Spirit of the Wolves (6 page)

“We're still working that out,” I answered.

“You're a new pack, then,” Lallna said, as if that explained a great deal to her. She leaned close to me. “I would choose the willow-smelling male,” she said, “even though he's lame. I
don't think you should have a female second. If you have a male second, he can also be your mate.” She looked Pell over once more and smirked.

“So why did you fight a human?” Sallin asked. The wound on his head was bleeding, but it didn't seem to bother him.

The more I talked to the Sentinel wolves, the more determined I was to keep them from knowing about our humans.

Lallna, Sallin, and their packmates stared at me, waiting for me to say more. Marra came to my rescue.

“You're called the Sentinel pack?” she asked. Her tone was polite but any wolf who knew her would know she was holding back laughter at their pack name. I glared at her and she lowered her eyes. Not in submission to me, but to keep from laughing.

“Yes,” Lallna said. “Sentinel holds all the lands from the spruce grove to beyond the Hill Rock.”

I held back a grunt of disbelief. I'd never heard of any one pack holding that much land.

“How many wolves are in Sentinel?” Ázzuen asked. The fur between his eyes wrinkled as it did when he was thinking hard. It hadn't occurred to me that the pack might be larger than the five wolves before us.

“I can't tell you that,” Lallna growled.

Ázzuen took a step forward. “What are you sentinels of?” he persisted, his nose twitching as if he was on the scent of prey.

Lallna lifted her lip at him. “You'll find out soon enough. We're supposed to bring any wolves that come through the Wide Valley to our gathering place. You can go on your way if our leaderwolves say so.”

My backfur rose. We couldn't abandon our humans. Even if the Sentinels' leaderwolves let us go on our way, I wouldn't leave TaLi and MikLan protected only by ravens. I looked at Marra. She was the best of us at pack dynamics, and I hoped she would find a way to talk the Sentinel youngwolves into letting us go. But it was Pell who answered, at his most arrogant.

“Why would we go with you?” Pell looked down his muzzle at Lallna. “We're not part of your pack and we'll pass through your lands as we choose. We won't be ordered about by a bunch of curl-tails.”

A curl-tail was the lowest ranking wolf in the pack and the last to feed. It was an insult, and the Sentinel youngwolves responded to it. Before I could even snarl at Pell, Lallna launched herself at me.

By the time I tensed my muscles to react, she was on me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the other four Sentinel wolves leaping at my packmates. Sallin and a tawny-furred male dove for Pell, who grinned as he crouched to respond. The two remaining wolves attacked Ázzuen and Marra. My heart pounded so hard I was certain Lallna could hear my fear. Some wolves enjoyed fighting. I did not. My chest was so tight I could barely breathe.

Lallna hit me hard, trying to knock me over with the force of her leap. My first impulse was to resist her, to stand strong and meet power with power. Then I remembered Torell's fighting lessons. He was Pell's father and leaderwolf, and he had taught me to use cleverness as well as strength in a fight. I let the momentum of Lallna's jump knock me over, but continued to roll so that she tumbled past me. Before she could
get up, I threw myself on top of her. She snapped her teeth in my face, startling me, and heaved me into the air. I fell onto my side.

Muscle and sinew moved under her fur as she landed on my chest, pressing down with her full weight. She wasn't that large a wolf and I hadn't expected her to be so strong. The hard landing had knocked the wind from my lungs, but I managed to curl away from her and get partway to my feet before she tackled me again. We scrambled on the ground, each of us trying to pin the other. Her legs trembled with what I thought for a moment was fear as strong as my own, but then I realized it was excitement. She grinned and I knew she was enjoying the fight.

I arched my back, twisted my hips, and snapped my head forward, slamming Lallna to the ground. Before she could get up, I dug my forepaws into her belly and bared my teeth to bite her, hard.

