Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf

This only added to Faolan’s strangeness in the eyes of the other wolves.
    Ever since Faolan had returned from the Sark’s cave, he had been obsessed with dreams of his first Milk Giver. He wondered if he had siblings, and if so, were they normal and had they survived? Where might they be now? They would have been allowed to stay in the pack and have been fostered by another she-wolf with milk to spare, for that was the rule. Would they resemble him except for his splayed paw?
    All of these questions haunted Faolan as he went about the business of becoming a dutiful gnaw wolf. He accepted the abuse with the appropriate whimpering and slid through the submission postures as if he had them engraved in his own marrow and not simply on the bones he was tediously ordered to gnaw. The one question to which he most often returned was where his parents might have gone. The harder Faolan tried to think about these questions, the more elusive the answers became. He felt as if he were tumbling through a deep vale of shadows.
     
    On an evening during the last crescent of the second hunger moon, a she-wolf far in MacDonegal territory was haunted by a scent she had discovered in the skull of a grizzly bear almost a year before. As soon as she had sniffed that scent, the forgetting had stopped. Like the ice slides of spring that peeled back the ground leaving raw, exposed earth, she felt suddenly vulnerable to memories, to feelings that had been long frozen, locked beneath the cold, snowy mantle of winter. The barriers that had built up so carefully deep within her and served as invisible scar tissue were swept away. Memories crashed in with a crushing force. He was silver, my only silver one.
    In all the litters Morag had borne, she had never had a pup with a silver pelt. There had been three pups in this litter, two tawny females and then the silver one with the splayed paw. She had, for those brief hours before the Obea found them, mothered him, nursed him, and adored nuzzling her nose deep into his pelt. It was a pelt of singular beauty, for it looked as if stars had fallen from the sky and been swirled through the fur. She would have named him for a constellation, perhaps Skaarsgard, the leaping wolf who caught wolf pups who fell off the star ladder on their way to the Cave of Souls.
    It was said that for mothers of malcadhs , a darknessinvaded their bodies where the pup had grown in their womb and that gradually this darkness faded until it became a pale gray shadow. But the pale gray shadow was changing, blackening; a darkness was invading not just her womb but her head as well.
    During the time of forgetting, Morag had gone on and done what mothers of malcadhs were supposed to do. She had found a new clan, the MacDonegals, a new mate, and borne another litter, of three healthy red-furred pups. She had become an outflanker of some repute in the clan, and though her legs were still strong and she could run at attack speed for long distances, the darkness now seemed to be invading her vision.
    On her last byrrgis , the point wolf had given the signal for attack speed. Morag flashed out to the front of the outflankers, her usual position. The musk ox herd appeared like a storm cloud lifting from the horizon. It was her job with the other outflanker to begin to turn the herd east toward the rising sun, which would be blinding. But it seemed as if the blinding was already happening. The storm cloud that was the herd remained a blur even as they drew closer. Morag felt as if she were sinking into a haze. How would she ever spot the weak musk ox that must be split off from the herd? That hadalways been her strength. Morag could run at top speed while still scanning the herd to find the sick one, the old one, the dying animal. Musk ox were slow compared to caribou or red deer. She should be able to spot the cailleach . She suddenly felt herself trip. She was down. She felt the packers streak by her. Great Lupus. I have fallen! She knew that her life as an outflanker had just ended.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T HE R ED D EER OF THE Y ELLOW S PRINGS
    MHAIRIE WAS STREAKING OUT ON the west flank of a large herd of red deer. This was her chance to earn her position and—Lupus be praised—the gnaw wolf seemed to have learned his lesson. He was safely behind her, far behind her, but she would not look now. Once again, she had been sent to run with the Pack of the Eastern Scree, the River Pack, and the Blue Rock Pack when a herd had been