Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf

wolf—for the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes…. You have it in you, Faolan…. You could be selected. You have fine teeth for carving and you have strength. However, you have no sense. But the gaddergnaw, Faolan—this could be your chance!
    A high-ranking wolf sending off a shamed gnaw wolf normally would have given him a sharp, almost stunning blow to the top of his muzzle, but the slap that Adair administered qualified somewhere between a pat and a thwack. Indeed, it almost missed Faolan’s muzzle entirely, for Adair could not bear to look at Faolan. He sees moon rot in me, but Duncan MacDuncan didn’t. Duncan MacDuncan saw something else!
    “Be on your way, gnaw wolf,” Adair snarled. “Learn from your disgrace! Roll in the scent of your shame. And save any dreams you might entertain of the gaddergnaw . For while you are on your trail of shame, the gnaw wolves’ preparation for the competition will begin in earnest.” He paused, then added nastily, “And you shall miss out!”
    And so Faolan set off into the darkness with his bone of shame gripped in his mouth.
     
    There is a time of night when the world seems almost empty. There is an overwhelming hollowness after the moon has slipped away to another world, and the constellations have slid to another Beyond. The stars expire one by one like the last small breaths of illumination in thedarkness, and the night goes dead before the first weak glow of the dawn.
    Faolan had not traveled far before Alastrine’s first howls scored the night. He stopped in his tracks. So the chieftain had passed. A shiver went through Faolan from his raised hackles to his tail, still firmly tucked between his legs. He fell to his knees and put his paws over his muzzle. This was the first true act of humility that Faolan had made since he had been with the wolves.
    Soon braided through the howls of the skreeleen was the fine filament of Cathmor’s voice keening the loss of her mate. What a terrible time to die, thought Faolan. For during these emptiest hours in the hollow of the night, there was not a sign of the star ladder to the heavenly constellation that the wolves called the Cave of Souls. Those stars had slipped away to the west already and in a few nights would disappear entirely for the three winter moons that would soon be upon the wolves of the Beyond. For those few remaining nights, Cathmor howled her thanks. Had it been the time of the winter moons, Duncan MacDuncan’s soul would have had to wait until spring to climb the star ladder and enter the Cave of Souls.
    The skreeleen ’s pitch changed to howl the summoning, calling all the MacDuncan packs to head to the far west, where the night was still young and the star ladder could be found. They were to travel at triple press-paw speed to catch it. For the next three nights, the wolves would gather there to howl the morriah , the lament for their dead chieftain. Gnaw wolves were excluded from this ceremony. Therefore, Faolan’s charge to visit all of the packs and perform his rituals of contrition would be delayed. He had wanted only to get it over with, but Duncan MacDuncan was the one wolf that Faolan had truly admired. In his marrow, he felt a keenness for the old chieftain that he had never come close to feeling for any other creature except Thunderheart.
    Thunderheart! The name exploded in Faolan’s mind. He had not been to the place where he had buried her paw since he had joined the MacDuncan clan. To touch the bone of the paw that had cradled him was now what Faolan wanted most in the world. Just being near that bone would give him comfort.
    He veered sharply south and headed toward the river from which Thunderheart had rescued him. She’d told him that the word fao meant both “river” and “wolf.” Lan meant “gift.” And when she had dredged him upfrom the swollen turbulence of the river, she had thought of him as the river’s gift to her. She had just lost her own cub to a cougar, and her milk was still running. So she became Faolan’s milk mother, and nourished him. When Thunderheart died, Faolan had taken the largest bone from his milk mother’s paw and carved on it the story of their golden summer together, of swimming behind schools of trout and standing in the rapids at the time of the salmon spawn and scooping fish from the roiling waters. It was all there on the bone. The kill of their first caribou, the summer den, the winter den. He had buried the bone on a shale slope of