Wolf Read online

  Drowsiness set in as she cleaned herself, lulled by the strokes of her tongue. Her eyelids sagged and her neck bent in the afternoon sun, now slanting over the trees to the west. Marta’s cleaning slowed, then stopped. Her head nodded and hung still. When she heard a howl, she could not tell if it was a dream or real, but it was Oldtooth’s call, and it woke her with a start. Sula! The pups needed her immediately. Marta struggled to her feet, surprising the ravens who had arrived to pluck at the kill. Stopping at the creek, she drank until her sides ached from the strain. Then she trudged toward the den site, heavy with fatigue and the weight in her belly.

  Oldtooth, who had not budged from the entrance to the den, greeted her with a wilder version of the hunting salute he gave when she left. Despite her grooming, she still smelled fabulously of fresh blood, and he licked at her muzzle. As she would for an older pup, Marta heaved up a token of the meat for him so that he could follow her steps back to the open carcass and feed for himself. As Oldtooth gobbled down the meat, blinking gratefully, Marta gave her coat a last cleaning. Then she wriggled, thin sides bulging, into the den. Only two pups greeted her with a tiny form of the hunting salute. Whining, they jumped at Marta’s face with wet snub noses. Their mother’s breath had never smelled like this, and it excited them in ways they couldn’t understand.

  Meat drunk and still drowsy, Marta stumbled over Rann and Annie in her search for Sula. She found the little one lying in the back of the den. At Marta’s approach, the pup’s head came up. Sula was alive. When she wobbled to her feet, Marta felt her milk begin to flow, and for the first time since Calef’s death, her heart felt its normal size. Marta sighed and dropped to her side. Sleep came instantly. She didn’t even notice that it was Sula who found the first nipple.

  After that night, Marta did not return to the ridge top.

  Six

  A Pack to Call Home

  Raising the pups without Calef would not be easy, as Marta quickly learned. This was her first litter, and her first year as an alpha wolf; unlike Oldtooth, she did not have many seasons of experience feeding and leading a pack. But Marta had something else, something that showed in her hunting, her playing, her mothering—even, as time went by, in the angle of her ears and the cadence of her walk. That something was the instinct for survival.

  Marta had a relentless will to live. It was an inner pulse that beat strong even when her body grew tired, a deep sinew that connected her to life. Without it, she would not have lived past puppyhood. Outcasts often die of starvation or attacks by other wolves—even members of their own pack—but Marta lived. She was fast enough to run from a fight, patient enough to wait for food, and smart enough to find danger before it found her.

  Luck, too, was sometimes on her side. The role of outcast actually saved her back in the north. It was late winter, the hungriest season, in the second year of her life. Marta’s pack was large and the snow was thin, so they had little advantage over the hooved deer and elk. When the wolves couldn’t make a kill, they scavenged, digging up remains buried by lions or even, sometimes, stealing from coyotes.

  One day they came upon an elk carcass unburied and uneaten, and the pack threw themselves upon it. As usual, Marta hung back, pacing in the cold. Now that she was fully grown, the friendly female no longer saved scraps or bones for her. Marta waited, pacing, as the ranking pack members carried away shanks and ribs, and even the young of the year, her brothers and sisters, gulped their share of meat.

  Marta had stopped pacing and was eyeing her littlest brother, waiting for an opening, when her father began to retch. As always, he had eaten first and most, but this time he was not heaving meat for pups; his body was bucking and twisting so strangely that the rest of the pack, pups and all, stopped eating. Alarm swept through the group and they froze in place, steam rising from their reddened mouths. Within moments, their leader collapsed.

  Marta backed away, her appetite gone. Her legs grew stiff and her belly tight as she watched her pack members, one by one, sicken and die. Some, like her mother, retched and collapsed violently as her father had. Others, like Marta’s friend, grew feeble and staggered into the trees. A few—mainly the young of the year who had fed last and least—simply heaved up their meal and fell down, exhausted, in the snow. By nightfall only Marta and her younger brother were still alive. The rest of the pack had been poisoned.

