Secrets of the Wolves (26 page)

A hill dancer, a small, light-boned deer that came down from the mountain in the deepest of winter, was almost impossible to catch. The marrow in their bones was particularly succulent, tasting of the sweet mountain flowers they fed upon, but we almost never caught them. In addition to being quick, they’re smart prey, wily and unpredictable.

“They twist around and kick you before you can get away,” Ázzuen answered, warily eyeing Pell. The Stone Peak youngwolf seemed to be enjoying throwing Ázzuen into a pile of branches and twigs over and over again.

“And what,” Torell asked, keeping an eye on his young-wolf, “does a weasel do when fighting a wolf?”

“Comes up from underneath you and bites,” Marra said with feeling from where she lay pinned beneath Ceela’s paws.

“You’ve been bitten?” Pell asked her, his voice full of sympathy. I felt an unexpected growl rise in my throat and swallowed it down. Why should I care if Pell was nice to Marra?

“Yes,” she said, “two moons ago. It had caught a rabbit I wanted. I tried to pin the weasel under my paws to take the rabbit from it, and it twisted around and bit my leg.”

“Exactly,” Torell said. “They do not try to overpower hunters much stronger than they are. They use their own strengths to win their fights. With killer prey you must do the same thing. You must think like prey and act like hunters.”

I looked at Torell’s thick chest and strong legs and thought about how I could be a hill dancer. It was no use. I was no prey. I looked over at Ázzuen and Marra to share my disgust, but Ázzuen’s eyes were narrowed in concentration, and Marra was getting to her feet, watching Ceela carefully.

“You’re fast,” Ceela said to her. “Faster than any wolf I know and certainly faster than any auroch. Use it.” Ceela took a stick from the twig pile and placed it between her paws. She raised her hindquarters high in the air and lowered her face to the stick. “Take this from me,” she said.

Before the words left her mouth, Marra had darted forward. She ran in a circle around Ceela twice, then darted under Ceela’s chest to grab the stick. Ceela tried to pounce on Marra but succeeded only in swiping Marra’s forehead with her paw.

“Like that?” Marra said, grinning around the stick and blinking a trickle of blood out of her eye.

Ázzuen walked over to her, as if to examine the stick. Then he veered suddenly to the left, catching Pell’s tail in his teeth. Pell whipped around as Ázzuen leapt atop the branch pile. Torell looked expectantly at me. I saw that he had placed a stick just behind him. I thought hard. I could dive under his legs and attack on my way through. Or leap over him, though I thought he might be ready for that. Instead, I ran straight toward him. Then, at the last moment, I dodged to the right, trying to get past him. He easily knocked me aside, flipped me onto my back, and bit down gently on my neck.

“Don’t commit yourself to an attack until the last instant,” he said, releasing me. “You’d already decided to go to the right, so when I moved, you had no other options. You could have changed directions, backed up, or bitten my paw. You have to keep thinking as you move. Leave your options open. Try again.”

An hour later, Ázzuen, Marra, and I stood, panting but triumphant in front of the Stone Peak wolves. We had all successfully gotten past each of the three Stone Peaks. Tlitoo, bored with our practice, searched for insects in the pile of branches.

“Good,” Torell said. “I think that we can help each other.” I was breathing too hard to answer, which was probably for the best. It seemed idiotic to me that Torell believed that being able to fight made a wolf trustworthy. Pirra, the Wind Lake leaderwolf, was one of the Wide Valley’s best fighters, and she was no more trustworthy than a hyena.

“We think that the Greatwolf cache is somewhere beyond the Western Plains, not far from where we’ll take you to hunt aurochs if you would like to go,” Pell said. “At the very edge of the plain there’s a ridge of low hills. The land beyond the ridge is flat, and you should be able to see far beyond it. We’ve seen groups of Greatwolves going together over that ridge. That’s where you should look.”

“It is in territories the Greatwolves have claimed as their own.” Ceela grinned. “Which is another reason auroch-hunting is dangerous.”

