Watch Wolf

soon as he saw it. There was a steep embankment and just above it a large cave, where Thunderheart’s last cub had been murdered by a pair of cougars. Faolan stopped. After all this time, there werestill signs of a skid path down from the higher ground of the cave to the water. Stumps from broken trees stood witness to the grizzly’s rage as, wild with grief, she had hurled herself toward the roaring river, only to find that it was too shallow for her to drown. There she had sat for hours, keening into the wind, begging Great Ursus to take her life, until something snagged on her foot. At first she thought it was a clump of river debris torn from the bank in the river’s spring tumult. But it was not. It was a tiny wolf pup.
    So often Thunderheart had told this story to Faolan. Her words came back to him now as he stood on the spot where Thunderheart had found him, half a league from the
tummfraw
where the Obea Shibaan had left him. He would go to his
tummfraw
soon, but he needed to stop here for a spell and think.
I sought death,
he remembered Thunderheart saying,
and you sought life. You were a gift from the river.
There were no more stories now, for Thunderheart was dead. There were only bones left to gnaw to her memory.
    Faolan made his way toward his
tummfraw.
It wasn’t as difficult to find as he had thought. He looked down at the bank gouged out now by three winters of rampaging ice and water. A pulse seemed to quiver deep in hismarrow, and his hackles rose. This was indeed the place. There was a weathered rut that could have been the very one made when the fragment of ice on which the Obea placed him had torn from the bank. So this was his
tummfraw,
this little spot of bank was where, as amewling pup, he had been left to die.
    He circled it three times. There was a familiarity to the spot that stirred the scent glands between the toes of his paws, and he found himself marking the ground. Then he settled on his haunches and looked out at the river flowing gently by. A mist began rising as the river water, still cool from winter, mingled with the warmer air. The mist became thicker, furling and unfurling into undulating patterns that were almost hypnotic. The roar of the river’s torrential rampage during the night he was abandoned came back to him. He gripped the banks now as once as a tiny pup he had gripped the ice raft. All of the sensations of those moments came back to him — the dizzying nausea as the ice shelf bounced in the turbulence, the terrible cold when icy water dashed over him, and the roar that grew louder and louder. His claws still digging into the bank, he looked deeply into the mist and saw a familiar pattern. The same design that had swirled through the fire in his dream the previous night now swirled in the mist before him.
    In that moment, Faolan knew what he would do. He would bring some of Thunderheart’s bones back to the cave high up on the riverbank and build a
drumlyn,
a small mound, to honor her. It had bothered him that he had never seen the
lochin
of Thunderheart climb the star ladders to Ursulana, the bear heaven. If he made this
drumlyn,
it might be a perch from which her spirit could leap. He would build Thunderheart’s
drumlyn
not on the place of his abandonment but on the place where he had been found. This was the meaning of the
Slaan Leat
for him. The mist had cleared and the river ran on smooth and dark, like an amber ribbon. As Faolan trotted at a brisk pace toward the secret place where he had buried the bones of his second Milk Giver, another thought began to seep into his mind as if out of nowhere.
My first Milk Giver! Who was she? What did she think of me? Did she feel cursed to give birth to such a pup? Were there others? Do I have sisters or brothers still in the clan?

CHAPTER FOUR
A T RUE G NAW W OLF?
    AS EDME MADE HER WAY DOWN from the northern peak of Crooked Back Ridge, she could not help but wonder what Faolan had felt when he found his
tummfraw.
She was certain that he would not have experienced the same emptiness she had when she stepped onto the table rock at the peak. Whenever she thought about it, she wanted to blame herself,but she knew this made no sense. She was not to blame — if anything, it was the
tummfraw
that was wrong, or the Fengo who had made a mistake. She was almost tempted to go to the Obea of the MacHeath clan and ask her point-blank if this was the right
tummfraw.
But Edme had to be honest with herself. She loathed the entire