Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf

T HE D ARKEST OF THE D ARK
    IT WAS THE SMELL OF GRASS— late summer grass, clover water, and bitterroot with a faint trace of ash. The vivid scents flowed through Faolan like a river, stirring lost memories. This is my pack, the Pack of the Eastern Scree. This is my clan, the clan of the MacDuncans . Each smell seemed to reassure Faolan that at last he was home.
    A pack wolf’s scent varied slightly depending upon the season or what the wolf had eaten. But beneath these small differences was an elemental scent, the essence of them all. In his sleep, Faolan was wrapped safe and secure in a blanket of these familiar and longed-for smells. He was bound tight by the scent of the clan.
    And yet Faolan was not in a pack den surrounded by the warm, moist breathing of slumbering wolves. He wasalone. As a gnaw wolf, he was banished to sleep on the edges of the pack’s territory. He must find whatever shelter he could. The rest of the pack had divided itself between two roomy dens they had excavated the previous summer on the Crooked Back Ridge, far from Faolan. But their scent lingered.
    Faolan quivered. There were tiny cracks in his sleep through which horrors darker than this moonless night slid. The blackness suddenly was scored with flames. Wake up! Wake up! he shouted in his dream. But this was no dream; it was a memory. Even though he was asleep, Faolan could feel half a dozen packs from several clans hard on him, determined to run him into flames all because of his splayed paw. He could feel the heat of the flames as he leaped the wall of fire and jumped for the sun. Faolan thumped his paw on the ground he had dug for a den, and it was the noise and the small rain of dirt sifting down from the roof that finally woke him.
    He rose up as far as he could in the tight confines of the hole. It was only in the darkest of the dark, on nights when the moon disappeared, that these terrors found their form. At those times, wolves seldom howled and it seemed to Faolan that the silence left spaces through which fear could slip.
    He sniffed the air. There was not a trace of smoke or fire, only the lovely redolence of the pack’s scent wafting through the dark. My nose tells me I am home, I belong, this is my kin, my clan, and yet… There was an ache deep inside Faolan that no scent could touch.

CHAPTER ONE
C ARIBOU M OON
    THERE WAS A TIME IN EARLY autumn when the moon cut the night like the thin curve of a caribou antler. It was at this time that the herds began to move south, first the cows with their calves and then the males. The wolves would track the beginnings of this great migration to seek out any old females or weak youngsters, but the hunting code of the clans forbade the killing of healthy calves. And the real hunting did not begin until the males came.
    On this morning as the sun broke on the horizon, a howl curled into the air. It was the summoning howl of Greer, the she-wolf skreeleen of the MacDuncan River Pack. But it was not for caribou, it was for moose. The tracks of a bull moose had been discovered near the river. Scouts had been sent out to find the trail, and whilethey were gone, a byrrgis , the hunting formation, was gathering.
    Bull moose could be unpredictable and, despite their staggering bulk, quite nimble. Therefore, it required a good-size byrrgis to bring them down. It was dangerous work, especially at this time of year, the moose mating season. Even Faolan’s second milk mother, a grizzly bear, gave moose a wide margin during the time of the Caribou Moon. Faolan tried to keep calm as the packs gathered and waited for the scouts’ return. He could hear the din of the gaddergludder , the pack rally that preceded the hunt of big game like moose. He felt a rush deep in his chest and pawed the ground.
    This was his chance at last, he thought. He would hunt with the pack and he would get it right. There were so many rules and customs. The wolves had special words for so many things—pack words, clan words—and Faolan had been a packless, clanless wolf for the first year of his life. Because of his strangely splayed paw, he had been declared at birth a malcadh , a cursed pup. According to the rigid codes that governed the wolf clans of the Beyond, all malcadhs were cast out, taken by the Obea of a clan to be left to die or be devoured by other predators. The parents of the malcadh were also banished from the clan’sterritory and forbidden ever to mate with each other again. In this way, the