Marta was deep in the den nursing her pups when she heard it. One sharp crack, like a lone thunderbolt, pierced the clay roof and stung her ears. Oldtooth, asleep just outside the den, twitched and jerked awake, his worn face groggy for an instant, then alert.
Marta had heard this sound before, and it did not mean a storm. It meant trouble. She stood up in the darkness, and the newborns tumbled away from her. She crept to the mouth of the den and listened, her black fur glinting in the starlight that filtered through the trees. All was quiet. She sniffed.
With her great wolf nose, Marta sniffed again. She smelled the spring rain that had fallen the day before, and she smelled dogtooth violets in the meadow. She smelled thawing soil and budding trees, and she smelled several fat mice within a quick pounce from the den—but for once, the mice didn’t tempt her.
She smelled the scent left by Calef, her mate, and it told her how long he had been gone on the evening hunt. She smelled a dull, oily haze from the road nearby, and she smelled the remains of a recent meal, a snowshoe hare Oldtooth had gotten all by himself. Then she smelled it: clear as a stroke of lightning in the stillness, the sting of gunpowder hit her nose, and every muscle froze.
Marta’s head filled with the smell, and her heart began to pound. She looked at Oldtooth, who had not gotten up but was still peering in the direction of the sound. If the smell had reached him, he gave no sign.
Oldtooth did not move, and all was quiet again. The stinging smell drifted past, and the new leaves around the den stirred in the night air. Nothing but the mice moved on the ground. Marta’s heart finally steadied, and the blood stopped pounding in her ears. Hearing the babies mewling in the blackness, she turned inside and crawled back to them. At the inner chamber she stood again for a moment, listening; then she nuzzled all three pups close together, dropped her rear end, folded her legs, and lay down to wait for Calef.
This was their first year on the Montana frontier, and their first year together. The birth a few days before was also their first. Marta had traveled far from the north to find this valley, to find Calef, to find her place in the world. It hadn’t been easy.
It had not been easy in the north, either. Born last in her litter and never quite accepted by the pack, her first years were a struggle for food, for protection, and for learning the way of the wolf. The way of the wolf was ancient and wild, a code of survival more than a million years old. Taught by example from one generation to the next, it was a code of the pack that found strength in numbers; a code of hunting that killed without waste; a code of order in which every animal had its place.
In those days, Marta’s place was on the fringes of the pack, and she had had to learn the way of the wolf from a distance. Being an outcast made her strong and taught her to survive on her own. Marta was, above all, a survivor.
Now for the first time she had a real pack, with Calef and Oldtooth and the little ones. She had a pack and a place in the world: a home.
Home. For Marta, as for any wild creature, habitat was everything, and Pleasant Valley was a good habitat for a wolf. Broad and sweeping, with miles of meadow surrounded by a sea of trees, the valley lay on the gentler side of the Rocky Mountains. Foothills and forests stretched for days in almost every direction, and toward the morning sun lay the backbone of the continent, guarded north and south by vast reaches of wilderness.
No wolves had settled in this valley for a long time. A thousand years ago, Marta’s and Calef’s ancestors had ranged across the continent, hunting and singing from one valley to the next. But those were the days when humans were few on the land and lived much as wolves did. Now the land was covered with a new kind of human, a loud and busy tribe that changed everything. They filled the prairies with buildings and roads. They drove the animals into the forest and cut down the forests. They turned rivers to lakes and lakes to rivers. They carved wide paths through the mountains and dug huge holes in the earth. They outshone the stars with their lights. And they killed.
They killed deer and bear and elk and buffalo. They killed moose and grouse and beaver. They killed salmon. They killed eagle. And they killed wolf.
In the old days, both wolves and humans killed in order to live, and both survived. But when the new humans came they killed in new ways, and much was wasted. Many wolves died and many more were driven out, and the last wolf homeland was pushed far to the north.
Since the new humans came, the forest wasn’t safe. The earth itself sometimes grew teeth: sharp, strong ones. A wolf could be sniffing the mark of an intruder, trying to protect the pack’s territory, and the ground could reach up and snap around its toes, and hold tighter and tighter until it never let go. Oldtooth knew about the metal bite. It had almost killed him once. Marta knew, too; she had watched from a distance as a packmate howled and thrashed to exhaustion, only to be carried away by a man. Humans made many dangers for wolves, especially young loners without the protection of the pack and the wisdom of their elders. Young loners like she had been.
Marta avoided humans. She learned to dodge their traps and cars and guns, and especially to dodge their scent. In Pleasant Valley the people were few and kept to their homes and ranches at the far end of the meadow. But wherever they went, they left their mark. Wherever they went, they brought loud noises and stinging smells like the one still lingering in Marta’s nose and mind.
That night, Calef was slow to return. As the leaves whispered outside and the stars wheeled overhead, Marta waited. Perhaps he was taking extra time to get the best kill; the babies, it seemed, changed everything. He had never been gone this long before.
In the darkness of the den, she and the little ones were safe. She felt three soft, round noses and paws searching the skin of her belly where it was stretched full of milk. Marta could not see them in the darkness, but she did not have to. Knowing each pup by its smell, she felt the gray female, then the black male, and finally the little black female find a nipple and begin to pull. Marta curled around them, making a warm circle in the dark, and listened as they nursed themselves to sleep.
When light finally came and the first birds rustled awake, Calef still had not returned. Marta left the pups sleeping with Oldtooth at the door of the den and set out to find her mate. She dropped her head and let the scent of his tracks fill her nose, drawing a map of the path he had taken.
Trotting up the hill behind the den, she noticed one of Calef’s long guard hairs caught on the bare branch of a shrub. At the top of the ridge she stepped over a fresh dung pile of his, squatted to mark it, and continued down the tunnel of his scent. His tracks dropped gradually over the other side, crossing and recrossing game trails and creek beds still filled with snow. Soon the trail led toward a human place, where the trees had been cut down and replaced with buildings and roads and animals behind fences: not wolf, not elk, not deer, not bear. Something small and white and woolly and slow.
As Marta drew near she trotted more softly, pausing now and then to lift her head and listen. All was quiet except for the sleepy bleating of the sheep and their young. She was almost to the fence line when she stopped dead. The smell of blood filled her head. Ten feet away she saw the awful truth: grasses battered flat by hard, human footprints and soaked with patches of thickening blood. Calef’s blood.
Marta’s senses exploded. Calef was hurt! Where was he? She circled the beaten grasses, first left, then right, then left again, but found no more tracks. She circled, stopped, and sniffed the air: nothing. Circled back and stopped. Impossible. The trail ended here, in this troubled patch of meadow grass. Marta’s head felt huge and thick, a dead weight on her neck. A trace of the gun smell that had come in the night hovered over the grass, and her great nose sagged.
No Calef. Just his scent, still fresh, long flecks of his gray fur, and too much blood. No sign of the brushy tail that waved high when they played. No clever eyes, no soft ears, no strong muzzle that could crush the haunch of a deer in one motion.
Marta’s throat closed. The sound, the smell, the blood all fit together now and meant one thing. Calef. Gone.
She stood for a long moment in the morning light, poised at the spot where her mate’s trail ended. Then she huffed, a great snort that seemed to come from her heart instead of her lungs, turned, and ran low and fast all the way back to the den.