WOLF
he pack raced across the frozen lake in the moonlight. They were following no scent, chasing no prey. They ran because it was a night of frost and stars and the snow was thick and powdery and they were together.
—
Wolf stopped in his tracks.
His eyes had caught something on the far shore, among the dark pines. A bright flickering, as if the sun had risen too early and was hiding in the forest, unwilling to reveal itself.
When the rest of the pack noticed Wolf was no longer with them, they circled and trotted back to where he stood gazing.
What in World is that? Alpha asked as she came up beside Wolf. Alpha was their leader, the wisest and bravest among them, and Wolf was just Wolf. As the youngest and least of the adults he had no other name.
I’m not sure, Wolf said. I thought it was the sun.
Alpha’s soft fur brushed ever so lightly against his, and Wolf felt his heart glow. She was quick and strong, and her coat was nearly all white, like the Great Mother wolf who lived in the moon. Alpha had led them well through the difficult days after her mate died in a fight with a cave bear over an aurochs carcass. It was only thanks to her that they had survived and stayed together. Wolf would do anything for her.
Wrong time, said Alpha. And the wrong place, for that matter. The sun doesn’t hang around in the forest.
At that moment their noses caught the scent of burning wood. This was not the sun. This was something stranger. Trees only burned when lightning struck them in the heat of summer. They didn’t burn in winter when snow was thick on the hide of World.
Quick shadows danced across the flickering brightness.
The fur rose on the back of Wolf’s neck. There are animals in the fire, he said.
He ran through his inner checklist of hunters and hunted. Cave bear, brown bear, otherwolf, big cat, smaller but still scary cat, lynx, wolverine, fucking hyena. Deer, elk, bison, aurochs, horse, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth. Did any of them live in fire? No. Nothing that was alive lived in fire.
Alpha said, This isn’t World but something else. It’s not for us. Let’s go.
She bounded off and the pack fell in behind her.
Wolf watched a moment longer, then he tore himself away and ran after them.
—
Wolf was alone as the sun rose, in a place of tall grass. There was no scent of his kind anywhere in World.
That could not happen.
Wolf panted, whined, darted this way and that, whined some more, pawed the earth. He raised his snout and howled for the others.
No answer. There was nothing else to do but run. Search. Find wolves. That was all that mattered. He broke into a headlong sprint and little birds shot from the grass with shrill cries. Nearby
trees shivered in a wind that sang nothing about wolves.
Wolf ran until he was exhausted. At last he collapsed into the grass, panting, shivering.
Are you lost? something said.
Wolf leapt up and spun around.
An animal stood there on its hind legs. It was shaped something like a wolf but made of shadows, with hackles of bright fire flickering at its edges.
No, said Wolf, backing away. I’m not lost. It’s the pack that’s lost. I have to find them so they won’t be lost anymore.
They’re gone, said the animal. What it said was terrible, but its voice was soft and soothing. More like breathing than speech.
I’ll find them, Wolf said.
You won’t. You’re alone. Come with me and you won’t have to be alone.
The shadow wolf held out a paw. A strange kind of paw, without fur, without claws.
Come on, it said. Don’t be afraid.
Wolf moved closer.
That’s right, said the shadow wolf. That’s it. Good boy.
—
Wolf woke. He was in the cliffside rock shelter the pack called home. Dawn was a faint reddening on the icy blue rim of the valley. Wolves were all around him, as they should be, stretching and nuzzling each other, preparing to head out into the promise of the day, to find something to hunt and kill.
His pack. His life. He was here with them.
That should have made him happy. It always had before.
—
Spring returned, soggy and blustery, leaving its muddy paw tracks on the clean white snow, which shrivelled and sank and disappeared. The low places filled with water and then clouds of mosquitoes.
Alpha’s mate had died before the pair could make the spring’s new litter of pups, and she had yet to choose a new mate. The beta male seemed the obvious choice, given his size and vigour in the hunt, but for reasons she kept to herself Alpha hadn’t let him step into that role. Whenever he made advances she warned him away with snapping fangs. As for the other males, they didn’t dare betray an interest in mating with her. With this lingering state of uncertainty about the pack’s future, it was left to the beta male and female to deliver, and they got to work on it. One morning the beta female came out of her den under a ledge at the far end of the cave followed by six fluffy, toddling wolf pups who blinked in the dazzling new light of World.
