Lone Wolf

and over. What kind of life am I going to? To be alone or be reviled, is there no other choice? He did not want to be part of a pack if it was only to be the object of their cruelty. And yet he had seen something else when he had observed those wolves hunting. It was the matchless splendor of a pack working together, the inexpressible, amazing unity for which there was a single word, hwlyn, that Faolan had never heard but the meaning of which he sensed. It was the lure of that unnamable spirit of hwlyn that would finally draw Faolan down from the ridge. And yet something always stopped him just as he was about to bound down the steep slope of the ridge and reveal himself to a passing pack.
    Faolan had ample opportunity to observe the different packs that composed the various clans. One pack seemed about the same as the other. He had no real preference, except he would prefer to avoid one clan. They  seemed the closest to the wolves of the Outermost. The pack leaders of this clan did not confine their abuse to the gnaw wolves, but seemed to fight frequently among themselves. The MacHeaths were especially vicious toward the females, and he did not want to join them.
    There was another clan that he noticed was mostly females, led by the only female chieftain he had observed so far. She was a tawny golden-colored wolf of some years. Her name was Namara, as he had learned through the howlings of the skreeleens.
    The territory Faolan traversed was dominated by the MacAngus clan. It was the MacAngus clan who animated for Faolan the scenes he had observed in the paintings from the Cave Before Time. He had seen members of various MacAngus packs ever since he had arrived on the ridge and because of this he had stayed high near the rimrock that afforded a dense fringe of jagged shadows.
    He had quickly learned how to thread his way through the shadows to conceal himself. It didn't take him long to learn what he thought of as the rhythm of shadows. It was in the mornings and the evenings that the shadows of the sun were the longest. This was convenient because it was midday when the wolves often rested.
    In his time haunting the shadows, Faolan felt as if he were straddling two worlds with paws in each. In one world, he was on the edge of a beautiful dream, part of that painted pack on the cave walls, a fleet member of the flowing line of wolves. In the other world, the unpainted one he observed from the spine of the ridge, he was a young gnaw wolf waiting patiently at the far edge of the pack for his turn to eat. It seemed grossly unfair, for he had seen that little wolf run despite his twisted leg, seen it scurry around to block the caribou's way when it tried to head off in another direction. And yet he had to satisfy himself on mere scraps. But this was the way of the clans.
    The season of autumn storms had arrived. On nights when the weather was most miserable he dared to go closer. There were torrential downpours, and when the sky was splintered with thunder and lightning, the wolves would gather in caves and a skreeleen would "read the sky fire."
    One evening when thunderbolts fractured the sky, Faolan dared to come closer than he ever had before. The lightning skreeleen told a story of a chieftain from the time of the Long Cold who had grown old and toothless with age and lost his hearing, and whose eyesight had dimmed.
    In the tradition of old wolves, he had gone out to a remote place to begin the steps of cleave hwlyn, the act of separating from his clan, his pack, and finally his own body. He had felt the marvelous sensation of slipping free from his pelt, becoming nothing more than a soft mist. He looked over his shoulder at his pelt glistening in the moonlight. His bones lay silent and cold, and he was bemused to realize how little they mattered to him. He sprang forward with the energy of a pup, leaping for the first rungs in the star ladder to the spirit trail leading to the Cave of Souls at the far point of the Great Wolf constellation.
    He had made it halfway up the star ladder when the skies began to rumble. There was a sharp crack. A hot white line flared and the sky split in two. The star ladder shook and the old chieftain felt himself falling... falling ... falling. He pawed the air with his claws, trying to cling to the star ladder. But the ladder had disappeared. There were no stars, only the storm-shattered blackness of the night branded with slivers of lightning. The sound was deafening and the world