Read Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf for Free Online Page B

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 a high ridge near the salt lagoons. It was a spot a fair distance from any of the wolf packs. Faolan had not wanted any wolf to see the bone he had carved. It was his story, his memory, and to him it was sacred. The wolves had a code, a law, a rule for everything. This was Faolan’s code. And by my marrow, he thought, it is right!
     
    He arrived just as the first thin, red slash of dawn light bled above the horizon. The sun rose, then faded to pink and dissolved into the flawless blue sky of morning. It did not take Faolan long to find his bone. When he heardthe first click of his dewclaw against the bone, he began to dig delicately with his mouth, sheathing his teeth, and finally using just his tongue to lift the bone from the earth. He licked off the dust, and his eyes filled as he saw the markings on the bone that told the story of what had been his life. He swung his head from the paw of Thunderheart to the bone of shame that Heep had carved. He wanted to fling that horrid bone of shame