Read Spirit of a Mountain Wolf Online
Authors: Rosanne Hawke
Spirit of a Mountain Wolf
He heard the man's voice in a low murmuring—he must be telling her a story. Then he heard the bells Tahira wore. He closed his eyes, imagining the way she turned, her hands opening and closing to show the path of the story, her feet making the bells ring with joy. There was silence, another low murmur, an exclamation, then a shriek.
Razaq raced to the door and pounded on it. "Stop. What are you doing?"
Murad was there instantly, and as Razaq was dragged away, he could hear Tahira screaming his name. . . .
"You are like a mountain wolf, so strong and proud."
Fourteen-year-old Razaq Khan lives in the Pakistani tribal area of Kala Dhaka, Black Mountain. When an earthquake devastates his family home, Razaq's dying father tells him to travel to his uncle, Javaid. A man preying on orphans lures Razaq to the city with the promise of finding his uncle. But it is not long before Razaq realizes he has not been helped at all—he has been sold into slavery.
Losing hope while in captivity, Razaq meets Tahira, a young girl suffering just like him. Razaq feels a surge of something new—love. Author Rosanne Hawke delivers a heart-wrenching story about friendship, sacrifice, and the power of the human spirit, a mountain wolf's spirit, to overcome sexual exploitation, the most harrowing of circumstances.
Rosanne Hawke is an Australian author of over twenty books, among them
Shahana: Through My Eyes; The Messenger Bird,
winner of the 2013 Cornish Holyer an Gof award for YA literature;
Taj and the Great Camel Trek,
winner of the 2012 Adelaide Festival Children’s Literature award;
Marrying Ameera,
a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book; and
Soraya the Storyteller,
which was shortlisted in multiple Australian awards in 2006. She was awarded an Asialink Fellowship to write in Pakistan in 2006 and the Carclew Fellowship in 2008. Rosanne was an aid worker in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates for ten years and now teaches Creative Writing at Tabor Adelaide, South Australia. She lives in rural South Australia in an old Cornish farmhouse with underground rooms.
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For those children whose lives have been traded
Abdur-Razaq Nadeem felt the rumble in the earth—like a truck rushing underground. Then, an eerie heaviness, a sound almost, but there were no words to describe it—like a mourning song with no music. He stood still by the stream, the water in the buckets he held sloshing even though he wasn’t moving them. Then the ground roared and shot up beside him as if it were a wave. He fell as another wave rose and his buckets rolled from his hands. This time the stream threw water out at him. He crawled away from the bank, fighting to keep his balance. The ground was a giant blanket shaken in the wind. Razaq reached out to grab a branch, but the tree suddenly disappeared. It was sucked underground in front of him. He backed away, tried to stand, fell again. In the end, he cowered on the ground with his hands over his head as wave after wave of the earth slithered under him and tossed him high.
The roaring had stopped but Razaq couldn’t remember when. He looked around; he didn’t trust his legs to stand. Boulders from the mountain had landed in the stream, and he was sure the water was flowing in a different direction now. He kneeled and saw a ravine where before there wasn’t one. If he had walked just a step, he would have fallen a thousand feet. He vomited on the ground.
He couldn’t see the buckets anywhere. His mother would be angry with him. They were the only way to bring water from the stream to the house each morning, and they had cost five rupees in the bazaar in the village down the mountain. It would take him all day to go down for more, if his father had the money.
Razaq began crawling up the slope to his house. The last time the earth had moved, he had been tiny; he remembered the panic, his mother running to pick him up and cradle him beneath her. The roaring had passed quickly that day, and there had been little damage.
After a while, Razaq tested his legs: they felt wobbly but he managed to stagger up the pathway home. When he reached the clearing, he thought he’d lost his way. His house wasn’t there. The vegetable plot his mother nurtured had been uprooted. Peepu, their prized ram, lay on the ground. There was something wrong with the way his heavy hoofs stuck out. Razaq ran forward. Peepu was lifeless, his long horns broken. Razaq couldn’t see the lambs or the goats. Then he noticed a rock that had fallen from the mountain. A sheep was caught under it. Peepu may have tried to butt the sheep out of the way and the rock had hit him first.
It was then that Razaq realized why he couldn’t see the house. He stared at the stones and rocks that covered what had been his mud, stone, and shale home. His mother would have been preparing parathas, his sisters still sleeping. Ramadan had begun, and he and his father had eaten before sunrise. He stood there, his mind in a mist; he couldn’t think what it all meant, didn’t dare to.
A charpoy, a string bed, sat the right way up on the ground, as if his father had brought it outside to lie in the sun. Then Razaq heard a groan. He followed the sound onto their terraced farmland.
“Abu!” Razaq could see his father’s legs. The trunk of a tree straddled his chest, and his arms were caught under it, too: he must have tried to shield himself. “Abu!” Razaq put two arms around the trunk, straining to shift it, but it didn’t budge.
His father opened his eyes. “Alhamdulillah, beta. Praise God, son, you are safe.” Razaq had to bend close to hear. “I was worried for you.”
“I am fine, Abu ji. I will get help.”
“Nay, do not go.”
“But, Abu . . .” Razaq sized up the tree. Two men maybe, plus himself, might lift it.
“Listen.” His father coughed, then groaned. “Find your Uncle Javaid. Go to Rawalpindi . . .”
“But—”
“. . . money in my pocket . . . bus from Oghi . . .”
The breath in his father’s throat sounded like a snake’s. Razaq had heard that sound before when his grandmother had died.
“Ji, Abu.” Razaq kissed his father’s face. The sound in his father’s throat stopped.
Razaq never found his mother and sisters. He scrabbled at the hill of rock where his house should have been, but without a tool, there was nothing he could do. No one could move a mountain with his hands. He found a branch in the forest and kept picking at the smaller rocks with it, but by nightfall, he was no closer to the house itself. Energy born of shock had carried him through the day, and now it disappeared. He had no sense of how long he sat there keening.
In the night, the roaring came again. He hid behind Peepu. The ground didn’t move as badly or open up this time.
In the morning, a man in a black turban with a long beard found him. Razaq hadn’t eaten for thirty hours, and he shivered in the morning cold. He eyed the rifle the man held, but saw only peace in his eyes.
“Are there more of your family . . .” The man left the sentence unfinished.
Razaq shook his head faintly.
The man stroked his beard. “A jao, come with me.” Then he said, “This is what comes of not submitting to Allah.”
The man was his elder, so Razaq didn’t say how his father said his prayers and went to the village mosque most Fridays. Razaq had begun to go, too, to join the men. What more did God require? His father always said that to live a good life, to work and look after your family and animals, was submitting to God. Even when Razaq’s little brother, Tameem, had died, his father accepted God’s will. Still, Razaq knew his father would agree with the man that God had brought the earthquake. Uncle Javaid would have provided some scientific reason. His brother’s new thoughts often made Razaq’s father argue with him and tell him he was losing his faith. He had told Uncle Javaid last time he was here that the earth was just as flat as the last time they had argued about it.