Watch Wolf

not absorbed in her own worries.
    “She said the bears call their Cave of Souls Ursulana.”
    “What a lovely word — Ursulana.” Edme repeated the word as if to savor every syllable.
    “I wonder sometimes if all heavens are really one, if there are no borders in the sky.”
    “Splendid!” Edme exclaimed and began a baying song that she made up as she howled. Long resonant yowls curled into the night as constellations rose in the east, and the blackness of the night tingledwith stars. Faolan listened. He hoped — oh, how he hoped — that he was right, that what Edme howled was true, that all those heavens were one. Then someday he would be united with Thunderheart, the grizzly bear who took him in when the wolf clan abandoned him and raised him as her own.
    They had camped for the night near a small marsh sprigged with tiny bright yellow blossoms of beewort. The two wolves had found a place to sleep under an outcropping of rock. Across the top of the rock, a spider had woven a web, and its silk threads trembled in the night breeze. Faolan was taken by its delicate beauty. “I’ve heardthat the silk of a spider’s web is much stronger than youcould ever imagine.”
    “Really?” Edme’s eye sparkled with interest.“Wherever did you hear that, Faolan?”
    “The Sark. The Sark of the Slough. She told me. She uses it to stop bleeding and bind wounds.”
    “You’re close to the Sark, aren’t you?” Edme asked in a taut voice. Faolan knew that the mere mention of the strange old wolf, whom many regarded as a witch, often provoked this response.
    “Yes, she understands me in ways others don’t.”
    “Do you suppose your mother visited her — you know, after …” Edme didn’t finish the thought, but Faolan knew what she was asking.
    After giving birth to a
malcadh
and being cast out of their clans, many she-wolves went to the Sark to recover. She had them drink potions that she brewed to help with what was called the Forgetting, so the she-wolves could move on, find a new clan, a new mate, and birth healthy pups.
    “My mother, whoever she was or is, did not visit the Sark. The Sark told me so. Do you think your mother went to her?”
    Edme hesitated before answering. “I have no idea, justas I have no inkling about this
tummfraw.”
Faolan noted that Edme did not say “my
tummfraw.”
The peak on the ridge had no more meaning for her than the most distant star.
    Shortly after the two wolves set off, they picked up a trail of elk headed back north with their young calves. Caribou shed their antlers during the frost moons, but elk shed theirs during the spring moons. Thus this time was called the Moon of the Shedding Antlers or sometimes the Moon of New Antlers.
    Mice populations made short work of the antlers, which were rich in nutrients. But Faolan and Edme had found a few still intact and had begun to gnaw them, inscribing them with designs that told the story of their
Slaan Leat.
This desire to gnaw designs was instinctual in Watch wolves. It was not required that they bring a
Slaan Leat
bone back to the Ring. But there was a compulsion that urged them to record their journey. It did not matter if the antler was ever seen or read; they needed to mark this milestone in their journey from gnaw wolf toward a life of service at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes.
    And so they gnawed designs of the constellations floating above them and tried to describe thehaunting scent of the beewort that drifted across the marsh, the quivering beauty of the spiderweb sparkling with night dew, and the low, gentle song of the grass as the wind stirred it on this late spring night.

CHAPTER TWO
W INTER D REAMS ON A S UMMER N IGHT
    WHEN THE MOON SLIPPED AWAY, the wolves fell asleep and huddled against each other as the night became colder. Faolan dreamed of fire — a particular fire in the meeting cave of the MacDuncan clan when he had been brought before the
raghnaid,
the wolf jury, for having violated hunting law. It was not the warmth of that bright fire of which he dreamed — a foil to the cold stares of the jury. It was a pattern of sorts that flared into his mind, a swirl of bright orange and yellow buried deep in the base of the flames. The spiraling flame echoed an odd mark on Faolan’s splayed paw. In his dream, the spiral became larger and larger and seemed to devour him in a spinning madness as the late chief Duncan MacDuncan’s face loomed immense behind the flames.
    “He knew! He knew!”
    “Faolan!