Lone Wolf

The animal had crashed through. Faolan  could hear it now, baying deep in the earth. He stopped in his tracks, standing in the middle of a death trap. There was a maze of these snow-covered seams that disguised deep crevices where the earth had cracked. Had Thunderheart been swallowed by one? Faolan grew weak at the thought of her dying alone in the bottom of an icy crevice.
    But for Faolan, there was one thought even worse than Thunderheart's death: abandonment. Gould she have left him? Although he and Thunderheart sometimes talked about the night she had fetched him from the river, their conversation always stopped short. He never asked her why he had been left to drown. He had never dared to think that his wolf mother could have done this to him.
    He decided it had been some terrible accident that had all worked out well. He had not been abandoned; he had been found. By Thunderheart.
    But now the questions he had so successfully resisted seemed to ambush him. Had he, back when he was just a tiny newborn pup, been left to die? Had Thunderheart now left him because he wasn't her kind! The ugly word seared through his brain, but it reminded him of something.
    That place, the Outermost! Thunderheart had spoken about the taste of the caribou from the Outermost being the best in the spring. She'd once had a den there. But when Faolan had said that someday they could go together, she had replied, "Perhaps. But I am not sure if it is good for your kind."
    Of course! thought Faolan. That must be where she has gone. She hadn't abandoned him at all. She had gone to get caribou and she would bring it back.
    Through the maze of snow seams he cautiously made his way back to the winter den. But when she had not returned in another few days and hunting became more precarious in the fractured snowfield, Faolan decided to head north, toward the Outermost, to find her. He did not care if it was good or not for his kind. He needed to be with Thunderheart. And he knew how to get there. All he had to do was follow the last claw in the foot of the Great Bear constellation, which pointed to the North Star. "The Outermost is in between." Those had been Thunderheart's exact words.
    ***
    Faolan knew it would be a long trip. But he was determined. Along the way, he sought temporary shelters,  although they never seemed as nice or as cozy as those he had shared with Thunderheart. How could they be? Despite the warming weather, they were cold places without the comfort of the sound of that great, drumming heart. Those rhythms had been as much a part of Faolan as the beating of his own heart.
    Faolan had just roused himself from a short nap in a cave far to the north of Thunderheart's winter den. The cycle of one moon had passed since Thunderheart had disappeared. And although the weather was growing warmer, there were still patches of snow in the territory he entered. He was surprised to see that the trees were different here as well. There were hardly any broadleaved trees, but mostly the kind with green needles and the cones that Thunderheart loved to eat. Faolan wondered if he was getting close to the Outermost.
    Since it was colder, the trees also kept their frost longer. So even now as he wove his way through the closely growing trees, their needles prickled with minuscule stars of frost, wrapping the woods in a dazzling radiance. Sometimes the trees thinned and for great stretches the land became almost entirely barren. The ground was covered with lichen, which Thunderheart had told him made for fat caribou. Perhaps this was a sign that he was drawing closer to the Outermost. He decided to push on.
    A few nights, Faolan heard the howling of wolves, and at first he was excited. But the howls were as different from the ones he had heard in the Beyond as the trees were. They were not melodious in the least, and seemed oddly meaningless. More like crude snarls in the night. Indeed, if the howls reminded him of anything, it was of that cataclysmic moment when he had felt the earth move. He had thought perhaps the world had been possessed of the foaming-mouth disease that Thunderheart had warned him about. She had told him to beware of any animal with a foaming mouth. He must never hunt one, but stay as far as possible from such a creature, even if it was a tiny ground squirrel.
    Although Faolan felt sure he was entering the Outermost, it was frustrating that he had not picked up the scent of any grizzly. He ached for that old summer den