“You will want some time to decide whether or not you wish to accept our offer,” Torell said. “Do not take too much time. The Greatwolves are more wary of us than usual. Go meet Frandra and Jandru as you said you would, so that they will not be suspicious.”

“Doing what the Greatwolves tell her to do is what would
make
them suspicious of her,” Tlitoo said from his branch pile.

Something that sounded like a chuckle came from Pell’s direction. When I looked at him, his eyes were half-closed, as if he were concentrating on something, but his muzzle was tight with the effort not to smile. Ázzuen and Marra laughed aloud. I glared at all of them.

“Go to your Greatwolves and your pack,” Torell said to me, a slight smile on his muzzle. “Meet us at our gathering place by the prey drive in two nights’ time if you decide to hunt with us and to help us find what the Greatwolves hide.”

I dipped my head to him, finding myself compelled to treat him as I would one of my own leaderwolves. “Thank you,” I said. Gingerly, I held my muzzle out to him. He took it gently in his mouth, then did the same to Ázzuen and Marra. I felt myself relax at his gentle treatment of us. Marra licked me and then Ázzuen on the cheek, then set off for the Lan tribe’s lands. With one last look around, I began to back out of the clearing, then stopped. Something Torell had said earlier was still bothering me.

“Ruuqo and Rissa wouldn’t betray a promise. They wouldn’t sacrifice their honor for their safety. They told Zorindru they would help us, and they won’t go back on their word.”

Torell started to say something, then stopped himself. “I hope you are right, youngwolf. In any case, if you wish to help us and, I think, yourselves and your humans, come to us two moonrises from now.”

Once again, I began to back out of the clearing. I stopped, startled, when a wolf emerged from the bushes beside me. It was Arrun, Torell and Ceela’s secondwolf. He was a brawny, dark-coated wolf. I had met him before and found him slow-witted and obstinate.

Torell narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be at Hidden Grove by now?” he asked his secondwolf.

“There is something you need to see, Torell,” Arrun said. “The Swift River youngwolves should see it, too.”

“What is it?” Ceela demanded.

Arrun met her eyes. I had no idea what he communicated to her but she dipped her head sharply, and when the second-wolf left the clearing, she and Torell went with him.

“Will you come?” Pell asked.

Ázzuen’s tail twitched eagerly. It wasn’t late-sun yet. We still might make it back in time to meet the Greatwolves. Or we might not.

“Yes,” I said, and allowed him to precede us out of the clearing.

Arrun led us to the north, along the boundary of Stone Peak and Wind Lake territory. It was rocky, dusty land, with little for prey to eat. I remembered Torell once telling Ruuqo that we Swift River wolves had much of the valley’s best hunting grounds. I had dismissed it as a ploy to gain more land, but I began to wonder if he had spoken the truth.

Arrun ran at a slow lope through Stone Peak lands. Although I was tired from our long run to the prey drive and Torell’s fighting lessons, the muscles in my legs twitched with the longing to run faster. I still had to find Jandru and Frandra to tell them about the prey. I began to doubt the wisdom of staying so long with the Stone Peaks. Arrun kept looking over his shoulder as he ran, looking at me and at Ázzuen, as if he wished to say something to us. I’d had nothing but bad experiences with Arrun and made a point of avoiding his gaze.

Arrun stopped at a shallow pond to drink. Gratefully I lapped at the still, stale water. I much preferred the running water of the river, but I was thirsty enough to drink anything.

When we finished drinking, Arrun began to walk, his slow, almost hesitant pace making me want to growl my impatience. One look at Torell and Ceela stopped me from doing so.

“Where are you taking us, Arrun?” Pell asked, noticing my annoyance. I shot him a grateful look.

“Aspen Glen,” Arrun replied, and would say nothing more. He stopped a few minutes later, at the very edge of the slender trees. He lowered his head to Ceela and Torell, and stepped aside so they could take the lead. I saw a flicker of black just above me, and looked up to see Tlitoo peering at me from one of the aspens. The two leaderwolves pushed past us and began to walk across a flat, grassy plain. Arrun and Pell followed them, and Ázzuen and I came last. Ceela’s sharp intake of breath and Pell’s quick, anxious look in my direction didn’t prepare me for what was there.

