Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf

long silence with which the Sark had greeted her story.
    “No,” the Sark growled. “Why waste a good bonk coal on a hearth fire? I have fur, remember. I don’t need such a hot fire in my cave.”
    After tending the fire, she settled down again. “This is very bad, very bad indeed. And you have no idea who this wolf might be?”
    “None. That’s why I’m here. I thought you might know.”
    “The only wolf, or kind of wolf, I can imagine doing this might be a foaming-mouth one. You didn’t pick up any scent? Oh, I forgot. You can’t smell.”
    “Right. But it might have been an outclanner from the Outermost.”
    “The clans would have known about it. There is an alert system.” The Sark buried her muzzle between her paws. Why? Why would a wolf do such a thing? The Sark remained still for several minutes. Finally, she pulled her muzzle out from her paws and said, “So you are the only one who knows about this heinous crime?”
    “Well, I suppose so. I mean, I flew off. Someone else could have come along and found…found”—Gwynneth stumbled—“the remains, but they wouldn’t know it was a wolf who murdered the malcadh . As I told you, I was flying overhead when it happened. I picked up the panting of a wolf, the gnashing of its teeth.”
    “Huh! So our teeth make that distinctive a sound, do they?”
    “Well, for our ears, yes. First of all, as you know, we owls don’t have teeth. It’s all talons and beaks with us. Fox teeth are much tinier than wolf teeth, and make a scraping sound. Cougars’ teeth are huge. They make loud, cracking noises.”
    “And what about wolf teeth?”
    “It’s your back teeth that have a unique sound. They slice, sharply. It’s not really all that loud—just a clean slicing sound as if two blades are swiping against each other.”
    The Sark opened her mouth wide and revealed the formidable scissorlike teeth in the back near her throat.
    “Yes, quite impressive,” Gwynneth said, and averted her eyes with a sudden twist of her head.
    The Sark closed her mouth. “So we can safely assume that no other creature except for us knows about this terrible murder.”
    Gwynneth nodded.
    “I think, then, we must keep it that way. I’m going to have to think about this for a while. Describe to me the exact site. Maybe I can go there and pick up a scent.”
    When Gwynneth finished pinpointing the location on a map she had scratched in the cave floor, the Sark felt there was one scent they would pick up. That of Faolan. For the place was exactly where he had described finding the malcadh pup whose mother had recovered in the Sark’s cave.
    “Faolan was at that ridge,” the Sark said casually.
    “Surely you’re not suggesting Faolan could have done this!” Gwynneth was shocked.
    “Oh, no, never. He saw the pup, however. At least a day and a night before you saw it on your flight to the Sacred Ring. But he was in a complete dither when he came here. You can imagine what it was like for a malcadh to see another laid out on a tummfraw , knowing that he had gone through the same thing. Went straight to his marrow.”
    “Yes, of course,” Gwynneth said, her voice trembling slightly. She sighed. “If you could fly and I could smell, what a team we’d make!”
    The Sark blinked several times. She felt her skittish eye still for a moment. “But we can!” she said suddenly.
    “Can what? You can’t fly. I have no sense of smell. You told me so yourself.”
    “But don’t you see that together we have it all? We might be able to solve this monstrous crime. We are more than the sum of our parts!”
    So together the wolf and the owl started to devise a plan in which they would both go to the tummfraw on the ridge. They would uncover what clues they could—bones, perhaps tufts of fur that had stuck in small crevices.
    “You see, there is—how should I explain it?—a map of scents surrounding everything. You just have to know how to sort them out.” The Sark spoke excitedly. Her eye was whirling now. “So I pick up the scent and then try and figure out the direction it came from.”
    “A vector—a scent vector!” Gwynneth replied. Owls were extraordinary navigators. So they often spoke in terms of navigation when they took bearings on stars or scanned for sound sources.
    “Exactly! You see what I mean. We are more than the sum of our parts!”
    And at just that moment, the old wolf’s nostrils began to twitch. The wind had shifted and on it a vaguely familiar