7

ONE NIGHT I WOKE UP to hear geese calling, and when I went back to sleep, I dreamed of Graylag praising those strong birds for keeping their groups together. You didn’t keep your group together, he seemed to say to me. Weeping, I tried to explain that I couldn’t help what had happened, but with a clapping of wings much louder than my voice, he rose into the air and vanished. I woke again and tried to look around, hardly able to remember where I was. The dark, the cold, the quiet, and the smell of stale ashes and wet fur reminded me. Then I thought of Aunt Yoi and my cousins, who by now must have returned to the Char River and told the people that Meri and I were here alone. Someone, I thought, must come for us.

But of course that couldn’t be, and if I had been thinking clearly, I would have seen it. If the people thought Father was alive, they would wait for him to come to them. If they thought he was dead, they might think Meri and I were dead too, starved. Still, I wanted to believe that someone would come, because I didn’t know how else we could join the other people. I didn’t think I could find the way from the Marten River to the Char River without help.

Later in the night it came to me that someone wanting to look for us would look on the Pine River. Learning the truth from Father’s corpse, the searchers would see that Meri and I were gone, but they wouldn’t know where. Then I was very sorry that I hadn’t left a twist of grass in a tree or three piles of stones pointing to the Marten River, and I made up my mind that when daylight came I would go back to the Pine to leave a message.

But I didn’t know what to do with Meri. Since the wolf had destroyed her outer clothes, I couldn’t take her outside for long; I couldn’t think of taking her on a trip when a storm might rise or the weather turn cold suddenly. And I didn’t dare leave her behind. Our group was now only two, but like two geese we should keep together.

In the dark I heard a sigh of contentment—the wolf. She always seemed untroubled. Perhaps because of the cold, this was one of the few nights recently that the wolf had slept in the doorway. By now she usually slept in sunny places near the lodge or in her favorite bed on top of the lodge. From there she could see the door and the open space in front where Meri and the pup spent their days playing. If she thought the woods were safe, empty of roaming, dangerous animals, she would sleep curled, muffling her eyes, nose, and feet from mosquitoes but listening with open ears to hear what might come along. If she thought something dangerous was near, she might bark once sharply to make the pup raise his head, then jump to the ground to trot past the pup and into the lodge with the pup at her heels. Meri had learned to follow.

Then the wolf would block the door against the danger. If I was outside, I had no choice but to climb on the roof, since the wolf wouldn’t let me pass her. Usually even from the height of the roof I couldn’t see what had frightened the wolf, but once I saw the bear who bothered us at night come out of the woods in the daytime to snuffle at the wolf’s beds, where she kept bones. When he came near the door, the wolf pushed herself half out of it, showing so much bristling hair and so many teeth that I thought she would throw herself on him. He must have thought so too, since he backed off. She rushed him, and he ran.

Then it struck me. If the wolf was using me as a helper, perhaps I could do the same with her. She couldn’t help but protect Meri if Meri stayed with the pup. All Meri had to do was pay attention, and Meri paid more attention to the wolf than she did to me anyway. I went to sleep happily, planning to go to the Pine River as soon as it was light.

But when I woke again, the wolf was gone. She often did this, going hunting at times I couldn’t foretell. A person gets ready to go on a journey, taking things that show where he or she is going and for how long. A wolf just disappears. She was gone almost two days, never doubting—it seemed—that I would watch her pup for her, never thinking that I might want to take a trip too. How selfish, I thought.

How generous, I thought after she came back in the night and gave up her food to those who still ate it. For herself she kept only one squirrel, whose hind feet I saw dangling in her gape before she gulped it down. Knowing that the squirrel would keep the wolf from hunger until I got back, I told Meri I was going to the Pine. I explained that I would leave a signal for the people looking for us and would try to get home by night. The wolf, I said, still had food in her stomach and wouldn’t be leaving for a while. “If she barks, go in the lodge,” I told Meri. “Whatever she seems to want, do it.”

“She just sleeps,” said Meri.

“Well, let her sleep,” I said. “But stay near the lodge and pay attention.”

“She makes us stay near the lodge,” said Meri.

I left, taking the ax. From her bed on top of the lodge, the wolf opened her eyes to glance at me. Perhaps she thought I was going for wood—something she knew about. Before the lodge was out of sight, I looked back. Her eyes were hidden in her tail. Only Meri and the pup were watching me.

It was early in the morning. The little pines were full of mist. Now that the long days were back, the sun moved north again. I noticed it to help me find my way.

