Wolves of the Beyond: Shadow Wolf (13 page)

THE
GADDERHEAL
OF THE MACDUNCAN
clan was large, but not large enough to accommodate the crowds of wolves and owls who had gathered excitedly to hear the results of the
byrrgis
. So the announcement was held outside, where the owls could perch in the sparse grove of birch trees.

There was a point system in which the gnaw wolves’ performances in the
byrrgis
were judged on several different aspects of ability and conduct. Scores were given for basic proficiency in running, smooth shifting in rates of speed and direction, adherence to formation, and interpretation of the silent signaling system. Extra points could be granted for certain tasks if performed exceptionally well. Even before the scores were announced, there were whispers about these extra points and who might receive
them. But as Liam leaped onto a stump, the tension mounted.

“The
taigas
have concluded their scoring process. I am pleased to say that you have all performed exceedingly well in this first round of the Gaddergnaw Games. We shall begin by announcing the highest scores. In first place is the gnaw wolf Creakle from the MacDuff clan. Creakle scored a solid ten in basic running as well as another ten in position adherence. He scored five in shifting rate of speed and direction, and an additional four points in signal interpretation. Although the last score was rather average, Creakle made up for it by a powerful leap in the kill rush, earning ten extra points. With no penalties for inattention, shoving, or stumbling, the
taigas
have given Creakle a total score of thirty-nine!”

A great cheer went up. This was considered a very high score. Not as high as the legendary gnaw wolf Hamish, who became the Fengo of the Watch and had accumulated the highest score ever with an astounding fifty points.

Liam MacDuncan continued with the announcements. Second place was considered an upset, going to none other than tiny Edme, who had gained extra points
for her quick thinking when Faolan faltered and for her spot-on delivery of a bite to the life-pumping artery.

Faolan, listening to the mutterings of the wolves around him, was gradually becoming aware of what a big upset it was considered that he—the wolf who had jumped for the sun—had not won, let alone placed second, in the
byrrgis
competition. A gasp swept the crowd when Tearlach was announced as the third-place winner with a score of twenty-five. Faolan felt all the eyes of both wolves and owls turn toward him.

“In fourth place, with a total of twenty-two points, is the wolf from the Blue Rock Pack of the MacDuncan clan, the Whistler.”

A cheer went up.

There were only two more gnaw wolves left to place. It felt as if all eyes had focused on Faolan and Heep. Faolan began to walk away. “And now in fifth place, with no extra points for anything and a two-point penalty for inattention”—Liam MacDuncan paused—“is the gnaw wolf Heep of the River Pack.”

Faolan could hear Heep groveling in the dirt, pressing the side of his face into the dirt, claiming that such a lowly wolf as himself, such a humble wolf, had never expected to win this honor. He was unaccustomed to
being anything but the most humble, the lowest of the low. On and on he went.

“And in sixth place, with a penalty of twenty points for two stumbles in the last quarter of the
byrrgis
, and for missing his cue for the kill rush, the gnaw wolf Faolan from the MacDuncan Pack of the Eastern Scree.”

Mhairie rushed up to him. “What happened?”

“Well, I didn’t bump into you!”

“No, you stumbled and you missed your cue. If not for that, you would have tied with Creakle,” she said with exasperation.

“But I didn’t. I was inattentive, distracted.”

“Yes, but so was Heep.”

“He was?” Somehow, this surprised Faolan.

“Didn’t you hear? He got penalty points for some kind of inattention.”

“No, I started to walk away and, truthfully, I wasn’t listening. But the thing is, he didn’t stumble because of inattention.”

Dearlea had come up in the middle of this conversation. “He was looking around. I saw him. I had to report it to the
taigas
.”

“What was it, Faolan?” Dearlea pressed. “You were running so well beside me and then you just seemed to lose it. I could almost feel it before that first stumble.”

He shook his head wearily. How could he explain something that only he seemed to be able to hear? And it might appear so minor, so trivial—like the buzz of a mosquito. The two sisters stopped walking. Mhairie stepped close to Faolan’s muzzle. In her deep green eyes he saw golden flecks,
like little constellations
, he thought. Mhairie and Dearlea both tipped their heads slightly and blinked as if they had seen something in his eyes as well. For a moment, the three young wolves seemed caught in a web of golden light.

“Dearlea, Mhairie, I’ll tell you what distracted me, but it might seem stupid.”

“No! No!” both wolves urged. “What is it?”

“Heep.”