I saw Pell throw the tawny male halfway down the hill, then flip Sallin onto his back, stand astride him, and take the smaller wolf's neck very gently in his jaws. He didn't bite down but just kept his teeth around Sallin's neck as Sallin averted his gaze and tried to lick Pell's muzzle. I remembered, then, what Ruuqo had told us about dominance fights when we were pups: they were to determine which wolves would be submissive and which would be dominant. Only a weak, scheming wolf would hurt another wolf more than necessary. It was Pell's gentle treatment of Sallin that made me gain control of myself. Pell had challenged the Sentinel youngwolves when he refused to go with them. No one had yet drawn blood, and if I did so, I would change a battle for control to a
fight to the death. I looked at the others. Both Marra and Ázzuen were struggling but holding their own.

My inattention allowed Lallna to throw me off her belly, but she didn't attack again. She narrowed her eyes at me and woofed softly to her packmates. The wolves fighting Ázzuen and Marra got to their feet, and Pell stepped off of Sallin. The fifth wolf scrambled back up the hill.

Lallna kept watching me. It was only when Ázzuen bumped my hip that I realized that Lallna was waiting for me to speak. They still thought I was a leaderwolf.

We had won the fight and so gained the right to make the next move, but the Sentinels were strong wolves. They could follow us back to the humans, or attack us again, or bring more wolves to fight us. We couldn't escape them, but we could gain some time.

“We'll come meet your leaderwolves,” I said, “but we have something to do first.”

“What do you have to do?” Lallna asked.

“Meet someone,” Ázzuen said before I could answer.

If I hadn't been afraid to turn away from Lallna, I would have snarled at him for thinking I was stupid enough to tell the Sentinels that we were looking for humans.

Lallna regarded us with her cool gaze.

“We'll let you escort us to your pack,” Marra offered. Lallna looked at me for confirmation.

“Yes,” I said, understanding what Marra had figured out already: if Lallna brought trespassing wolves to her pack, she would gain status with her leaderwolves.

“We could've won if it weren't for the willow-smelling
male,” Lallna said, “but you fight well.” She jutted her chin in challenge. “If you let us escort you to our pack, you can go.”

“You won't follow us,” Pell ordered. I was grateful to him. I hadn't thought of that. “And you will give us until two nights from now.” I would never have had the courage to be so aggressive.

“One night and half a day,” Lallna countered. Pell looked at me and dipped his head slightly.

“Yes,” I said. “We'll meet you back here.”

Without another word, the five Sentinel wolves turned tail and dashed down the hill, kicking up mud behind them.

T
he humans were awake and waiting for us when we returned to them near dawn. They took down their shelter and tied up their packs, then set out some firemeat and tartberries for their morning meal. Again, I couldn't help staring at them as they ate. We still hadn't been able to hunt. Again, they fed us from their supplies. There were wolves who said that the humans were so different from us that we could never fully trust them, but TaLi and MikLan fed us just as packmates would, with no hesitation. I knew wolves who were not so generous. Ázzuen, Marra, and I devoured what they gave us. Pell stood off to the side, refusing the humans' food. He smelled of voles he must have caught on our way back to the humans, but a few voles weren't enough to keep a wolf healthy. If he was anything like the wolves of Swift River, he'd be irritable and difficult to deal with if he didn't eat.

“Would you just take some?” I said, annoyed. “If I'd wanted a pup along I would have brought one.”

He snarled at me. “I hunt my own prey.”

“We need every wolf strong,” Marra said, “and you're our best fighter.”

He looked at her and then at the humans. He licked Marra on the top of her head and stared at MikLan. Again, the boy seemed to understand us better than other humans did. He dug into his pack and held out some firemeat on the flat of his hand. Pell kept staring at him until the boy dropped the meat on the ground and stepped away. Pell gobbled it.

“Thank you for sharing your prey,” Pell said formally. MikLan swallowed a few times and then lifted his pack onto his shoulders. TaLi hefted her own pack. It was more important than ever to hurry them along. I was certain that Milsindra was close by, and even if the Sentinel wolves honored their word and gave us a night and a day to come to them, we had no time to waste. To my relief, the humans set off at a brisk pace across the plain.

Getting them to follow us to the Crossed Pines was not so easy. Humans could be as stubborn as ravens, and they kept looking at their map, then at their surroundings, and then walking away from the quickest route to the woods where Tlitoo had told us the pines were. Ordinarily, I would have let them go the long way, but if Milsindra was stalking us, I needed to get TaLi to safety as soon as possible. And the sooner the humans reached the human village, the sooner I could find my mother. When TaLi stopped at a tree with a strangely bent branch and frowned at the hide again, I grabbed it from her hand.