When I reached the plain, I saw the glacier in its cleft in the hills: my landmark. All morning I walked toward it. Besides the ax I carried only my knife and my firesticks, and with so light a load I traveled quickly. I found food on the way—new shoots of ducksfoot by the river and tender, bitter leaves of deerflower among the heather on the plain. In a nest in a thicket I found six red eggs with brown spots—ptarmigan eggs—and ate two, meaning to come back to the nest on the way home to get the others for Meri.

The herds of mammoths, bison, and reindeer were off for their summer grazing on the steppe, leaving the plain to scattered herds of saiga and horses, all with young. Small herds of hinds grazed near the treeline. The plain, once white with snow, was now in bloom with follows-the-sun and sweet-root, all tumbling with bees. A cold, fresh wind blew from the north, and the sun shone.

Beyond the plain I saw the outline of Father’s lodge among the trees. When I stood near its door, not daring to go in, I looked around for signs of people but found none. Then, gathering smooth stones from the river so that people would know my sign was a message about a river, I put them in three piles, large, middle-sized, and small, pointing toward the Marten. I also gathered long grass, which I knotted and put in a tree in case passing animals scattered the stones. That was what I had come to do, and I thought of starting back to the Marten. But as I sat for a moment beside the lodge, listening to the wind in the empty forest, remembering when all of us first came there and how different our lives had seemed, I knew that if I didn’t look inside, I would always wonder what I might have seen, or always imagine something that would give me dreams; so although I was frightened, I made sure that no animal was lurking inside and then went carefully through the coldtrap.

The lodge was quiet and very dark, except for a dim light from the smokehole, showing the old ashes. An odor hung there, the odor of carrion and mildew. In the corner Father’s body in its deerskin lay covered by a delicate white mold, as thin as mist. The greenstones he had brought from the Char River lay in the corner, partly worked, their cores exposed, hiding among their fragments a bit of antler carved in the shape of a lapwing.

As I looked at the carving, I remembered Father sometimes whittling in the evenings, and suddenly I thought I knew what the carving was—a memory of my mother. I didn’t touch it. I knew I shouldn’t touch anything else either, yet I couldn’t help reaching out suddenly to take Father’s firesticks and spear. As I did I felt terror, as if a spirit were watching, and I quickly put them back. Then I overcame the terror and took them anyway, because I needed them so badly—Father’s sharp spear in case something happened to my knife, and his firesticks in case mine broke. I stole them. Holding them up so they wouldn’t make a dragging noise, I crawled outside without looking back and walked quickly through the woods toward the Marten.

On the way I made plans for the spear. Animals whose flesh gives us strength are not to be caught in snares; I could use the spear to help get fat for Meri, still dangerously thin. Although I wasn’t good at throwing the spear and found it very heavy, I thought I could try on a moonlit night to stab one of the swans nesting on an island in the river. I remembered that these birds have some fat all year, even in spring.

I reached the lodge in the evening. The wolf lay on the roof, her face and legs in her tail. She raised her head as I came near and watched me carefully. Meri and the pup came out the door, where Meri, and perhaps the pup too, had been hiding from mosquitoes in the smoke from the fire.

Meri looked at me hopefully, and the pup ran to my feet, licking the air as if he were begging. Going inside, I gave Meri the eggs, which she gulped. The pup must have been very hungry too—he ate the shells. I gave Meri a large bundle of greens, which she stuffed into her mouth while the pup pleaded, but two frogs I had caught while following the river I kept in my shirt to cook after the wolf went hunting.

Meanwhile the wolf came in to see what we were doing. She smelled the pup’s lips while Meri tried to swallow the great mouthful of greens. She couldn’t swallow quickly enough—the wolf sniffed her mouth too, but turned away, uninterested, to sniff me. As if she suspected that I sometimes carried food she couldn’t see, her nose lingered long over the hidden frogs. Then she looked me in the eyes a moment, and because I was in fact hiding something, I found I couldn’t meet her stare. At last she glanced between her front legs at the pup, who by now was sucking as quickly as he could. Relaxed for a moment, the wolf sat with her ears partly folded, her eyes squinting, and her tongue rolling out, letting him nurse for a time. Very soon she stood, swung her leg over his head, and as he tried desperately to cling, shook him off and left the lodge. From the scrabble on the roof we knew she was again in her favorite resting place, out of his reach.