“Heep distracted you? But he was looking around himself.”

“But he was doing something else, too. Have you ever seen his gnaw-bones?”

“Not really,” Mhairie said. “He’s not in our pack.”

“I’ve heard his carving is not very good. Kind of clumsy,” Dearlea said.

“It isn’t very good, but there’s something else. One of his shearing teeth has a nick in it. You cannot only see the nick in his carving if you look closely, but if you sit next to him in gnaw circles, you can hear it.”

“It’s like Taddeus, our little brother. I hate the way he smacks his lips when he eats,” Dearlea said.

“He slurps, too, when he drinks,” Mhairie offered.

They were getting it. “But this is much worse. It’s horrible. It can drive you
cag mag
. It’s like a mosquito buzzing in your ears during the moons of the flies in summer.”

“But he wasn’t gnawing a bone, for Lupus’ sake, in the
byrrgis
!” Mhairie protested.

“No, but he was making that sound. He was doing it to wreck my concentration. It has never wrecked it when I am gnawing. I’m not sure why. But when I was running, it did. And then finally, right before the kill rush, I missed my cue because he settled as close to me as possible and then opened his mouth and began slashing his teeth right in my ear. I tell you, it was like slivers in my brain. He hates me.”

Mhairie and Dearlea exchanged glances.

“You’ve got to believe me,” Faolan said. There was the heat of desperation in his voice.

“All right, we’ll come to the gnaw circles,” Dearlea said. “They’ll be going on for the next three days.” She paused. “And, Faolan, the bones you gnaw count more than the
byrrgis
. You can make up for your sixth place, in the gnawing events.”

“I hope so. As I said, it doesn’t seem to bother me when I’m gnawing, as much as when I’m running.”

“You know why that is?” Mhairie asked.

“No.”

“Well, I know. It’s because you’re an artist, Faolan. A true artist.”

FAOLAN WAS ONCE AGAIN IN A
gnaw circle with Heep. But he knew he had been right in what he told Mhairie and Dearlea. The clicking sound of Heep’s shearing teeth, although just as loud as during the
byrrgis
, did not seem to annoy him nearly as much. Perhaps the simple act of sharing this with Dearlea and Mhairie had relieved him a bit. Even if they couldn’t hear it themselves, this was the first time he had really been able to share a feeling with another wolf since he had been in the Beyond. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the two sisters approaching. They were coming just as they had promised. He tried to quiet his own gnawing so Dearlea and Mhairie could hear the click of that nicked tooth.

Dearlea and Mhairie stopped on the other side of
Heep. “That’s interesting,” Dearlea said. “The natural shadowing of the bone might be an obstacle to some, but you carve deep.” She didn’t know what else to say. The lines were deep—deep and clumsy—and she did detect the nick. Now she wanted to hear it.

“Oh, I am humbled by your remarks.” Heep began to screw his face into the ground and writhe in submission.

“Oh, please, dispense with such formalities. We would much prefer to watch you gnaw.”

Faolan had stopped gnawing entirely and was oiling his bone by rubbing it between the webbing of his paws. Oiling had two main functions. First, it marked the bone with a wolf’s distinctive odor, and second, it cleared away the bone dust from the gnawing. For Faolan, there was now a third function to be served. It offered silence.

Dearlea and Mhairie should be able to hear the click of that nick. He could tell that they were both concentrating very hard, with their ears shoved forward. Did they see the nick in the bone that Heep’s tooth made? Soon, the two moved off. Heep slid his green eyes toward Faolan. Then he whispered as if to himself although everyone in the gnaw circle could hear him, “I can’t imagine why two such high-ranking wolves, wolves from the Carreg Gaer,
would stop to look at my humble work.” No one said anything.

The gnaw wolves went on gnawing, and there was no sound except for the scrape of teeth on bone until Edme lifted her head. “Uh-oh! Here comes the Fengo Finbar,” she said.

Heep immediately dropped his bone and started to twist not just his face, but what seemed like his entire body, into the ground.

“Up, up!” Finbar was a handsome brown wolf with a lustrous coat. One of his back legs was twisted so that the paw was actually reversed. “Veneration and obeisance practices are suspended during the games. They are a waste of time when such important business is being conducted.

“I am here to remind you all that you should be thinking about your story bones. In the old days, it was permitted to gnaw three, even four bones to tell a story. But during the time of our late and venerable Fengo Hamish, it was decided that it was even more challenging to be concise. So for your stories, my advice is to keep the focus narrow, prove a single point or follow a single idea, but develop it with specific examples and facts. Try to avoid clichés.”

