf, I can imagine doing this might be a foaming-mouth one. You didn’t pick up any scent? Oh, I forgot. You can’t smell.”

  “Right. But it might have been an outclanner from the Outermost.”

  “The clans would have known about it. There is an alert system.” The Sark buried her muzzle between her paws. Why? Why would a wolf do such a thing? The Sark remained still for several minutes. Finally, she pulled her muzzle out from her paws and said, “So you are the only one who knows about this heinous crime?”

  “Well, I suppose so. I mean, I flew off. Someone else could have come along and found…found”—Gwynneth stumbled—“the remains, but they wouldn’t know it was a wolf who murdered the malcadh. As I told you, I was flying overhead when it happened. I picked up the panting of a wolf, the gnashing of its teeth.”

  “Huh! So our teeth make that distinctive a sound, do they?”

  “Well, for our ears, yes. First of all, as you know, we owls don’t have teeth. It’s all talons and beaks with us. Fox teeth are much tinier than wolf teeth, and make a scraping sound. Cougars’ teeth are huge. They make loud, cracking noises.”

  “And what about wolf teeth?”

  “It’s your back teeth that have a unique sound. They slice, sharply. It’s not really all that loud—just a clean slicing sound as if two blades are swiping against each other.”

  The Sark opened her mouth wide and revealed the formidable scissorlike teeth in the back near her throat.

  “Yes, quite impressive,” Gwynneth said, and averted her eyes with a sudden twist of her head.

  The Sark closed her mouth. “So we can safely assume that no other creature except for us knows about this terrible murder.”

  Gwynneth nodded.

  “I think, then, we must keep it that way. I’m going to have to think about this for a while. Describe to me the exact site. Maybe I can go there and pick up a scent.”

  When Gwynneth finished pinpointing the location on a map she had scratched in the cave floor, the Sark felt there was one scent they would pick up. That of Faolan. For the place was exactly where he had described finding the malcadh pup whose mother had recovered in the Sark’s cave.

  “Faolan was at that ridge,” the Sark said casually.

  “Surely you’re not suggesting Faolan could have done this!” Gwynneth was shocked.

  “Oh, no, never. He saw the pup, however. At least a day and a night before you saw it on your flight to the Sacred Ring. But he was in a complete dither when he came here. You can imagine what it was like for a malcadh to see another laid out on a tummfraw, knowing that he had gone through the same thing. Went straight to his marrow.”

  “Yes, of course,” Gwynneth said, her voice trembling slightly. She sighed. “If you could fly and I could smell, what a team we’d make!”

  The Sark blinked several times. She felt her skittish eye still for a moment. “But we can!” she said suddenly.

  “Can what? You can’t fly. I have no sense of smell. You told me so yourself.”

  “But don’t you see that together we have it all? We might be able to solve this monstrous crime. We are more than the sum of our parts!”

  So together the wolf and the owl started to devise a plan in which they would both go to the tummfraw on the ridge. They would uncover what clues they could—bones, perhaps tufts of fur that had stuck in small crevices.

  “You see, there is—how should I explain it?—a map of scents surrounding everything. You just have to know how to sort them out.” The Sark spoke excitedly. Her eye was whirling now. “So I pick up the scent and then try and figure out the direction it came from.”

  “A vector—a scent vector!” Gwynneth replied. Owls were extraordinary navigators. So they often spoke in terms of navigation when they took bearings on stars or scanned for sound sources.

  “Exactly! You see what I mean. We are more than the sum of our parts!”

  And at just that moment, the old wolf’s nostrils began to twitch. The wind had shifted and on it a vaguely familiar scent wafted into her cave. Indeed, an alarming scent.

  “Owl!” she rasped. “You have to go. Visitors are coming and it’s best I be alone. Come back two nights from now.”

  Gwynneth knew better than to argue. She left at once.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A STANDOFF AT THE SCRAPE

  THERE WERE IN ALL SIX GNAW wolves who would be competing at the gaddergnaw during the Moon of the Singing Grass. They had gathered to practice
on the lower slopes of Crooked Back Ridge, a place accessible to all the packs and clans. This morning, the gnaw wolves were working on bones in a gnaw circle that formed around a scrape, a small circular area that had been literally scraped bare of any grass. In the center was a pile of bones from which the wolves selected the ones they wanted. As they gnawed, they spoke softly—clan gossip, the upcoming trials of the big gaddergnaw, as well as what they knew of the history of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes and the wolves of the Watch.