The moon rose. I took the spear to the riverbank by a long, thin island where I thought I might find a swan’s nest. At the water’s edge I took off my clothes and put them with the two frogs in the top branches of a little tree. Then I waded up to my waist in water so cold I ached, so cold that for a moment my heart wouldn’t beat. But I caught my breath at last and waded toward the island slowly, so that the river’s noise would cover mine. In the moonlight I saw a swan’s white form among the reeds. I raised the spear. As the swan bent its head, perhaps to touch the eggs under its breast, I stabbed it. It screamed and beat its wings, and something hit my head so hard I saw a bright light. Then blows fell over me and something enormous hit the arm I flung over my face.

I tried to lift the spear again and found it too heavy, so while blows and bites rained on me, I dragged it toward the shore. Somehow I fell, gulped some water, and managed to pull myself out on the bank. Behind me on the reedy island a huge swan beat its wings. I had been frozen and bitten for nothing, it seemed, but then I saw under the moonlit water the white body of another swan on the end of my spear. Wondering how I could have dragged something so heavy and not known it, I heaved it up beside me.

Suddenly I noticed a large pair of green eyes watching. I was about to dive into the water again when I saw it was only the wolf. She must have heard the noises. Quickly I lifted the dead swan on the end of the spear to lodge it with my clothes and the frogs in the cleft of the tree, out of the wolf’s reach. But instead of trotting forward as she usually did if she thought I had food, she stopped in her tracks, bristled, barked once, and ran a few steps away. Had she seen something behind me?

In fear I looked over my shoulder, but saw only the moonlit river and the island beyond. Was the wolf afraid of the swan? The spear? Or—and I felt a fear colder even than the river—a spirit come after the spear? Slow with terror, I pulled my clothes out of the tree and put them on.

The moment I was dressed, the wolf came cautiously up to me to sniff uneasily. Her bristling mantle drooped, her eyes went from round to normal, and she glanced around casually, then up at the swan; she sniffed along the riverbank and in the reeds, then walked away as if nothing had happened.

What had she seen? Nothing dangerous was in the river and I didn’t think a spirit would abandon a spear so quickly after following it so far. Then I knew—she had bristled at the sight of me! Me naked! She must have been as startled as I would be if she suddenly lost her fur. I was afraid to make more noise, or I would have laughed aloud at her. Instead I laughed inside.

Later that night she disappeared, probably to hunt. When she was gone, I went back to the tree to get the swan and saw from her footprints that she had leaped for it, but the spear had helped me put it high. Meri and I plucked and cooked the swan that very night to make it ours, eating the liver and the yellow fat while they were still so hot they burned us, as the pup begged for a share in vain. We got strength from that meal.

Then I knew that with the spear Meri and I could eat better. I might be able to kill more swans as long as they were sitting on their nests, or to use the spear to drive them off their nests and take the eggs, or to kill fawns hidden at the edges of the plain. I might be able to throw the spear at something, but even if I couldn’t, it still greatly lengthened my reach.

Very soon the fawns would be running, the eggs would be hatched, and the swans and cygnets would be swimming where I could never catch them. I knew I couldn’t wait. Planning to kill the other swan the next night, while the moonlight lasted, I used the morning to look through the grass and low bushes for a fawn.

 

The thought that one of us should watch the lodge was the wolf’s, not mine. Her pup might wander off but Meri wouldn’t, and although the wolf might wait for me to get home before going hunting, I saw no reason to wait for her. Feeling much safer, much more dangerous, with the spear than with the ax or the antler pick, I went to the plain, hunting for young animals in every patch of long grass, in every clump of bushes.

In time I heard faint hoofbeats and looked up. Two mares and a colt were running toward me, followed eagerly by a wolf—our own long-legged female. Now and then the horses would stop running to glare at the wolf, who held herself back at a distance so she wouldn’t scatter them. Then the horses would dash off again with the wolf alert behind them, not on their heels but far off, swinging out to the left or out to the right in a way that made the horses run toward me. A stallion driving them would not have moved them better, except that he would have been on their haunches, driving them with shoves and bites. I couldn’t at first imagine why she was chasing horses to me. Then I thought she might want help. Did she know what the spear was for? She couldn’t know that! Perhaps she saw me standing on the plain and hoped I might snatch one of the horses with my hands, to hold it until she could set her teeth in it to start it bleeding or drag it down.

In the next moment the horses thundered by. Then everything happened at once—I threw the spear just before the hooves of the first mare lifted me off the ground and sent me flying. Drawing up my knees and hugging my arms over my head as I landed, I caught a second blow as if a tree had fallen on me, then I felt a stab of pain from a third, terrible blow on my shoulder, which I thought would crush my bones. I screamed.