Edme raised a paw, “Pardon me, Honorable Fengo,
but might you give an example of a really good story bone that a gnaw wolf from the past has carved?”

“Aah, very good question. Undoubtedly, the very best bone ever gnawed was that of our late Fengo Hamish, telling the story of how he and the late king of Ga’Hoole, Coryn, first met when Coryn came to the Beyond as an outcast from his mother’s hollow. It was not so much the events of the story but the deep feelings he expressed. It was an outcast’s story of another outcast. It was as if Hamish had to get outside himself and his own agonies before he understood them and the world in which he lived. Hamish showed Coryn’s agony in being an outcast, unloved, nay hated, by his tyrannical mother, Nyra, and yet cursed with a face so similar to hers that, in his wandering, he provoked fear wherever he went. The high point of the story occurred when Hamish first meets Coryn. He described the spark between them that kindled their long friendship. Simply gnawed, this bone—a tibia, I believe, from a musk ox—told a tale of profound friendship.”

It was as if he had to get outside himself and his own agonies before he understood them and the world in which he lived
. The words of the Fengo Finbar resonated deep in Faolan’s marrow.

The Fengo cocked his head to one side and closed his eyes until there was just a slit of green light from
each. He seemed to be contemplating something in the distant past. “A bone gnawed with such compassion seemed to touch the marrow of all wolves. Classic. A true classic.” Then the Fengo walked away without saying another word, as if he was still in the thrall of that memorable bone.

The gnaw wolves of the circle all looked at one another, undoubtedly with the same thought.
How will I ever match that?
But Faolan was not thinking of bones or the competition at all. It was as if he had moved outside his own body. He was on that ridge again where the pup had been murdered. Murdered by a wolf!

He was trying to imagine the killer winding up that steep incline to the flat rock on the top. How long had it been after Faolan had left? If he had stayed and just kept watch over the poor little pup, would she have died before the murderer could get to her? But if he had stayed, would he have been tempted to save her? Questions whirled through Faolan’s mind as the other wolves gnawed. He had thought there was more to the pup’s story, but never had he imagined it would be so complicated and so gruesome.

A sleeping den was reserved for the competing gnaw wolves, but Faolan preferred to sleep alone. For even after a day of working, the gnaw wolves often talked long into the night, and the constant discussion of the competition put Faolan on edge. Although everyone was careful not to reveal too much about the story he or she was carving, they loved to discuss certain challenges they were encountering. Faolan had yet even to come up with an idea for his story, so he had nothing to reveal. He wasn’t worried. He knew that, sooner or later, he would think of something. Many of the stories focused on the gnaw wolves’ deformities and how they overcame them. Edme’s was particularly affecting, describing how she began to understand that she did not necessarily miss the eye she was born without, but thought of it instead as hovering above her in the sky, looking down upon her and giving her courage.

Creakle insisted that although he was missing a paw, he possessed what he called a
lochin
paw that served him well and had forced the muscles in his leg to become much stronger. Therefore, he was gnawing a bone about his great leap in the kill rush that brought down the caribou.

Heep was rather reserved about his own bone, but,
when pressed by Tearlach, replied quickly—a bit too quickly, Faolan thought—that he was gnawing a bone about the unexpected joys of humiliation. “It’s really a philosophical story about the strange fulfillment in understanding one’s place as the lowliest of creatures and the reverence it gives one for the Great Chain that orders our existence on earth.” Heep slid his eyes toward Faolan. Edme felt something seize in her marrow when she caught the treacherous glint in Heep’s gaze. Had Faolan seen it?

The Whistler yawned loudly during Heep’s explanation. He was gnawing a story about an early memory of when he had first found his way back to the MacDuncan clan and wondered whether it was better to live as a lone wolf. It seemed to Faolan a very honest tale, but he heard Heep snickering. “If I might humbly ask the Whistler how he could ever consider abandoning this noble clan for life as a lone wolf?”

“No,” snapped the Whistler. “You may not ask. When I finish my bone and you see it, perhaps your humble mind will understand.”

