Pack (Part 2)
*Please note: tumblr is having issues so this needs to be broken into two parts. If you are a member of Wolvden, you can view this (unbroken) on the contest thread associated with it.*
The next winter, as our tiny pack huddled together, Koll grew restless. She seemed upset, but could not articulate why. Dulca tried licking her ears, but she would not stay still. She watched the darkened sky and moved away from us.
And soon the sky was filled with odd lights. Not the ribbons of sunflame that were the ghost packs hunting, but moving specks and at times a red burning. The tall stalkers and warm things became scarce, and we wondered what was happening, could not quite understand. But Koll knew, and one morning she was no longer there.
Dulca was frantic, so we sniffed about, and howled for her. Eventually we reached a boggy depression where dead black spruce and paper birch clustered, trunks sinking below snow into dark ice. Here, we found her scent, and were wagging our tails with excitement, when I looked up and growled. Eyes ringed us, watching from the darkness. They were eyes like Koll’s, but larger and getting closer.
The beasts circled, closing gaps until there was nowhere their spindly arms could not reach. Dulca stood still, but I balked, afraid. I have always been the more cautious one, there is much in this world to be afraid of.
The creature before us smashed small trees in its its paws with a sound like the breaking of bones, then opened its mouth and keened.
This was a sound I knew, Koll made it often in frustration. We didn’t respond, and then all was silent, but for clicking of claws on ice.
Dulca moved forward a pace, her right paw out, and she begin to scratch something in the snow. I recognized her work as some of the symbols from before.
The thing looked down, brow crinkling, then back at her. She sat, and then two things happened almost at once. The beast growled, and my hackles rose as I leapt to defend Dulca. But a smaller, darker, blur knocked me aside, standing over us.
It was Koll, and she was screaming. We stood very still as she then started to make mouth-noises to the creature before us. The creature responded. I looked at our pup. This, this was her pack?
These sounds were not those of a wolf, but her body spoke to us still. She paced and growled, licking her muzzle in both submission and defiance. The ring listened, and then broke apart. The one before us turned, and Koll glanced at us to follow. Then, we made a traveling line and slipped through the broken trees under the moon. Smells changed around us, revealing we were no longer standing apart, an understanding of sorts had been reached.
We continued in darkness as the moon sank, toward a growing brightness that was not the dawn, but a half-ring of small silver hills. These smelled like Koll and her pack. Their dens? Beside me Dulca flipped her head to one side as one of the dens leapt into the sky with an acrid smell and flew. But they had no wings? I was further confused.
And now you know the root of my doubts. It wasn’t that we didn’t love Koll, though at one time I’d struggled. It was that she clearly wasn’t a wolf, but now she also wasn’t the creatures before us. We’d condemned her to be neither, I think. Maybe if we’d left her as a pup, her pack would have found her sooner.
The den before us had an open slot in it and all the beasts glanced at us then loped inside, leaving our small family alone in the snow, choice quite clear.
Koll sat down, her eyes wide and ears up, tail fanning the snow. We looked at each other, and then I nudged her gently, Dulca following suit. We would be alone again, my mate and I, but Koll would have her family, and we wanted that for her.
Koll nipped at us.
“Come too,” she asked in her still-poor wolf speech, “pack come too.”
Looking back, our world was so much more narrow then, so it seems obvious that we would not at first understand. We tried to shove her forward with more insistent nose pushes, but she squealed and would not budge.
“She wants us too, Alvi,” Dulca finally admitted. “We are her pack.”
“Pack,” Koll echoed.
I looked at my mate, she returned my glance. Our pup, recognizing we’d made the choice she wanted, shook herself off. And our pack as one stepped together into the gap, and beyond the bounds of anything our kind had ever known.