The hoofbeats grew faint and I dared look up to see the wolf with her teeth sunk in the colt’s hindquarters, dragging it to the ground. While its little feet battered her, the two mares spun, but instead of rushing back to the colt, they jounced against each other, confused. The colt screamed and the two mares answered, and when one of them charged back to us, I rolled myself up like a ground squirrel. In the silence that followed I opened an eye to see, very near me, the colt stretched in a pool of blood, still living, with the mare bowed over him, her head by his head. At a distance sat the wolf, eyes half shut and tongue rolling. Remembering a wolf that Timu and Elho and I once found, killed and battered into the earth by a horse—a story the tracks told clearly—I lay perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe. After a very long wait, during which the mare ran at the wolf several times and ravens set themselves down on the plain around us, the colt died and the mare gave up hope. Then both mares went away. Again I dared to peek, and saw the wolf taking big bites from the colt’s haunches.

I stood up carefully, my head ringing and my body very sore. But the wolf snarled at me so fiercely I sat down again. After that she ate more quickly while keeping an eye on me, and any move of mine brought her almost to her feet, snarling. By now evening was coming with other hunters; the open plain next to a dead animal was no place for me. I would gladly have given up any share of the colt to find my spear and go home, if only to learn how badly I was hurt and to lie down. But whenever I tried to stand, the wolf seemed to think I might try to take her meat and showed me her teeth, reminding me of the adults of our group when they sometimes got wrong ideas fixed in their heads and wouldn’t listen to any explanation. So I sat still, feeling sad and hungry, with no hope of a share.

At dusk the wolf walked heavily away to throw herself on her side and clean the blood from her fur. I stood up on numb legs and dragged myself home, bruised, sore, and ashamed to have been gone all day only to return with nothing. Late at night the wolf strolled through the coldtrap door, and lowering her head, heaved once, heaved twice, and vomited a pile of pale, shredded flesh, which Meri and the pup bolted.

 

From my point of view, what had happened with the horses wasn’t promising, yet afterwards the wolf seemed to want to use my help in hunting as well as in keeping watch. Although she wouldn’t leave the lodge if I was leaving, she would come to meet me if she saw me on the plain. Often she would trot ahead of me, chasing nesting partridges and nightjars up from their cover. Since whatever she caught she ate herself, I didn’t want her with me and tried to make her see this, but she didn’t pay attention. Twice more she tried to chase animals to me. Someone to surprise an animal, to make it falter, was, I think, how she saw me, but her plan didn’t work. When she managed to chase a young bison mother and calf far from the herd, I was so terrified to see them charging at me that I dropped Father’s spear and dove into the mouth of a badger’s burrow, where I curled tighter than a birch mouse and prayed to The Bear to spare my life.

Another time the wolf chased a herd of little asses: the stallion, his three mares, and his colt. The wolf was almost as big as the mares, and she frightened them so much that she made them run from their cover of brush at the edge of the woods right across the short grass on the open plain, with the stallion after them, trying to make them turn back. When I saw them coming I knew why, and had the spear ready. From Timu’s and Elho’s talk of spears, I remembered that you must throw before the animal reaches the place you aim for, because the spear takes time to reach its mark. Steadily and carefully I waited, and when the asses got very near I threw, using all my strength. The spear flew past their chests and pierced the ground, the asses dashed by, and when the wolf saw what had happened, she dropped her pace from a run to a trot and, showing me her furry hindquarters, made off toward the glacier.

We saw her at the lodge late the next day; she stayed long enough to heave up some limp, wet food—a gray hamster, three or four voles, and two nest-building mice. As Meri and the pup began to eat eagerly, the wolf nosed the hamster for a moment. When attacked, these fierce animals sometimes throw themselves on their backs to bite and scratch. Sometimes they leap at you. Perhaps this hamster had shown more fight than a wolf might expect. Although it was dead, she stared at it, then suddenly flipped it in the air and, when it fell, barked at it. Finally she gulped it.

As the summer grew, we began to hear more voices at night. We heard the owls, or the bear snuffling and grumbling to itself, or the high, fine squeak of bats over the smokehole. One night we heard lions roaring from the plain, the first sign since we came to the Pine with Father that any lions were near. This frightened me; I listened to a far lion answering a near lion just as if their voices were telling me not to visit the plain anymore. How selfish they were, I thought, to take for themselves even a plain as small as this, when they make us expect to find them on wide plains, on the steppe and tundra, where the large herds graze. Finally I crawled out the coldtrap to learn, if I could, how the wolf felt about these distant bellowing voices.