  Marta ran. Not knowing why or where, she ran. Leaving the dead and dying, leaving her brother, she ran until she could run no more. She ran for days that became weeks. She ran circles, spirals, and crazy-eights; diagonals, slashes, switchbacks, and zigzags. She ran from the danger, ran from the death, ran to survive.

  As Marta ran, she learned. Where once she had learned from a distance, watching her elders, now she learned from the world around her. She learned to smell for traps and run detours around them. She learned to run with water and to run from strangers; she learned to run for food, killing large and small to stay alive. She learned to run from the scent of humans, and she never forgot the taint of poison. Pack or no pack, home or no home, Marta kept to one path: the path of survival.

  It was in that time of running that she found Calef. Unlike other strange wolves, he proved friendly, and soon they were running together. With Calef, Marta learned to hunt as a team; together they could kill more, and more easily, than either could alone. For the first time in her life, with Calef Marta learned the pleasures of play. When it was time, they mated.

  There in the north Marta and Calef had all they needed, except a home. Marta had left her birthplace far behind and now, wherever they ran they were the strangers, the outsiders. Where one wolf pack’s territory ended, another’s began. Where there were no wolves, there were bears or lions. Where there were no wolves or bears or lions, there was no food. Marta and Calef ran from valley to valley, looking for territory to make their own.

  They traveled south. There, most of the valleys were filled with people. With people came cars and roads, bullets and traps; the smell of human beings was the smell of danger, and Calef and Marta ran out of their way to avoid it. It was on one such detour, a journey through the Kootenai Valley to the west, that they encountered Oldtooth. He too had come from the north. Between his age and his teeth, he was no threat to Calef and Marta, and they soon discovered that what he might lack in strength, he made up for in experience. The pack of two became three, and ran together.

  They ran as far as Pleasant Valley, and there they stopped.

  The valley had a long history. To run through it was to run through millions of years, from the rolling of the first seas to the wrinkling of the land that formed the Rocky Mountains. Some fifty million years ago the first ancestor of the wolf had walked here. For eons the land rose and fell under the paws and hooves of ancient creatures, building and eroding, flooding and reforming. Then for a time it lay silent under great sheets of ice: the animals disappeared, and Pleasant Valley took shape.

  When the ice melted, there were no trees and no meadows—just a scoured landscape and a gentle gouge in the hills, half full of water. As rock turned to soil and hills turned to trees, the lake filled with rich sediment, forming the floor of the valley. A remnant of water, Dahl Lake, remained at the east end of the valley, and tall meadow grasses grew around it. By the time wildlife returned, the valley was perfect for deer—and perfect for wolf.

  The wolves stopped and stayed. Pleasant Valley fit Marta like her own frosty-black coat. After only one season, she knew its creeks and ridges by heart. The pack had marked scent trails through forest and pasture, and she could find her way in fog, in rain, in a blizzard white as teeth or a night as black as Sula’s soft, round head. Here, food was abundant. With or without Calef, this long dish of a valley would feed Marta better than her mother ever had.

  Whether Marta could feed an ailing packmate and a litter of pups was another question. Oldtooth knew his arithmetic; what he didn’t know was Marta. He didn’t know her inner pulse. He did know that for an alpha wolf, the life of the
pack was life itself.

  Now, as the alpha of their pack, Marta’s fierce will to live included them all. Her answer to wolf arithmetic was simple: three pups meant hunting three times as hard. She was no stranger to struggle. If there was one bone, she would gnaw it to the marrow; if there was one scrap, she would find it; if there was one way out of danger, she would chance it. Marta did not quit. The hard days of her youth became a strength that stayed with her.

  With Pleasant Valley for a home, Marta for a pack leader, and any luck at all, the old wolf outside the den and the young ones in it—all of them—could live to see many seasons ahead.

