Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf

caribou would climb higher and higher followingthe horns of the Caribou Moon during the frosty autumn evenings, and soon the caribou’s mate and calf would walk behind him across the night. Faolan missed the Great Claws. He didn’t even like the wolf name for the constellation. The Great Fangs—how stupid! It made him think of slobber in the skies, long threads of saliva spinning off into the night just like Mhairie running with the byrrgis .
    Talk about a temper! He had never experienced such a drubbing. It was so different from the usual abuse. That slobbering mouth never quit! Although she had not slobbered when she stood over him, yelling her head off.
    He looked up again, searching for the Great Claws, which would always remind him of Thunderheart.
    When he glanced away from the stars, he saw a thin, white wolf looking at him as she passed by the rock where he waited. His blood froze. He got up to move away but still felt her eyes on him. There was no mistaking who this wolf was. Lael, the clan’s new Obea. The Obea was the female wolf in each clan responsible for removing deformed pups from the whelping den, tearing them from their mother’s milk to take them to a tummfraw , a place of abandonment where the pup would die. If the she-wolf he had seen with Lord Bhreac and Lord Clarendelivered a malcadh , it would be Lael who would carry it away. Unless, of course, the mother went by-lang and succeeded in losing herself and the pup in the deep away. Faolan felt the green eyes of the white wolf following him.
    A pup now ran up to where he was waiting.
    “You’re big for a gnaw wolf,” the pup said. “I mean you’re big for any wolf.”
    “Yeah,” said another.
    “He’s bigger than my da.”
    “My da and my mum put together!” said another.
    “Hey! He should be doing a submission roll.”
    “But he’s so big,” whispered a rust-colored wolf.
    “Doesn’t matter, he’s a gnaw wolf.” The other pup came forward. She, too, was rust colored and must have been his sister.
    “You’re supposed to get down, you know. I mean, you’re already in trouble.”
    “Yes, yes, I know. Sorry.” Faolan began to sink to his knees.
    “You talk funny, too,” said the bossy little wolf.
    “My mum says he talks like a bear.” A new pup had now come up to watch the spectacle by the red rock.
    “A grizzly bear was my second Milk Giver,” Faolansaid, twisting his neck so his face pushed into the ground. I cannot believe I am doing this. I am five times the size of these pups.
    “A bear. Weird! What was it like?” the first pup asked. He was a genuinely curious little fellow and had crouched down a bit to get on eye level with Faolan.
    “Are you scared of going in to see the raghnaid ?” asked a gray female pup.
    “Are you cag mag ? If a bear was his Milk Giver, you think he’s scared of the raghnaid ?” said the curious pup, who was still crouching.
    But they were wrong. Faolan was scared, not of the raghnaid so much but of the shame of facing Duncan MacDuncan.
     
    The half dozen or so pups who had crept out from behind the red rock soon became bored and went off to wrestle on a patch of scoured ground. Faolan looked across at them. Two other pups had escaped from their parents’ den and were trying to nose their way into the tussle, but their mother came out, gave them each a swat that sent them flying, and then growled. The pups obediently followed her back into their den.
    A shaft of moonlight suddenly poured down and illuminated another she-wolf and her two pups. Their coats were a silvery gray, much like Faolan’s own, and Faolan tried to imagine what his life might have been like if his paw had been straight and not splayed. If he’d had a wolf mother and father or sisters and brothers to play with in the moonlight, to cuff him soundly on the muzzle and make him follow them back into a cozy den. He would have known then that the Great Claws were called the Great Fangs.
    Faolan groaned and sank down to his knees, but he would not screw his face into the dirt even though he saw a high-ranking male wolf stride toward him. He rolled to one side and looked at the stars. There was a swirl of clouds that thinly veiled the moon. The clouds quickly scudded away, but for just a moment, they looked identical to the whirl of lines on the pad of his splayed paw. Why had that upset the yellow wolf Heep so much? Heep had backed off from biting him because he was frightened. And yet the first time Faolan had