She was resting on the roof, curled up as usual to protect herself from mosquitoes, and although she glanced at me when I came out, she seemed not even to hear the lions, although of course she could. This encouraged me, and I was just about to go back inside when I heard a faint, far howl of wolves, one voice at first, pure and rising, then joined by many others, some high, some low. This brought our wolf to her feet, her eyes wide, her fur bristling. Inside the lodge the pup howled an answer, and to my astonishment Meri joined him, lifting her voice to pass his voice as his was falling, just as a wolf would do. Did they do this together when I was away? They must, but why? Were they calling? I would have gone inside to ask Meri, but the wolf, looking very anxious, made many little cries and wagged her tail, then raised her chin and howled too. At the sound of her voice, Meri and the pup held still.

Then came a great silence. The wolf listened, Meri and the pup inside the lodge must have listened, and I listened. Out on the plain the near lion, having nothing to do with the howling or the wolves, thinking only of the far lion and of whatever they meant to each other that made them roar, began the drawn-out grunts that meant he was going to bellow again. But the wolves must have heard our wolf, because suddenly they answered her. She scrambled off the roof and vanished in the deep shadows among the trees. Then the near lion bellowed, the far lion bellowed too, and I went back inside the lodge to think where best to stay in case the lions should come into the forest. Would we be safer in the lodge or in a tree? Although matters would have been much better with the wolf keeping watch, I decided to stay in the lodge even without her. On the plain were bison and saiga, horses and asses, colts and calves. Surely the lions would kill something there and not bother us. Besides, the lodge was well made, with a small coldtrap.

So I told myself, and lay down with Meri and the pup under our deerskins, but I found I couldn’t stop listening for the lions and couldn’t sleep. During the night the far lion came much closer to the near lion, and in time, like the excited voices of two furious people, the two roars mixed, very loud and sharp. Then came silence. Where had the lions gone? Soon the silence became more frightening than the roaring, which was the way with lions, as I remembered from our summers on the plains by the Grass River. The pup and Meri slept peacefully, never doubting that they were protected from all harm, while I listened for the scratch of the wolf’s feet on the roof, wishing she still slept in the coldtrap so I could sleep too.

During the night I heard a lion breathe outside the door, or thought I heard it, and by morning, when the time came to go for food, I was nervous and tired. Taking my digging stick and Father’s spear, now badly chipped from being thrown into the ground, I went unwillingly to the edge of the plain for onions and lily bulbs. After digging a few I smelled fresh meat, and thinking that I might find carrion to bring home, I carefully followed the odor. It came from a low thicket in which I heard, as I went nearer, the buzzing of flies. Ravens and magpies stood on the grass nearby, there being no trees for roosting, and two foxes ran off in opposite directions at the sight of me. Asking myself why these animals were not in the thicket eating what the flies were eating, I knew to go no closer, and started a wide circle to go by. The smell of meat grew stronger, mixed now with the fragrance of sage and the musk of lion, and just as I felt relief that the lions who made such noise at night were now eating, I saw between the bushes that the odor didn’t come from a carcass but from one of the lions, a male lying on his side with his head raised slightly, his eyes shut by wounds. He may have heard me or smelled me or seen me between his swollen lids—baring his teeth, he growled. A crowd of meat flies rose from his body as he moved. Very frightened but remembering not to run, I backed away until the thicket stood between me and the lion, then I turned and hurried for the edge of the woods, where, if necessary, I could climb a tree.

When I reached the lodge, I tried to be sure I understood everything I could about what I had seen. A lion lay in a nearby thicket, alive but alone and wounded, surely not able to hunt large game. Not only that, but it knew I was around—it had shown its teeth to me. Soon it would need food, and what food could be easier to catch than me or Meri? Now I knew we needed the wolf, who could hear more and smell more than I and who, being an animal—or so I reasoned—would be likely to know where another animal might be. But the wolf didn’t come back.

I began to wait for her, and to sit on the roof in her old place, partly to keep watch over the woods as she had done and partly to look for her, so anxious was I to see her again. Two days passed. After we ate our last scraps of food, I made Meri stay in the lodge and even blocked the door with the fir tree. I tried to leave the pup outside, so that if the lion came he would eat the pup and not Meri, but this made them both cry so much that I shoved the pup inside to stop the dangerous sound.