Something was wrong with beta female, though. She was distracted and irritable, sometimes snapping at her pups as they nursed, sometimes batting them away. Eventually she crawled off alone into a hollow she had scraped among some thorn bushes. They heard her writhing and whimpering as if there were a fire burning her from the inside. Any wolf who tried to approach received a growled warning.
One morning they heard nothing at all from the hollow. The beta female’s mate ventured in and found her dead.
From then on it fell mostly to Wolf, as the least of the adults, to keep a watchful eye on the pups while the others hunted. The pack ranged far and wide through the hills and narrow valleys, across the greatness of World, to find food for the hungry new mouths. For his part Wolf kept the pups out of trouble, while showing them what they would need to know to become hunters themselves. He taught them stalking games and wrestling games, and how to play tug-of-war with sticks and bones—all the skills they would one day depend on for their lives.
At last the pack wandered back to the dark lake nestled in the hills, where the prey herds had often been found in the past. Another wolf pack lived here too, one that they sometimes fraternized with and sometimes fought.
There were no herds. There were no other wolves. Instead there was a new animal.
It was the creature they had seen in the fire.
—
The new animals had established themselves not far from the water, on a rise above the pines and near a swift-running creek, with a view all around.
They were busy animals. And in odd ways clever, too.
They had constructed several small caves out of branches and prey skins and went in and out of them several times a day. The little caves were also where they slept at night.
And they kept fire, penned in a ring of small rocks. It leapt and smoked as all fire did, but it wasn’t allowed to race out hungrily to eat World. It stayed submissively in its ring, warming the strange new animals and giving them light in the dark hours.
The new animals had done the unthinkable. They had made fire a member of their pack.
—
The new animals ate meat.
They ate berries and roots, too. Things the wolves ate only when there was nothing else available. But mostly they ate meat.
It was another reason they kept the fire. They burned the meat over the flames before they ate it. Despite this bizarre custom, the meat still smelled
wonderful.
They’re our competition now, Alpha said one wet and windy spring evening as the pack sat on a grassy hillside not far from the place where the new animals lived, watching them burn meat on their small, obedient fire.
Competition, scoffed Beta. Look at them. They can’t run worth a damn. When they spot one of us they flock together and make all that jabber, like panicked ducks. They’re terrified of us.
Since his mate had died, Beta had been making it clearer than ever that he was after the top job. He’d been standing up to Alpha, taking the lead on minor matters without permission, defying her in small ways that weren’t quite enough to get him driven out or killed. It was plain to everyone that Beta was destined to become the new top male, but Alpha hadn’t mated with him yet. The one time he tried mounting her she sent him packing with his tail between his legs. He’d been so humiliated he’d taken it out on Wolf, chasing him out of camp and giving him a few painful nips on the flanks for good measure. It was his right as senior male, but Wolf knew that with Beta this was more than pack tradition at work. Wolf was no match in strength for the bigger male, but he was better at noticing the unusual and at puzzling things out. Beta hated him for that.
I don’t see the threat, Beta went on. They’re just a new kind of prey we haven’t figured out how to hunt yet, that’s all.
They kill what we kill, Wolf said from where he lay, with pups crawling all over him and nipping at his ears. On rare occasions, usually when his betters missed the point, he dared to speak out of turn.
The rest of the pack stared at him.
They eat what we eat, he added.
So what? Beta snarled, baring his teeth at Wolf. There’s plenty of food to go around.
For now, Alpha said.
—
What happened to the other pack? Beta wondered out loud one afternoon.
They were loafing on a warm, sunny slope across the water from the new animals, watching them go about their strange business. They hadn’t seen any sign of the other wolves for days.
Look! Wolf said. That animal there, it’s wearing one of them!
The new animal had a wolf draped over itself. Or something that had once been a wolf.