  Seven

  Monkey See, Monkey Do

  As the days grew longer, so did Marta’s hunts. In addition to milk, the pups were soon eating the meat she brought back in her belly and gave up for them at the den site. Nourished this way, the pups grew sturdy and round. They left the confines of the den and, under Oldtooth’s supervision, explored the tiny forest world that lay within a few steps of their birthplace. They quickly discovered, as youngsters will, that everything was a toy: a stick, a pebble, a caterpillar, a moth, a scrap of hide, and sometimes—if they dared—Oldtooth himself.

  The old wolf seemed to live for the little ones, though it wasn’t always easy for him to keep up with them. He creaked from teeth to toes when he got up, but get up he did, and creak he did, the moment he heard the pups stirring. But his ears were not as keen as his nose, and sometimes the pups were on their second round of play by the time he finally wakened.

  Oldtooth could not provide for the pack by killing big game, but he had an equally important role. While Marta was off hunting, he became the pups’ guardian, teacher, disciplinarian, and gruff playmate. The youngsters were not allowed away from the den area, and if they lost track of the boundary—as sometimes happened—Oldtooth scolded them back. He had a terrifying growl, and the bite of his rounded teeth could leave a lasting impression on a wolf puppy’s neck. Annie, the boldest of the three, had been returned to safety more than once in the clutch of their gray guardian’s jaws.

  Oldtooth showed complete patience with the pups, sometimes more than Marta. Rann already knew better than to try to pounce his mother awake. The one time he tried, it earned him a nip on the rear and an unforgettable gleam from a pair of huge yellow eyes.

  Marta needed rest. Her sense of play had returned, but play came after work and these days, she had work to spare. Filling three small bellies was hard, especially when filling them only made the bellies larger and hungrier. Oldtooth continued to kill what he could, but once the pups reached their summer growth spurt, they were always hungry. Until late fall, when the young would be old enough to go along on hunts, their need for food would only grow. The more Calef’s scent faded from the area, the more his pack needed him.

  Though Calef’s scent faded, his presence remained in the pups. Annie, the firstborn of the litter, was gray just like Calef, with the same black tip at the end of her tail and the same grace in her stride. Pouncing after grasshoppers, Annie was stronger and smoother than either Sula or Rann. Even in puppyhood, she was all power and precision: her father’s kind of hunter.

  If Annie was her father’s hunter, Sula was her mother’s daughter. Healthy now, growing as fast as her brother and sister, Sula was an echo of Marta’s lean, frosted-black self. Sula was the one who would follow anyone anywhere, just to go along. But she was quickest to follow her mother, looking like a shadow of Marta as they trotted to the creek for a drink. Sula seemed happy just to be alive.

  As for Rann—Rann was the clown of the litter. His head looked too big for his body, but then, his father had been enormous from head to tail. Big-boned, night-black, and born to tease, it was Rann who would stalk Oldtooth, napping in the sun. Creeping up on the old wolf, Rann would crouch—shoulders low and tail swishing—waiting for the right moment to pounce him awake. If Oldtooth was sleeping hard and the ambush failed, the little prankster tried not to look embarrassed as he circled around for a second try.

  Rann was also the king of hide-and-seek. He never lost a game. In tall grass, behind tree stumps, around rocks, in or out of the den, he could always slink the lowest and hold still the longest. He barely seemed to breathe, or even blink. No matter how long Annie and Sula waited, he could wait longer—long enough, sometimes, for his sisters to get bored and find another game. When that happened, it wasn’t long before Oldtooth would tip back his head, work his jaws, and start a long, soft coming-home howl. Annie and Sula would stop their playing, glance at Oldtooth, and lay back their heads in a pair of puppy howls. Before long Rann would appear, as if by magic. The sound of his pack was one thing that would bring him out from his hiding place.

  When Marta was not hunting or sleeping, she was in the thick of the pack: feeding, teaching, protecting, and finally playing. The way of the wolf began at birth, and in the first months, it was learned through play. Every skill her babies would need to survive in the wild—running, tracking, attacking, keeping order, communicating—had its beginning in puppy games.

  A favorite game was monkey see, monkey do, and it was played constantly at the wolf site. What the pups saw, they did. When Marta went to the creek for a drink, Sula followed. When Oldtooth pricked his ears at a smell, Annie pricked hers. When one pup found a stick to bite, the others had to have sticks too. When the adults howled a hunting song, the pups joined in. It was a game for the youngsters, but it formed the bonds of the pack; and as their elders knew, the way of the pack was the way of the wolf.