I didn’t dare look for food on the plain, so I tried the river, stalking among the reeds with my digging stick lifted, ready to strike one of the thin green frogs which early in the year poise on the riverbank, singing. But where once there had been many frogs, now there were none. Then from the reeds ahead of me a large crane lurched into the air and crossed the river. Perhaps he had eaten the frogs. I looked for strawberries at the top of the bank and found a patch with a few berries left, but the bear had been there before me. He had eaten many bulrushes too, and the sedge roots, but I found some he had bitten and dropped, and these I took with me. Then I saw he had been almost everywhere that food grew. He had overlooked some broken asparagus, some lily bulbs without stalks, and some slug-eaten mushrooms. All these I took gratefully. He had trampled some purslane. Even this I took, although one can’t live on purslane. When the sun was starting down the sky, I still didn’t have enough to feed both me and Meri, but the thought of what the wounded lion might be doing began to worry me, and I went back.

On the way, when I stopped to pick bits of the sweet gum the larches bleed in summer, I tried to listen carefully to the woods. All around me pine-singers were starting their evening songs, and the late-afternoon wind made a watery whisper in the branches. I strained to hear beyond these sounds, and at last I heard a high, clear call, a wolf’s howl, which rose, trembled, fell a few notes, and stopped. After a long pause, as if for listening, the call rose again. I felt the skin between my shoulders prickle and my eyes grow dry and round. Forgetting the sweet gum, forgetting even to walk quietly, I hurried toward the lodge as if someone were calling me. Halfway home I heard the howl once more.

I’m not sure what I expected to find or why I hurried. I think I hurried because I was so relieved to hear the wolf. I must have been more frightened than I realized without her, and must have been excited to hear her again. But also the howl seemed to be a call, perhaps to me, and in truth I didn’t stop to think about it very much, because as I hurried along, frightening thoughts of bad things came unasked into my mind. I imagined Meri picked up through the small of the back and carried away by the lion.

Then suddenly I saw Meri on the trail in front of me. Wearing only her ragged trousers, she was sitting on her heels in a patch of sunlight, her ribs and shoulder blades sharp under her thorn-scratched skin. She had been crying. On her very dirty face were clean streaks, the tracks of tears. I asked, “What are you doing here?”

Her tears began again. “He ran away,” she said. “She’s gone too. They wouldn’t wait for me.”

Meri called the wolf pup he and him and the large wolf her and she. “Wait for you?” I asked. “Where were you going?”

“I don’t know,” said Meri. “She came for us. She wanted us to go with her somewhere else. She’s not going to live here anymore.”

I was shocked. “And you ran into the woods alone? What were you thinking of and why was she howling?”

“She wasn’t howling and I wasn’t alone,” Meri answered, weeping. “I was with her. She waited for me for a while. But she’s faster than you and faster than Father or anybody. She gave up waiting and went off, and I couldn’t keep up with her.”

“Did she take the pup?” I asked, but Meri just sat miserably, wiping her streaming nose and eyes. I saw that the wolf had taken the pup. If so, I thought, Meri could be right that they wouldn’t come back. “Well, we must make the best of it,” I said, trying to swallow my great disappointment. “We must go back to the lodge now. Night is coming.” Meri sulkily shook her head again. “Come on, I’m going. Good-by.” I started down the trail. But when I looked over my shoulder and saw that Meri wasn’t following, I lost my temper. Thinking, Now everything is wrong and you are fighting me, I went back a few steps. “Do you remember those roaring lions?” I whispered. “I see one in those shadows, looking at you!” Meri jumped up and followed me.

When we reached the lodge I went inside but Meri climbed to the she-wolf’s place on the roof. “Stay outside then,” I said, tired of her stubborn ways and angry because I saw she hadn’t even fed the fire but had carelessly let it burn out.

I took my firesticks from their place in the wall. As I was rolling a new fire a wolf’s howl rose, wavered, and dropped—the same howl I had heard from far away, now right above me. I dropped the firesticks and hurried outside, glad to think that the wolf was back after all. But on the roof sat only Meri, thin and cold and tear-streaked, hugging her knees.

Late in the evening, Meri gave up and came inside to lie curled on her side, her eyes open. I sat by the fire to think about all the things I had not understood. I had not understood how much we both depended on the wolves. Meri cried for them, though she had never cried for Mother or Father. She seemed to understand them—she could even howl like one. Perhaps they had been teaching her when I was out of earshot; by the time I heard her, she was doing it far too well to be trying it for the first time. I saw that Meri’s life and my life here at the Marten had been very far apart. I had been too busy and too worried to think of this before.