At first, as I walked behind the Stone Peak wolves onto the plain, I didn’t understand what it was I scented. I smelled Swift River wolf, but no Swift River wolf would be so far into Stone Peak territory. I took a few steps, then stopped, perplexed. Ázzuen shifted his weight uneasily from one paw to the other. Then I gave a yip of excitement as I finally realized what it was that I smelled through the confusion of grass and aspens and Stone Peak wolf. It was Yllin; she was still in the valley!

Unable to restrain myself, I squeezed past the Stone Peaks and began to run in the direction of the scent.

It took a moment to realize just what the grayish lump in the grass was. I didn’t truly understand until I stood almost directly over the limp pile of fur and flesh.

Yllin had not been dead long. Her flesh was cool, but not yet stiff; the blood at her belly and chest was sticky and fresh-smelling. I stared at her. She was not the first dead wolf I had seen. Ázzuen’s littermate, Reel, had looked and smelled much the same after he had been trampled to death by the horses, but I still wasn’t prepared for the strangeness of the scent, the smell of Yllin but not quite Yllin. Of wolf but not wolf.

Ázzuen whimpered softly. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

I drew closer to Yllin and saw that her belly had been torn open—a huge gaping tear that could only have been made by very large teeth. A rock lion’s teeth could have made such a wound, or a bear’s. But the other scent mixed with Yllin’s fear and blood was the scent of the Greatwolf Milsindra.

My body seemed to understand what my brain did not and my chest grew heavy and my legs weak. It took all my strength to turn to face the Stone Peaks. They had stepped back respectfully, leaving us alone by Yllin’s body.

“The Greatwolves killed her,” I said. The rasp of a voice that came from my throat sounded like some other wolf. I remembered how Yllin had stood up to Milsindra at the spruce grove. Surely that couldn’t be enough reason for Milsindra to kill her.

“I was on my way to the Hidden Grove Gathering Place,” Arrun said, his usually surly face gentle. “She was still alive when I found her. She said that she and another wolf were leaving the valley five nights ago when they were intercepted by the Greatwolves. The Greatwolves told them it was forbidden to leave the valley, that no Wide Valley wolf would be allowed to leave for any reason. Then the Greatwolves attacked. Yllin and the other youngwolf fled. They got separated, she said, and she hid in a cave until today, when she grew too thirsty to stay hidden any longer. She was making her way back to Swift River territory when Milsindra found her and attacked. I stayed with her until she died,” he said gruffly, “so she would not have to die alone.”

A violent rustling shook the trees behind us. Tlitoo’s shriek pierced my ears as he flew to us. He circled Yllin’s body once, screeched again, and returned to his aspen, hissing.

“They told her she could go,” I said in that strange, strangled voice that seemed to be the only thing that could come from my throat. “They told her she could mate outside the valley!”

“Evidently, they changed their minds,” Torell said, his scarred face grim.

“But she was going back,” Ázzuen said. “Why did they kill her if she was obeying them and going back home?” His voice cracked on the last word.

“To make an example of her,” Ceela said. “To show other wolves in the valley what will happen if they try to leave.”

I shook my head, trying to clear the mud from my thoughts. I could see Yllin running, faster than even Marra, leaping over a stream the rest of us had to wade. She wasn’t even two years old. She should have led a pack someday.

I opened my throat to howl for her.

“Kaala, wait,” Pell said urgently. “The Greatwolves will hear you.”

“So what?” I said. I didn’t care what they heard.

“
Think
, Kaala.” The harshness in his voice forced his words through the thickness of my thoughts. “What do most packs do when the prey leaves?”

“Follow the prey,” I said automatically. “Where the prey goes, so goes the pack.” It was what every pup learned.

Then I realized what Pell was trying to tell me. The Greatwolves had forbidden any wolf from leaving the valley, then drove the prey away.

“They’ve trapped us.” At first I didn’t recognize Ázzuen’s voice. I had never heard such anger and bitterness in it. “They sent the prey away and will not let any wolves leave. So we’ll have to fight each other and the humans.”