Tearlach seemed to prefer not to discuss his story, although he gave small hints on occasion. Faolan, however, had not given the slightest indication. When he had
finally decided what he would carve, he was careful to go to the pile to pick a bone when no one else was around. He had selected a pelvis of a marmot because there was a beautiful gray crack that ran diagonally across it and reminded him of the river from which Thunderheart had rescued him. There was also a spot on the surface that was slightly discolored and in the shape of the cave that had been their summer den. It amazed Faolan that the other gnaw wolves did not take more time in looking at their bones and discovering the interesting designs that occurred naturally on the surface—small fractures, shadows, slight depressions. Heep had used the natural crack in a bone once, but only once, when he carved the image of Faolan jumping the wall of fire. That crack was so obvious, it was hard to miss. But as far as Faolan could tell, neither Heep nor any of the other gnaw wolves had looked for these features in the bones they were incising.

There was a landscape that already existed if one looked carefully, and then all one had to do was arrange one’s carving around that landscape. In the pelvis of the marmot, there was river, sky, a summer den—only Thunderheart was missing, but that was what Faolan’s teeth would inscribe. The story seemed to press to get
out, so that Faolan’s teeth almost ached with the story they held.

Late one evening a few days after the story bones had been started, Faolan saw a tree with forking branches that he felt might make for good sleeping. The last time Faolan had leaped into a tree was when he was chasing a cougar in the Outermost. This leap looked about the same distance and certainly did not require the kind of leap he had made jumping the wall of fire.

He did not even have to take much of a running start before he was in the tree with his legs draped over the fork. He had not realized it, but there were two other branching limbs that joined these from the back of the tree. It formed a sort of basket similar to the ones that Rogue colliers and smiths carried their coals in, although much bigger. It was the perfect den, if one could call such a place a den.

Faolan looked up through the black embroidery of the fringed spruce branches against the sky. The stars were just breaking, and he could see the first antlers of the caribou’s constellation. It made Faolan think of the
drumlyn
he had built for the caribou he had caught nearly a year before. How different it was from the violated little
bones of the pup on the ridge, he thought. Faolan shivered in his sky basket, as he had come to think of this tree den. He felt high enough to reach out and touch the stars with his paw. Those starry antlers of the rising caribou constellation were a sign that the Great Star Wolf was returning to guide the mist of the murdered pup to the Cave of Souls.

Faolan twisted around to lift his splayed paw to the light of the moon just above. There it was, the
malcadh
mark, the dim tracery of spiraling lines like a swirled star. The print on his paw seemed to merge with a whirl of stars in the sky. Once again, the thought came to him that he was part of something bigger, a larger design that was just one fragment of a single piece, an endless cycle spinning around and around like those swirling lines on his paw. He recalled that terrible night when he had found the skull of Thunderheart and howled his grief into the darkness. He remembered how he had taken some solace in the thought that, for one moment in the infinite loop of cycling time, his and Thunderheart’s lives had come together. His
glaffling
, as the wolves called the howls of mourning, was as much a prayer of thanksgiving as a song of grief. The words of his mourning howls came back to him now.

But the song soon faded as he crossed the border into sleep and entered a dreamworld in which he trotted across the starry night, looking for the little
malcadh
pup to see if she was safely climbing the ladder to the Cave of Souls.

I am a star walker!
he dreamed as he walked throughout the constellations, looking for the little pup. He knew he dreamed, and yet this was much more tangible than any dream he had ever had. The night air seemed billowy beneath his paws, and his silvery fur captured the flickerings of the stars until he felt wrapped in a radiant mist of light.

It is all so real! So real and so familiar. Have I been here
before?
But that was impossible. What living wolf had ever walked the stars? And he was not dead. A long shadow began to stretch itself across the nightscape of his dream. A shiver passed through him and it was as if the marrow in his bones shifted ever so slightly. Just then, he heard a
click
…
click
…
click
…
Not here. Surely not here!

He awoke with such a start that he almost pitched himself from the tree. His ears were pricked up. But there was only silence, not the clicking of that nicked slashing tooth. “It was in the dream I heard the clicking,” he whispered softly to himself.
In the dream!

He looked straight up through the branches to the star-dusted night he had just walked in his dreams. He squinted his eyes so he could see the stars between spruce needles. And then it came to him, the image of those tiny bones bristling with needle-like slashes. He must look beneath the fury of the marks. Something else was there that he had not seen before. All these days that the gnaw wolves had been carving their story bones, there were bones out there on the slope with the little pup’s story already told.

He could almost see the pup leaping down from the star ladder, snarling in vengeance at her killer. She would have no rest until the murderer was known. In that
moment, Faolan knew what he had to do. He had to go and retrieve the bones he had buried with Thunderheart.