Then I saw that the wolf too had a life apart from us, and for the first time I saw how little I knew about her. If wolves live in groups as we do, why didn’t she? If they have dens in the earth, why did she choose the lodge, when there were many sandy knolls where the soil could be dug easily? If wolves keep their pups warm, especially right after they’re born, why had three of hers frozen? Where was the husband or sister who could have kept them warm?

For a long time I thought about these questions, until at last I saw them as a secret, the wolf’s secret, which I picked at like a knot. And when the knot fell open and I thought I saw the truth, it was so like a person’s secret that at first I didn’t trust myself. Yet there it was: she had gotten pregnant when she should not have gotten pregnant, perhaps by someone forbidden to her, and when her time came to give birth, she had been forced to hide. This explained why she wasn’t with her group—she was hiding from them. It explained why she lived in the lodge—she learned that she was pregnant after the ground froze. And it explained why she let me and Meri share the lodge—she needed helpers. Now she was gone, because like me and Meri she was lonely. She heard her people singing far off in the woods and went to find them.

 

After I became a spirit, when it was too late to matter, I finally saw how close I had come to guessing the truth about this wolf. Sometimes when I sat on the roof of the lodge, bored with Spirit Marmot and Spirit Goldeneye talking of people I didn’t know, I would think about her. How lonely she seemed to me then—trying to care for young who couldn’t understand her. And if in the form of wolves we went hunting, even as a wolf I remembered that other she-wolf. No matter how strong the wind or how wet the snow, no matter how cold or dark the night or how tired I might be, if I could see the pale hindparts of Marmot or Goldeneye bobbing ahead on the trail, I knew that our hunger and fatigue wouldn’t last; we would eat someday, be warm someday, and best the enemies who bothered us. Whenever the cold air held a cloud of odor, or when, like smoke, a scent—perhaps of dung or footprints—crept up through the snow, I would glance at Marmot, the eldest, our leader, to learn what we would do about it. And Marmot and Goldeneye would glance at me, to learn if I thought as they thought.

But if as a wolf I became separated from the others, or had to travel far alone, I would begin to feel unsure, even hopeless. I could keep only part of myself doing whatever the shaman asked, while the rest of me searched for the other wolves. I would search each pool of scent for traces of their scent, and would strain my eyes and ears for a glimpse of them in the distance or an echo of their sound. I would stop as I ran to leave a scat or urine in case they came behind me after the scent of my body had been carried away. And as our scent stays behind to leave a message even if we must go elsewhere, so our voices go where our bodies cannot, to those who are far away. In the evening, when I saw the low sun, I would call them, listen, and call again. Watching the stars come out, I would send my calls to the black place in the center of the north sky where there are no stars, the place that never moves no matter what time of night, no matter what season, like the opening of a den. “Where are you?” I would cry to them.

 

But all that was far ahead of me that night in the lodge, as I kept watch while Meri slept. During the night I hoped against hope that the wolf would come, or call to us anyway, because I missed her too. We are really alone now, I thought when I gave up listening. We have no one. The wolf has taken her child and gone back to her people; she has forgotten us, our people have forgotten us, we will grow up alone here if we are lucky or die here if we are unlucky. A crane has eaten all the frogs, a bear has eaten the roots and strawberries, the tasty milk caterpillars are now in their shells, and a lion is keeping us off the plain where we might find carrion. Before the bearberries and pine nuts ripen, we will starve. So I thought, during the night.

A few days later we had no more food, and I decided to visit the plain. I could still find lilies and asparagus there, and I might find carrion by watching the birds. If I went at midday, the lions, if there were any, would most likely be sleeping. Of course I had to bring Meri since the wolf was not there to keep watch, and when, rather than argue with her, I simply started off without her, she ran after me, able to see that if she didn’t follow she would be very much alone.

By the end of the day, when I was hot and stuck with grass seeds from digging lilies all afternoon, when I was almost at the end of my patience with Meri for whining and wandering away, we heard the distant voice of one wolf howling from the woods beyond the plain. We listened eagerly. Meri suddenly threw back her head and howled an answer, sounding so like a wolf that if I hadn’t known her, I wouldn’t have believed what I heard. The first wolf howled again. “It’s him,” said Meri. “We must go.” She tugged at my hand, and I let her lead me, trying to make her go carefully, to look at all the thickets before passing through them, until we came to a grassy place near the edge of the woods. There the pup burst out of the grass and leaped on Meri, licking her mouth with joy. Then he crept toward me very gracefully, his legs bent, his head low, his ears folded, and the tip of his tail wagging. Meri put her arms around his neck and kissed his face.