  In tug-of-war the pups learned to keep their balance and how to look an opponent in the eye. They practiced the moves that would be used to tear hide from a carcass, building the muscles behind their jaws. In hide-and-seek, they learned to run from enemies and sneak up on prey. Who’s in charge, a special wolf game, determined which pack members would make the best leaders and whose direction should be followed. Even hunting was still a game, as the pups pounced after dragonflies and stormed the nearby anthill.

  The most important game, the pups quickly learned, was follow the leader. In the Pleasant Valley pack, everyone followed Marta. She was the alpha: she decided when to hunt and when to sleep, when the pups had to stay in the den and when it was time to leave. Oldtooth was next in line and took over when Marta was away. Even the pups had their own order. Since they were barely out of the den, Annie had been the leader of the three. So Sula and Rann followed Annie, and they all followed Oldtooth, who, in turn, followed Marta.

  By the time the pups were two months old, their den site was littered with the happy debris of playthings. Bones and parts of bones, sticks and rocks, lichen and bark were strewn about the mouth of the den. Even a tuft of chewed plastic lay in the dirt, looking like dried gristle. The pups had not used the inner chamber for some time; Sula, who was now as tall as Annie, no longer crawled into it when she was frightened.

  The young wolves were filling out, losing their scruffy, potbellied look and taking on a long-boned leanness. The leggier they got, the more restless they grew. Once they knew every stick and pebble around the den, they started to stray toward the woods when no one was watching. If they didn’t come running, tails tucked, at Oldtooth’s growl, worse was in store; the pups were still not too big to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and hauled unceremoniously home.

  One drizzly morning, the youngsters were at their usual business. Rann was digging frantically for buried treasure. Annie was digging along with him, until a butterfly caught her eye. She chased the butterfly around and around until she spied Sula chewing on a piece of bark. When Sula stopped to shake the crumbs off her tongue, Annie snatched up the bark and pranced away, carrying it proudly toward the woods and watching Sula’s reaction from the corner of her eye. Sula hesitated, then picked up another piece of bark and continued chewing, watching Annie.

  Rann abruptly stopped digging. He and Sula followed with their eyes as Annie paraded toward the trees with her loot. Where was she going? Rann turned to catch up w
ith her, and the game of monkey see, monkey do was on. Annie sniffed at a stump. Rann sniffed at the stump. She squatted and marked. He squatted and marked. Sula dropped her bark and scrambled to join them, and together they sniffed and marked their way deeper and deeper into the woods.

  Monkey see, monkey do became follow the leader, with Annie in charge. The farther they went, the more complicated she made it, and soon they had left the safe zone of the den. So intent were they on discovering and following that they did not hear Oldtooth’s warning sound. Annie kept leading, and Rann and Sula kept following; there were tracks they’d never smelled, grasses they’d never tasted, and scurrying sounds they’d never heard.

  Suddenly a tremendous commotion erupted in front of them. Something gray and black and snarling, an eight-legged monster, appeared in their path. The thing snapped and growled at them, a writhing mass of fur and many, many teeth. The pups cringed together, making themselves as small as possible—and abruptly, the snarling stopped. The legs sorted out into two sets of four, one black and one gray. The teeth disappeared behind two familiar faces: Marta and Oldtooth. The pups had never seen such stern looks, and they flattened their chests to the ground, slicking back their ears and looking up at their elders. Even Annie, bravest of the three, stretched back her lips in an apologetic grin and thumped her tail on the ground.

  The pups cowered, waiting for a gruff bark to send them back to the den or for the feel of teeth lifting them by the neck. Neither came. Instead, Marta turned and marched off in the opposite direction, away from the den. The pups half rose and hesitated, whining and looking at Oldtooth. He barked then, a sharp command directed at Marta’s disappearing backside, and the pups shot off after their mother. It was time to see the world.