Frost Wolf Read online

  KATHRYN LASKY

  WOLVES OF THE BEYOND

  FROST WOLF

  For Rachel Griffiths

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Old Buck

  Chapter One: Frost Wolf

  Chapter Two: Tracks to Nowhere

  Chapter Three: The Last Moose

  Chapter Four: Secrets of the Gadderheal

  Chapter Five: The Inner Eye

  Chapter Six: Most Foul!

  Chapter Seven: Frayed Tempers

  Chapter Eight: A Raghnaid in Shambles

  Chapter Nine: The First Sign

  Chapter Ten: The Whistler

  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

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Drumlyn of Morag

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE OLD BUCK

  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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROST WOLF

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TRACKS TO

  NOWHERE

  “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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE LAST MOOSE

  AFTER INVESTIGATING THE TRACKS, Faolan returned to the den to rest, but Edme continued on her scouting expedition in hopes of picking up more of the caribou herd’s trail. Her efforts proved futile, and as dawn broke the next morning, the two wolves set out toward the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes.

  “Let’s cross the creek here. I think the ice might be thinner and we could get some fish,” Faolan suggested.

  It did not take them long to claw through the ice, and within minutes they found three winter-thin salmon.

  “It seems wrong catching them when they can barely move. It’s not a fair fight exactly, and they hardly have any flesh on them.” Edme shook her head as she swallowed the last piece.

  “Eat the head. Thunderheart always made me eat it. She said it was the most nourishing part.”

  Edme shuddered. The notion of a fish head after the promise of meat from the caribou tracks was revolting.

  “Go on! Eat it,” Faolan growled.

  “You even sound like a grizzly,” Edme muttered as she took a small nip of the fish head.

  “I could do worse,” Faolan chuckled.

  Thunderheart, a grizzly bear, had been Faolan’s second Milk Giver. He had been cast out by the wolf clan, deemed a cursed one, and left to die because of his splayed paw. The grizzly had rescued him from an ice floe in the river. It was Thunderheart who had taught him to fish during those glorious golden days of his first summer. But now she was gone, as was Faolan’s first Milk Giver. He chewed the fish head and looked up toward the sky. It had started to snow again. He turned his face toward the constellations of the Cave of Souls and Ursulana, the wolf and the bear heavens. It didn’t matter that he could not see the stars. He knew that both his Milk Givers were up there, snug in their heavens.

  The wind had picked up and was cutting down from the north like a blade. To head directly into it for the Ring would be hard going, especially on their meager meal of three scrawny fish.

  “All right,” Faolan sighed. “With this wind we’d do better tacking across instead of facing it straight on. We’ll head toward the eastern edges of the MacNab and the MacDuff territories. Let’s go.”

  The snow stopped as they left the Shadow Forest behind. There were drifts on the ground, but they were not too thick and Faolan and Edme were able to increase their speed considerably. The sun rode high in the sky, beating down fiercely on them and threatening to put an icy glaze on the trail, which would make it even more difficult for them. Edme was thinking about the irony of the summer sun and the threat of ice occurring simultaneously. How can a world turn so strange so quickly? she thought as she trotted along several paces behind Faolan. Suddenly, she saw Faolan skid to a halt. “Not already!” she muttered and accelerated her pace to catch up. She was careful to lock her toes into the snow to avoid skidding.

  “Look ahead!” It had begun to snow again, hard. A driving wind flung the swirling gusts smack into their faces, but something else came on the edge of those gusts — a scent. The scent of meat. The snowflakes seemed to freeze in place. The wind stopped and a shadow loomed dark behind the white veil of the blizzard. It was a moose.

  The tang of the animal’s meat saturated the air. Could they take down one of the largest animals in the Beyond? This one didn’t look full-grown, but it still could be dangerous. Moose were unpredictable and many a wolf had died after being charged and then impaled on the sharp rack of their antlers.

  Faolan’s and Edme’s stomachs churned. A new energy flooded through them and both sprang in a dead run downwind of the moose until he was within kill range. There was no way they were going to let the creature pick up their scent.

  Now! Fa
olan signaled silently with a flick of his ears. He split off from Edme, heading upwind. Edme tore through the blizzard at such a speed that she left a wake in the wind-driven snow, a narrow path that seemed fragrant with the smell of meat. Within seconds, the moose caught her scent and began to run. He was small for a moose, but he was fast. Faolan drove down on his port flank, trying to turn the moose in a classic outflanker maneuver. Meanwhile, Edme was packing the gap. Is she packing already? Faolan wondered. This was risky. The moose was turning too sharply.

  “Let it go!” Faolan howled the cease chase call. His eyes widened in horror. Edme was not stopping. The moose caught a glimpse of Edme out of one eye and let out a bellow that shook the blizzarding sky. He was going to turn and charge.

  “Edme!” Faolan cried. He saw something small fly through the air. And then everything stopped for him, everything except the echo of the bellowing moose as it hammered away into what was now a blinding blizzard.

  “Edme?” Faolan looked around desperately. The bellows of the moose began to diminish with the distance. “Edme?” His voice cracked.

  He saw something stir in a small drift ahead.

  “I’m all right. I’m fine,” Edme said as she emerged from a mound of snow. She wobbled slightly, but Faolan could see no blood.

  “Edme, wh … what …” Faolan could barely form the question. “Why would you do such a thing? That was cag mag! To make a move like that, to cut in.” His eyes darkened with disbelief.

  “I know … I mean, I know now. But all I could think of was meat. It was scary. Or it’s scary now to think that I did this. I was just so hungry.” She looked at Faolan. He was shaking.

  “Edme, if he had killed you … if …”

  “I didn’t mean to fighten you, Faolan.” She was suddenly filled with a terrible sadness. She came up to Faolan and nuzzled his shoulder. “I’m here, Faolan. I’m just fine. I’ll never do anything like that again.”