  “There’s a rumor of outclanners slipping over the border,” Tearlach, the earless gnaw wolf from the MacAngus clan, said. “Have you heard about that?”

  “Where—near here?” Edme, the one-eyed wolf from the MacHeath clan, asked nervously.

  “Probably not,” Heep said. “You know there are always rumors, and if in fact any outclanners are around, most likely they are up near the MacDonegal territory. That’s closest to the Outermost border.”

  “Not a pleasant subject,” Edme said, and gave a shiver.

  “You know,” Tearlach began, as if to purposely change the subject, “they say that when the old Fengo Hamish was released from his duties, his hind leg, which was twisted backward, turned around. A cloud passed across the moon, and when it cleared, his leg was straight.”

  “Really?” Edme asked somewhat breathlessly.

  “But it most certainly is true!” Heep snapped. “Why would you ever question this story?”

  “I thought maybe it was just a legend.”

  “No!” barked Heep. There was a snarl embedded in the bark that took them all aback.

  But Edme seemed unfazed. “I don’t think we should even think about that because it would mean the good king Soren of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree would have to die, and another owl would have to dive for the ember.”

  “I never have understood this at all. Embered kings, unembered ones,” Faolan said.

  “That’s because you’re new.” Heep lifted his head. “You really don’t understand our history or our ways.”

  Faolan went back to his gnawing. He was not going to let this wolf get to him.

  “But we should tell him, Heep! Or how will he ever learn?” Creakle, who was missing a paw, leaned out to explain. “As you know, the duty of the Watch is to guard the Ember of Hoole embedded in one of the craters of the five Sacred Volcanoes. That’s when there is what we call an unembered monarch such as Soren at the great tree. Embered monarchs have the ember with them, so there’s no need for a Watch to guard it.

  “What happened to Hamish could happen only after the Ember of Hoole was recovered by Coryn, who became an embered king a long time ago. At that moment, every wolf of the Watch was released from duty and could resume the life of a normal wolf. What had been broken in their bodies was mended; what was twisted was made to grow straight; what was crippled gained strength.”

  “Is that what the law says?” Faolan asked.

  Heep snorted as if to say, How could one be so stupid? but Creakle shot him a dark look. “Oh, no. This was not a decree from the gaddernock. It has nothing to do with wolf codes or laws. It was a prophecy.” He spoke in a hushed tone. “A prophecy made by the very earliest owl king of the Hoolian world.”

  “But it came true!” Edme said.

  Hasn’t it in some way already come true? Faolan thought. He remembered his amazement at the beautiful howling that issued from the throat of the Whistler and wondered again how that buckled throat, the warped windpipe that gusted and rattled in speech, could produce such a lovely note. He said nothing. However, the story of the wolves of the Watch being restored to new lives had a haunting resonance for him.

  The wolves at the scrape were silent for a long time after Creakle’s explanation. Faolan liked this new companionship but was deeply annoyed that he had to gnaw so close to Heep. He could almost hear that little nick in the back blades of Heep’s teeth clicking as he gnawed. Wolves of the same clan had to work next to each other. This meant that Heep, the Whistler, and Faolan always had to gnaw side by side.

  Across the scrape from Faolan were Creakle the MacDuff wolf, Tearlach from the MacAngus clan, and Edme, the pathetic one-eyed she-wolf who had endured unspeakable abuse from the infamous MacHeath clan. One of the vilest secrets of the MacHeaths was that they would purposely maim young pups, hoping to gain a place in the Watch of the Sacred Volcanoes. MacDuncans had been favored for the Watch, but when Hamish became Fengo, he worked hard with the best scholars of the gaddernock so that the law could be changed and others could be considered for duty. Hamish felt that new blood was needed to keep the Watch vigorous. It had been one of his last achievements before he died.

  As they chatted and gnawed around the scrape, Faolan worked on a design that he hoped someday to perfect so he could carve it on Thunderheart’s huge paw. It was a carving of a summer night when Thunderheart had watched the stars with Faolan, naming the constellations for him and pointing out the Great Bear. Faolan was determined to incise this constellation on his bone—every little star from the Bear’s muzzle to the tips of its hind feet.

  Edme had risen up to stretch her legs. “Oh, my goodness! Look at what Faolan’s done!” she exclaimed.

  “What?” grunted Heep.

