Lone Wolf

spot, standing with three cubs. The cubs did not notice him, but the mother did and looked at him warily. Faolan's heart seemed to skip a beat. He felt a strange mixture of disappointment and relief. Disappointment that it was not his beloved Thunderheart but also relief, for he could not have borne the thought of Thunderheart with new young ones. He wanted no other cubs sleeping close to that great booming heart.
    The grizzly gave a soft snarl of warning. Faolan lowered his tail and dipped his head to signal: Don't worry. I will not harm your cubs. The bear understood perfectly.
    She had blinked because for just a moment the small movement of the head was so essentially bear that it was hard to believe that the wolf was not one despite his appearance.
    It had been a long time since Faolan had tasted salmon, but desolation chased away his hunger. He yearned for Thunderheart more than ever but was glad to know that now he was truly back in the Beyond. The rapids of the salmon run confirmed this. This is where I belong, he thought. I am a wolf of the Beyond. But there was little conviction in his heart that accompanied this thought.
    ***
    He moved on through another day and two more nights. He began intermittently to hear the distant howl of wolves, as welcome as they were intimidating. He understood them, but they served to remind him of how different he was. When the grizzly at the salmon rapids had blinked at him, he had seen the confusion in her eyes. What are you? she seemed to say.
    Faolan had to ask himself the same question. He was a wolf of sorts, but would other wolves accept him? The farther he traveled, the more uncertain he became.
    He saw signs of the devastation that the earthquake had wrought. Indeed the course of the river seemed to  have been altered, as many new creeks ran from it where he had never remembered them before.
    He sensed that the summer den that he and Thunderheart had shared had been flooded by one of these countless new creeks, for there was no sign of it. The thicket of alders now stood in water halfway up the tree trunks. There was no sign of the glacier lilies or the blue drifts of irises. And yet there was a familiarity about the woods that made him ache with those first memories of Thunderheart.
    The woods became denser but were riddled with small streams and creeks that had gurgled up since the earthquake. Faolan was about to step into the shallows of a stream when the sunlight glinting off a polished black stone caught his attention. He lowered his head to poke it with his muzzle, for he thought it looked pretty. He quickly noticed that there was a spiraling pattern almost exactly like the one on the pad of his forepaw. He stopped and gripped it in his teeth to pick it up, but carefully, so as not to mark it. He dropped it on the bank and stared at it for a long time. There was an odd comfort in discovering this design, such a part of him, inscribed on stone.
    He gently placed the stone back into the stream, then turned and walked on.
    The sun began to sink, a cold blue light stealing through the forest and strips of milky mist swirling around the dark pines. There was an eerie paleness to the woods, as if Faolan had entered a region that was neither earth nor sky. He could feel the ground underfoot and yet wraithlike swags of fog wrapped the dark tree trunks so that they seemed to float. He proceeded warily, his ears forward, his tail slightly raised, and his hackles straight up and bristling.
    There was something white ahead, whiter than the swaths of fog. Blazing white. At first he saw only fragments of this whiteness. As shapeless as the fog that swirled around him. But as he drew closer, the whole of it revealed itself, and he realized what it was -- the skull of a majestic grizzly. He staggered briefly and then rushed toward it -- the skull of his beloved Thunderheart rose in the blue milky light of the forest with a majesty that made Faolan drop to his knees.
    For long minutes he stared into the empty sockets, his own eyes thick with tears. He did not see death, only grandeur in that skull of the great grizzly, that skull that had breathed life into him. He saw only beauty in those bones. Then he tipped his head up to the sky, now indigo and splattered with stars, and searched for the Great Bear.
    When he found the constellation, he threw back his head and began to howl. He howled her to Ursulana. All night he howled and watched the stars and the sliding spectacle of the