I looked around the clearing, and found wolf scats and prints and a few chewed bones. The she-wolf, for her own reasons, had made the clearing her camp, as wolves do with their young at the end of summer. I thought at first that the camp might belong to the other wolves, the sound of whose voices seemed to have made our wolf leave the lodge. Did they now live here? Had she come to join them? I looked carefully at the tracks, but found only hers and the pup’s. She seemed to have come by herself, perhaps to hide from the others, as they must by then have known of her at the lodge. Then I felt sure that she was trying to keep her pup a secret, and I began to understand why the wolf wanted to bring Meri with her. Meri would have kept the pup company, so he wouldn’t try to follow his mother. When we left the clearing, he followed us.

He seemed to have grown, even in the few days since we had seen him, and he was full of excitement and play. When on the way I found a goosefoot with its delicious white tubers and began to dig them, the pup dug too, accidentally filling in the hole. When I got one of the tubers, he seized it and ran around us shaking it, so I thought to give up gathering and go home. He came too.

After dark a wolf howled from the woods where we had found the pup. He seemed eager when he heard the sound, then seemed to think, then howled an answer. Meri joined him with a call that rose, then fell, then faded. After a very long time, the she-wolf came trotting out of the woods. She danced for a moment at the excitement of the pup and Meri, then briefly nuzzled them both. It all seemed so simple. If she had been a person, someone would have angrily made her explain herself. As it was, she lay down in her place on the roof.

During the night we were wakened by both wolves howling, and when we listened, we heard that they were answering many other wolves howling far away. I went out and saw the she-wolf in the moonlight, standing with her pup, both looking into the woods. The pup whined and wagged his tail, and the mother threw back her head and howled. Then the pup joined his voice to hers, and their songs passed each other, his voice high and falling, her voice low and rising, so that their voices passed back and forth over each other like strands in a braid. Their song was strange and beautiful, almost frightening; the voices of shamans when they sing like geese, like eagles, are not more stirring. The hair on my arms rose.

Then suddenly the woods seemed full of wolves. I saw their gray forms, pale in the moonlight, dark in the shadows, moving among the trees. Jumping from the roof, the she-wolf barked sharply once, and the pup dashed into the lodge. Then the mother wolf stood stiffly by the door.

I was afraid of a fight. Meri was inside; I was outside, where I could count four large wolves coming toward us. If, as the she-wolf seemed to expect, they tried to get into the lodge, I would have to help her keep them out, and I wasn’t sure how.

But the four wolves showed no sign of fighting. Rather, they danced toward the mother wolf, some tails high, some tails low, while she stood stiffly for a moment to let them smell her lips and mantle. As their furry group crowded against her she suddenly relaxed, and with her ears folded and her eyes almost shut, she touched her nose to the lips of the newcomers.

Then out crept the pup. The newcomers mobbed him. He rolled on his side with the tip of his tail wagging fast and the moon shining white on his belly. He passed urine and made many little whines. The grown wolves loved it. They looked him over eagerly, their waving tails held high, then two of them dashed into the lodge, only to come out again in a moment looking rather surprised.

Until now they had paid no attention to me, but suddenly they surrounded me, smelling my feet, my hands, my clothes. I stood perfectly still as they pressed their nostrils against me, knowing that in an instant they could tear me to pieces and wondering what they might have done to Meri. But after filling their nostrils deeply with my scent, they merely sneezed and snorted, and then, in their sudden manner, ran away into the trees. The mother wolf went after them. Picking himself up, the pup went too.

“Meri!” I called. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she answered, crawling out the door.

“What happened?”

“Two wolves looked at me, that’s all,” she said. “Who were they?”

“The wolf’s own people, I think,” I answered. “She went away with them. The pup too.”

“Look there,” said Meri. I looked. Among the trees, against the moonlit sky, the wolves were passing east in single file. We recognized the long-legged wolf, whose shape we knew so well, as the third in line, with two wolves in front of her and two behind. With their ground-covering lope like birds flying low they were over the rim of the valley in a moment, over and gone before we saw the pup behind them. His half-grown figure was small in the moonlight, all legs and feet. His gait was struggling, stumbling.