  “Why, he’s only made the most beautiful constellation I have ever seen. With all the proper stars surrounding it.”

  “It looks like a bear, not a wolf—if that’s what you intended.” Heep scowled.

  “That’s exactly what I intended. It is how the bears look at the stars. They call the Great Wolf the Great Bear. My second Milk Giver taught me those names. The Great Bear points to Ursulana, the place where bear spirits go when they die.”

  “Oh, her again, that bear,” muttered Heep.

  “It’s beautiful, Heep!” Edme said. “What difference does it make what one calls it? Stars all have different meaning for different animals, and heavens have different names. It’s an inspiration.” She scurried to the center of the circle and picked a femur from the pile, then returned to her spot and began gnawing diligently. “I’m starting over, a new bone, new design! All because of Faolan!”

  Edme was such a cheerful wolf despite her pitiful appearance.

  “Yes, Faolan’s is one of the loveliest designs ever.” The windy words of the Whistler brushed Faolan’s shoulder as Whistler leaned over to study the bone. “Edme’s right; what difference does it make?”

  “Blasphemy, perhaps?” Heep muttered.

  “I think you’re going too far,” Creakle said.

  “That’s your opinion, Creakle. But some might call it profane to call the Great Wolf by the name of another animal.”

  “Oh, really!” The Whistler groaned and it sounded like the clattering of bare branches in the wind.

  Faolan knew that his gnawing had caused talk, especially since he had gnawed the bones of contrition. The elegance and beauty of his work had stirred rumors among the most superstitious of the wolves that he was from the Dim World, or perhaps was the malcadh offspring of an outclanner! Wolves were watching him closely now, and it was unnerving. If Heep began muttering about the constellation he had just carved and saying it was blasphemy, there could be trouble. But should Faolan change his design to look more like a wolf? That seemed dishonest, even profane. He had wanted to show how bears viewed the night sky. The bear’s point of view. Did the entire universe always have to be seen through the eyes of wolves?

  Edme paused in her gnawing. “Don’t you find it odd that both wolves and cougars share the word ‘scrape,’ but the meaning is so different?”

  The clicking sound next to Faolan stopped. Heep dropped his bone. He began to make the writhing motions that often were the prelude to one of his humble speeches. “I am well aware that I am the humblest of all the gnaw wolves gathered here today, and perhaps I am reaching beyond my lowly station to even suggest that the esteemed gnaw wolf from the MacHeath clan goes too far.”

  Faolan felt his hackles rise at this. Heep had just wrapped an insult in the decept
ive pelt of his fawning words. Poor Edme knew that she was the least-esteemed gnaw wolf in all the Beyond because the brutal clan she came from was a whisker’s breadth away from being considered outclanners. Heep’s words rubbed a raw wound.

  “But it is my humble opinion that it does a disservice to our noble wolves to even think of a comparison between our clans and cougars.” And with that, Heep got up, walked around to where Edme was working, and gave her a sharp nip on the ear.

  “Youch!” Edme screeched. A trickle of blood ran down her neck.

  The other wolves were momentarily stunned. Tearlach was at Edme’s side instantly, and the other wolves soon jumped up, their hackles raised.

  “Are you all right, Edme?” Tearlach asked.

  “I’ll be fine. It wasn’t deep. I’ll be fine.” But she did not look fine.

  Edme’s face seemed to be collapsing into her skull. Her muzzle trembled, her eyes leaked oily tears. But she stared at Heep uncomprehendingly. “Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

  “You need to learn, Edme. Your comments were an insult to our species.”

  “I…I…” she began to speak.

  She can’t apologize. She can’t! Faolan thought. He had had enough of the yellow wolf for one morning. He knew it was not so much what Edme had said but her drawing attention to Faolan’s carving earlier that had angered Heep. Heep was trying to get back at her. Faolan came right up to Heep and assumed the most threatening posture he could muster, for gnaw wolves were not practiced in the basics of threat stances and dominance signals. And yet the other gnaw wolves dropped their bones when they saw Faolan with his tail erect, his head held high, his ears shoved up and forward.

  Faolan circled Heep, walking with a slight swagger until he stopped and faced him. He growled and bared his teeth. Then he began to speak, and what he said was so shocking that the other wolves gasped: “Heep, you are prideful. You are not humble at all. And you are a hypocrite. Pride and deceit have made you mean. What you just said to Edme was cruel. You are vain. Your so-called humility is false. You want to be humiliated? I’ll help you!”