Authors: Kathryn Lasky
Frost Wolf
KATHRYN LASKY
WOLVES
OF THE
BEYOND
FROST WOLF
For Rachel Griffiths
Chapter Two: Tracks to Nowhere
Chapter Four: Secrets of the
Gadderheal
Chapter Eight: A
Raghnaid
in Shambles
Chapter Eleven: A Hero Mark Disturbed
Chapter Twelve: “How Has It Come to This?”
Chapter Thirteen: The Whisper of Rocks
Chapter Fourteen: Rabbit-Ear Moss
Chapter Fifteen: Dance Interrupted
Chapter Sixteen: The Cave Before Time
Chapter Seventeen: A Sudden Summer
Chapter Eighteen: The Broken Chain
Chapter Nineteen: The Obea Tree
Chapter Twenty: Strange Lights
Chapter Twenty-One: An Owl on a Mission
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Owl and the Gnaw Wolf
Chapter Twenty-Three: A Significant Encounter
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Bear’s Den
Chapter Twenty-Five: “The Prophet Shall Reward You!”
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Prophet Comes
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Visor’s Glint
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Too Late
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Good-bye to Friends
Chapter Thirty: Back at the Ring
Chapter Thirty-One: The Musk Ox
HE
O
LD
B
UCK
HE COULD HEAR THE POUNDING of their hearts behind him. The caribou herd, young and old alike, was struggling through the blinding gale of snow and sleet. The memory of the trail was inscribed deep within the old buck’s muscles from years of leading. He knew the way as his father had known the way, and his grandfather, and back into the dim reaches of time. They had done this migration forever, but now he was confused, deeply confused. The old caribou had been leading the herd in circles for days, ever since the blizzard began.
All of the usual signposts had vanished under the onslaught of the gale. But they had started north at the right time, at the time of the Moon of New Antlers. Then something had gone wrong. As the herd traveled north, the seasons had traveled backward, or had winter never left? But why would the herd’s antlers have dropped if it was not the time of the spring moons? Nothing made any sense.
The old buck felt as though he and his herd were teetering on the edge of doom. He would not go down in the ordinary way, toppled by a younger, stronger buck. This was not to be the death of him, but the death of all of them. The death of the herd. He could hear them now braying in baffled disbelief.
Where are we going? Where are the lichens, where is the summer grass? Where are you leading us?
And the old buck dared not say that he was no longer leading them. For the vast, barren reaches of the Beyond eluded him, and round and round through the woods he continued to wander in circles without a trace of sweet summer grasses. The succulent mosses and lichens of the summer feeding grounds became dim memories.
F
ROST
W
OLF
SHE HEARD THE TREES OUTSIDE THE cave lean into the wind, groaning with despair. Edme, a Watch wolf of the Beyond, had never been in such thickly forested country before. Nor had she been so far from the glowing nimbus of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes since her service on the Watch began. But these were peculiar times, and now she wondered if the despair she heard in the creaking trees was simply an invention of her mind.
She mused on this notion while she waited for Faolan to return from scouting. She was supposed to have been sleeping until her turn came to go out and look for tracks. Tracks of the herds that had never returned to the Beyond, herds of caribou or lone travelers like moose or elk. But the animals had disappeared. The meat trail of
the past summers had almost vanished. Ordinarily, by this moon there would have been a dozen or more herds passing through the extended territory of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, and ten times that through the rest of the Beyond. But there had been only one herd so far, and the occasional stray. Wolf clans had to travel farther and farther to hunt, for the meat trail was dwindling. Might it simply vanish entirely?
It was summer! Summer, the time of meat. That was what made it all the more puzzling. The Moon of the Flies was upon them and yet the flies, too, had disappeared. The weather seemed to stutter between the hunger moons of winter and the raw, wet days of the Cracking Ice Moon, the first moon of spring. One day brought warmth and then the next brought freezing rain or even snow. The ice on the rivers hadn’t really begun to crack until the Moon of New Antlers, months later than it should have. And even then the ice seemed to hang on desperately. The Moon of New Antlers was supposed to bring the warm winds. But instead it brought ice storms, the last of which had backed into the Moon of the Flies. Behind it was a weather front that threatened a real blizzard, with clouds thickening and casting a glowering light over the Beyond. The sun was becoming as elusive as the meat trail.
Occasionally the wolves had come across a lone caribou. But a single caribou, not even as large as a moose or an elk, could hardly provide enough meat to feed a pack, let alone a clan. And why would a caribou travel alone? They were herd animals.
With the dwindling supply of meat came rumors as well of small violations of clan territorial boundaries. Perhaps most shocking of all, there were stories of clans not sharing information with one another, through scent posts or howling, about sightings of animals or herds on mutual borders. This was bad. And it had resulted, Edme realized, in the oddest change of all: a terrible silence in the Beyond.