You still think they’re prey? Alpha asked Beta.
—
Summer arrived, hot and rainless. The prey animals hadn’t returned in their usual numbers, the great herds of aurochs and reindeer that poured over the bare hilltops and darkened the valleys. The few who did appear were mostly sickly and older. Not the choicest meat.
The pack was getting hungry. They spent more and more time hanging around the place where the new animals lived, observing.
The new animals had had better luck with hunting. They cloaked themselves in prey skins that helped disguise their scent. Their team tactics, like working together to drive a small herd over a cliff, were radical but effective. They also caught and ate animals—birds mostly—that the pack either couldn’t catch or didn’t bother with. And most astonishing of all, they had things resembling claws and teeth that they could detach from their bodies and hurl through the air to bring down an animal that was out of reach.
That’s cheating, Beta declared, as the pack watched the new animals dispatch a lone older doe with their flying teeth. Prey the pack itself had been stalking.
Another day they found one of the animals’ weapons. The tooth was a sharp, narrow piece of stone stuck on the end of a thin stick.
Longteeth, the pack named these things. With teeth like this now in World, a maw full of fangs felt quaint.
—
When they were finished eating, the new animals tossed away the stuff they didn’t want: guts, wings, gristly bits, sometimes entire heads. And bones. Lots and lots of bones. They’d crack them open to get at the good stuff inside and then toss them away. On rare occasions they flung the leftovers far enough from their camp that the wolves would come across them during their exploratory jaunts.
Perfectly good bones, Beta said in disbelief when he returned from foraging near the animals’ camp. Lots of good eating still on them. I don’t get it.
A short distance from their camp, the new animals had scooped out a long, narrow pit in the sand. This, it turned out, was the place they went to drop and bury their shit. The wolves couldn’t help but notice that the shit gave off the enticing greasy stink of the fine meals their neighbours were enjoying.
One night Beta snuck to the pit right after a young animal had used it but hadn’t buried what she’d left. Beta was clearly hoping to impress Alpha with his daring. He returned unharmed to where the pack was waiting for his report.
That is some good shit, he said.
—
Beta went back the following evening for more, but one of the animals caught him creeping around and burned his rump with a stick that had fire on the end. He fled home yelping and trailing sparks.
A few days later a younger pack female was nosing around the bone pile when a flying longtooth tore one of her ear tips off.
We’re moving on, Alpha announced the following evening when they had gathered at the cave. We’ll go hunting somewhere else. These animals are too much trouble.
Are you sure? asked Beta. They have all those bones and shit.
And they have fire, Alpha said. You want more of that?
No, he said, his tail drooping.
And how about the longteeth, does anyone else want to feel one of those?
No one did.
Alpha had put her paw down. There was nothing more to be said.
—
Still, they lingered another day, and then another, waiting for Alpha to choose the right moment and give the signal. Everyone was hungry, and tempers were short. More than the usual number of fights broke out, and some turned serious.
Wolf got into a couple of scraps himself, one with Beta, who he knew could tear him apart easily if he chose to. Beta had started it by snatching a chunk of rabbit right out of Wolf’s jaws. Before he could stop himself Wolf had let out an angry snarl. The next instant Beta was on him.
He won’t kill me, Wolf thought as he writhed and rolled to get away from Beta’s gnashing teeth. He’s just putting me in my place.
But this wasn’t a lesson in pack protocol. It was something more. Beta didn’t relent, not even when Wolf tried clowning around, dancing and tumbling like a clumsy, excited pup. He was playing his role as the least of the adults, the kid brother who made them all smile and forget their grievances—and it usually worked. But soon Beta had Wolf pinned and was snapping at his throat, going for the lifeblood.
There was no choice but to fight back.
Wolf gave it everything he had and burst out from under Beta. Instead of fleeing as he usually would, he turned and barrelled into the bigger wolf, who wasn’t expecting this rally. Wolf bowled Beta over and leapt on top of him.
To Wolf’s surprise Beta went limp and bared his throat.
He was going to let it happen.
His fangs an inch from the hot blood pulsing through Beta’s veins, ...
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