Lone Wolf

when she had traveled with the MacDuncan clan that it was always bad when a grizzly came out of its winter den too early.
    Morag approached the carcass. If it had been in a fight, there were few wounds, at least not enough to help the ravens. She walked slowly around the body until she spotted a terrible head wound near the grizzly's ear, where the ravens had already torn away what flesh they could. The bear was on its side, and she could see bone protruding from its back. She stopped and peered at it.
    The grizzly's back had been broken by an enormous force. Morag looked up. A short distance away was an immense boulder, smeared with blood. The earthquake, of course! The boulder had tumbled down from the ridge above. The bear must have been in its path. It wasn't a living animal that had ended this bear's life, but the spasms of the earth itself.
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    The two ravens perched on the bear's hip, clearly indicating that this was the site they expected Morag to rip open for their feast. The ravens were already intoxicated by the scent of blood. But Morag caught the thread of another scent. The scar tissue that had so subtly built up within her began to dissolve. The first shadows of darkness began to steal back in from that empty place she had so completely sealed off.
    She became agitated and began nervously racing around the carcass, burrowing her nose into the bear's thick fur, first beneath its huge arm, then beneath its haunches. The ravens became raucous; soon they were confused. What was the wolf doing?
    Morag circled back toward the grizzly's shoulders, where an immense hump rose like a mountain. But even without poking it with her muzzle, a familiar scent drifted from the dense fur. Morag's hackles rose and her eyes rolled. She knew this scent. The pup from the year before! From the time she had traveled to the far edge of the Beyond to find a birthing den away from her old pack. The pup the Obea had taken, the one with the splayed paw marked with the spiral print.
    Every bit of that sad time rushed back to her: how she was forced to return with the Obea and the remaining pups, and was then cast out of the clan. For an entire moon cycle afterward, she would find the highest point of land each night and tip her head toward the sky, searching for the track of stars called the spirit trail that led to the Great Wolf, Lupus, and the Cave of Souls. She was waiting for lochinmorrin, when her unnamed pup with its splayed paw would begin to climb the spirit trail. Then she would know that his abandonment had ended in  death, and he had found peace in the Cave of Souls. But lochinmorrin had never come. She had never seen the soft mist of his lochin, the soul of a departed wolf.
    He had not died, but she had wiped him from her memory until this moment. She sat down on her haunches close to the carcass of the bear. She pressed her head into its flanks. This bear had cared for her pup. She would not rip into the grizzly's body. She would keep watch over it through the night. She would let no predator near. This would be like lochinvyrr, the ritual that wolves followed when they brought down an animal and it was dying. It was a demonstration of respect in which the killer acknowledged that the life he was taking was a worthy one. Although Morag had not brought down this bear, she felt it was her duty to acknowledge the grizzly as worthy, for she had reared a wolf pup as if it were her own cub. The lochin of this magnificent bear would follow that spirit trail of stars to its own Cave of Souls. It was all she could do for the bear who had become the Milk Giver for her own pup, and allowed it to survive.

PART TWO THE OUTERMOST

CHAPTER TEN
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    THE FROST FOREST

    SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAD HAPPENED to Thunderheart, but what? It had been days since the earth had trembled, since the frozen waterfall had broken free of its chamber of ice. The landscape had drastically rearranged itself. There were huge gashes in the snowfield, immense boulders had appeared where there had never been any before. Some of these gashes were as deep as the mountains were tall. The day after the earthquake, Faolan had seen a moose suddenly vanish. There were no trees around, no cave. The moose was there one second and gone the next. Curious, Faolan had cautiously made his way to the spot where the moose had disappeared. He followed a seam that looked like no more than a dent in the snow, but then split wide just ahead where the moose had been standing.