Everything in the Beyond depended upon communication among the wolf packs that made up the clans, and among the clans themselves. It was the
skreeleens
who howled out the messages from pack to pack and clan to clan, telling of a passing herd of caribou, or a moose brought down by a bear who would share the kill. Now there was a great engulfing silence that stretched across the Beyond, as if every wolf were listening, hoping that a
skreeleen
would announce the arrival of a herd, the sighting of an elk, a moose, anything. If such meat had been spotted, had the
skreeleens
been ordered not to howl? Was this silence caused by a terrible fear that famine might be coming?
Edme was suddenly aware of a presence just outside the cave. Then the darkness melted and a glowing form appeared before her. She inhaled sharply. It was a wolf, but like none she had ever seen. Huge and radiant but old, so old. A
lochin
! She felt her marrow freeze. Then a strangled bark cut the frigid air.
T
RACKS TO
N
OWHERE
“URSKADAMUS TINE SMYORFIN MASACH!”
Edme wasn’t sure what to believe now — her ears or her eye? There was only one wolf who swore in both the language of bears and that of Old Wolf.
“Faolan?”
“Who else, for the love of Lupus? One would think you saw a ghost.”
“But with all that frost — you look like a
lochin
.”
Faolan gave a dismissive bark.
“You should see yourself,” Edme persisted. “You’ve got icicles hanging from your chin fur. Your belly fur looks as if it’s …”
“I know! I know! I can feel it!” he replied crankily.
“You look absolutely ancient. I mean older than the Sark.”
“Thanks a lot,” Faolan huffed.
“Well, what did you find?”
“No meat.” His voice dwindled.
“I’ll set out now. Maybe I’ll have some luck.”
Faolan seemed to hesitate, then said abruptly, “I’ll go with you.”
“It’s not your turn. What’s the sense in that?”
“I have to show you something that” — he hesitated again — “that makes no sense.”
Edme came closer and cocked her head. “Faolan, what are you talking about?”
“It’s disturbing. I can’t quite describe it. But you have to see it.”
“But you need to rest, Faolan. Neither one of us has eaten since yesterday, and that snow hare we caught was barely enough to feed a pup.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “Edme, I have to go with you. We have to look at this together.” He looked straight into her single green eye.
“All right. All right, but first rest a bit.”
The moon was a smear behind the scrim of heavily falling snow as they traveled to the edges of the Shadow
Forest on the far southeastern border between the Beyond and the Hoolian kingdoms. It was not a blizzard yet, but it seemed to be building to one. A blizzard in the Moon of the Flies!
They kept a deliberate pace at snow-paw speed, with their toes spread far apart so as not to sink into the powder. Their spindly legs seemed to float over the building drifts. The snow thickened and fell with an unswerving determination. Although Edme was just a few paces behind Faolan, there were moments when he was all but swallowed by the swirling snow. She lost sight of him entirely for several seconds. Faolan also frequently turned to look back over his shoulder and could feel his marrow clutch when he couldn’t see Edme behind him. It was as if they had fallen into a void. As if the Beyond had broken open and they were tumbling into an abyss of infinite cold.
When they caught sight of each other they were relieved, but it felt to Edme as if she were reliving that first glimpse of Faolan when he had returned to the den. He had seemed so much like a ghost, but there was something else that frightened her even more. Despite his exceedingly large size — Faolan was a third again as big as most wolves — he had looked frail. Even ancient.
What occupied Faolan’s thoughts were the strange tracks he had found. The creek they crossed was frozen, but Faolan thought that the ice seemed thinner in places.
Might there be a place we can break through for fish?
he wondered. The fish would be slow now, hardly swimming under the cold lock of the surface ice.
Later
, Faolan admonished himself and pushed notions of food away. It helped him when he thought of bears and how they never felt the slightest twinge of hunger during their long, cold sleep of winter. Their hearts slowed and their minds became thick with dreams. But now it was summer, and what would the bears do? They couldn’t sleep all year without starving.
“Here!” Faolan said abruptly. “Stop!”
“What?”
“I don’t want you to disturb the tracks.”
“What tracks?” Edme asked.
The impressions were faint but still visible.
“They are caribou tracks. Lots of them!” he replied.
Edme spotted them and began pressing her nose close to the snow to follow the tracks. She wagged her head slightly from side to side as she traced the dim scent. Faolan watched her. Within a short time she was back to where the tracks had started.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “It seems as if they are going in circles through this wood.”
“They are. Or were,” Faolan answered.
“A buck — from the tracks. My guess is an old buck was leading them. It looks as if he was staggering.” She paused. “But in circles?”
“I know.”
“Where did they go?” Edme asked.
“That I don’t know. The tracks just vanish.”
Like the trees that seemed to groan wretchedly in the night, the caribous’ hoofprints seemed also to mark a deep anguish. The snow suddenly ceased and the moon appeared with a scalding brightness. The caribou tracks became more visible and more tantalizing. Faolan and Edme stared down at them, with the same thought as their mouths watered —
If only they led to something, a herd, a feeble cow.
It seemed like a cruel joke. An old, staggering buck leading his herd to nowhere. Their stomachs rumbled.