“Silvermoon!” In her annoyance, TaLi used her old name for me. “Bring it back!” She stopped, planted her feet, and put her hands to her hips.

I trotted over to her, just close enough so it looked like she might be able to grab the hide. Both she and MikLan lunged for it. I dodged away. They lunged again and I dodged again. Marra and Ázzuen ran between their legs and bumped their hips, making them stumble. I let them chase me and almost catch me several times. Then I began to run, slowly enough that they could keep up, in the direction of Crossed Pines. They followed.

NiaLi was wrong. We communicated just fine when we needed to.

The humans were angry and tired by the time we reached the stream two hours later. I waited for them to stop gasping, then walked up one of the two fallen pines that crossed over one another. I set down the hide and panted at TaLi. She had clambered halfway up one of the fallen trees when she stopped and really looked at where I was sitting.

“Two pines crossed over one another at a stream,” she said to herself. I looked around, expecting to see humans at any moment.

“This next part isn't on the map,” TaLi said to MikLan. She went about two hundred wolflengths into the woods, turned to the left, and walked for five minutes. Then she stopped near a trickle of a stream.

“This should be it,” she whispered.

Pell knocked me in the shoulder. “I'll explore the territory around here,” he said. I was going to protest, then smelled his unease. He had put up with our humans to help us, and I liked him all the more for it. I wouldn't insist he stay to meet a packful of strange humans.

At first I couldn't figure out where the humans would be,
although I could smell them close by. I looked for the large mud-and-rock structures and burning fires that made up TaLi's village back in the Wide Valley. Then I remembered NiaLi's shelter, how it had seemed to grow from the forest, so much so that other humans often walked by it without noticing it. When I looked more carefully, I saw signs of humans: a flat place where they would build their fires, and mounds of stone and dirt that seemed to grow naturally from the earth but that had to be shelters.

An old male human crawled from one of the mounds.

“Welcome,” he croaked, “we've been waiting for you.” The man addressed me as well as TaLi. He wore a longfang tooth attached to a bit of alderwood on a preyskin strip around his neck, just like the one NiaLi had given to TaLi when the girl accepted the role of krianan. I realized that he must be a krianan, too. We had found their village.

Just then, a young male dashed from behind one of the smaller mounds.

“BreLan!” TaLi yelped. That was why the old man knew who she was. TaLi's mate-to-be must have told him about us. TaLi threw off her pack and galloped to BreLan.

Ázzuen got to him first. BreLan was his human, and he loved the boy as much as I loved TaLi. When he was still two wolflengths away from BreLan, he launched himself. The young human was tall and well muscled, but the force of Ázzuen's leap knocked him on his rump. Ázzuen licked his face over and over again, his tail whipping so hard it kept hitting TaLi, who was trying to get to BreLan, too. Other humans began to gather, quietly emerging from shelters and from behind trees as if they were wolf rather than human.

BreLan returned Ázzuen's greeting, thumping his ribs so hard that Ázzuen coughed. BreLan shoved Ázzuen away, stood, and lifted TaLi off her feet. He swung her around several times before setting her down. He held her so close I didn't know how she could breathe. I walked over to them and pawed BreLan's leg.

“Hello, Silvermoon!” he said.

Then he saw MikLan standing next to Marra.

He grinned at him, releasing TaLi. Then he looked MikLan up and down. “You've grown,” he accused.

MikLan walked shyly to his brother. He thumped the blunt end of his spear on the ground in formal greeting. BreLan pulled him close. “Thank you for bringing TaLi safely,” BreLan said.

MikLan smiled up at him. “I have to go back soon,” he said. “I promised the other krianans in the valley I'd tell them what's happening here.”

BreLan's face grew serious as he stepped away from his brother. “You'll have a lot to tell them. There's more going on here than even NiaLi knew. I don't know if she would've sent TaLi if she had known.”

BreLan pulled TaLi close again, wrapping one arm around her while his other hand rested on Ázzuen's back.