Stalking Moon
The wolves talk to each other in the way that wolves talk to each other. Gestures, smells, the raising and lowering of hair, the baring of teeth, body postures, sounds and body direction. The order comes from the alpha female: the pack needs to move location. They are, at this time in the season, too close to the two-legged ones. An event is due and distance is needed between the wolves and their natural enemy.
Wolves are not able see into the future, of course, but vague memories stir in their minds like gentle winds. And instinct. Instinct has always been sharper than intellect and more reliable. Instinct tells them something is coming, something bad. It’s not something they can’t deal with, so long as they take heed of the warning feelings that arise from somewhere deep within their bellies. It says move and so they move, heading up the slope and into the dense, dark forest of the mountainside.
Each wolf has a scent-name: their primary identification. Once the scent-name has been recognised there are other aspects–coat markings, cowl-colours, size, length of hair and voice–which identify the individual and place him or her in a position in the pack. Every wolf knows its status, from the alphas down to the omega, the raven wolf, last in the line, tip of the tail, end of the pack. The alpha female leads. The raven wolf trails, bear bait or first to fall from the iron sticks.
They move off that night, under a waxing moon, slipping through the trees like grey spectres, shadows of themselves. The pack is of medium size, though numbers only ever remain general in the heads of those who are in the least bit interested. Importantly, they always know when one or more of the pack is missing. A quick sweep of those around them registers any lost soul. Sometimes they wait for that member to find a way back them again by their howls or their smell, sometimes they will initiate a search, but they never ignore a missing wolf.
Scouts move up front and outwalkers to the flanks. There are just three young, kept in the middle of the pack. This is an ancient and tried formation which insures the safety of the main body. Surprised bears can and do wreak havoc amongst them, though now in the time of snow and ice the bears are asleep. The two-legs are always awake though, whatever the season. There are several kinds of two-legs, but in the main docile ones that live in huge packs and run away at the sight of a wolf, and dangerous wild ones who kill with iron sticks. They point the iron stick at a living creature, there follows a loud storm-noise accompanied by a small flash of fire from the end of the stick, by that time the wolf is dead or is injured. The wild two-legs are to be avoided at all cost and even the docile ones can bring danger on a pack.
The alpha female does her best to keep the trail easy, but sometimes they have to struggle through deep snow. Wolves can get lost in such conditions and a howl is never far from their throats. Snow-covered ice is circumnavigated. Wolves have been known to break through thin ice and drown or freeze to death.
As the pack travel their souls go with them. The silent dark ones from the otherworld of canines. These are the link with death, these highly-respected black silhouettes. A reminder that there is a place to go once you leave the living pack forever. There is comfort in this thought, though no living wolf will acknowledge his shadow-spirit, and a glance at them always raises a slight shudder of fear.
Although this night is for travelling, the pack also hunt on the move. A hare is caught, and a lost dog that smells of two-legs, provides food for the whole group. There isn’t a great deal of flesh on these two carcasses, so the raven wolf is only allowed to feed after the others have done so. Their bellies aren’t full, but they have eaten some, so they continue their journey until the morning, when they rest.
The following day they begin moving around late morning, slipping up the slopes through the harder snows. Once they see a solitary two-legs in the distance, with harnessed dog packs pulling flat tree-branches, but the two-legs doesn’t see a single pack member and all is well.
In the evening they rest, sing a few songs to lift their spirits. They nibble out the ice from their pads and lick any injuries. One wolf has a split paw, another a scratched flank. These aren’t serious pain-givers, but small sufferings compared with starvation or a broken leg. Broken legs often lead to death, though not always. Not so long back there had been a three-legged member of the pack, who had amputated his own back leg by gnawing at it until it had been severed at the joint. This wolf had been caught in an iron-toothed snapper left by trappers. Three-legs was a hero amongst his fellows and thereafter did not have to feed himself, but was fed by the younglings.
The mornings begin with dawns that are as grey as the cowls of the wolves themselves. The pack is up and ready at the first hair of light to grow on the back of the sky. It’s important to get as far away as possible from the two-legs. No one really knows why, but senses that it’s a necessary move. The alpha female especially has this feeling deep down in her belly which tells her that something bad is coming. The bad thing will still arrive –there is no thwarting it –but it can be contained so long as the pack are in the right place at the right time.
It’s her job to see they get to that place before the event.
Seven days they walk, trot, run. On the fifth day an elderly matron is left behind when she’s unable to keep up. The raven wolf, the pack sweeper, drifts by her without a glance. When they rest at the next halt, no one returns to look for her. She’s not a missing wolf, she’s a dying one. Once night came again the matron will freeze and the dawn will greet her stiff-bodied, stiff-haired carcass with the same welcome as the living wolves receives. She won’t respond as they will. Her time has come and wolves, like any other creature, all have to die alone. There is no company in death, even for those who die together in the same place at the same moment. All have to make the last journey alone. The blackness falls and there is an end to personal memories, for the spirit that lives on after death has no memory of life. For some this is even a happy thing, for others it is a melancholy fact.
On the sixth day there’s a blizzard and the world is whiter than ever. The pack cluster around a tall monolith, the base of which keeps the wind at bay. The invisible spirits of departed wolves trapped in the winds are furious. They shriek and whine, and howl, and cry, telling how unfair it is that they’re nothing but cold shreds of sound while their descendants are warm as blood and can croon with a living throat. Stars surge around the heads of the pack in their millions. The earth and the sky rush together and swirl into each other, mixing until they’re one. When they finally separate again, the pack members are covered with cloud and they have to rise and shake themselves free of storm-dust. Then they’re on their way again, slowly, up to their belly-hair in new, soft-yielding snow. Youngsters disappear beneath the surface and have to keep up by tunnelling around the legs of the elders.
That night they kill a weak stag, bringing it down by sheer weight of numbers, gripping its shoulders, biting its knees, until it finally falls in a cold, cloudy shower of snow to let out its hollow death moan. Even before the creature’s eyes have glazed the alpha male and female are guzzling the liver and heart with relish. Elders tear out the kidneys and intestines, while the rest chew happily on tougher meat. Fat is fought over and swallowed more readily than muscle or gristle, though the dead beast is as delicious in death as he had been magnificent in life. Brains are licked from the skull, eyeballs cracked between teeth, gonads crunched, nostrils gnawed by the younglings. The pack would have eaten the stag’s very soul if they could have found it amongst the bones.
A big cat comes and tries to intimidate the pack, tries to chase them away from their kill, but they know their combined strength is too much for the intruder and ignore her fierce hissings and spittings, and the show of teeth and claws. One wolf would have backed away, but several do not. The big cat waits on a high rock until the last of them leaves, before she lopes down to pick at the bones and gnaw on the skin.
The seventh day arrives and the pack settle on the rocky plateau of a high fastness and wait for the night. There’s nervousness amongst them, which manifests itself in snapping at each other for minor irritations. Darkness descends like a heavy weight upon the earth. The sky is clear, the stars in their sets. With wild thoughts and a deep sense of fear of the unknown, the wolves wait for a stalking moon to rise above the tallest trees and relight the world. Once the orange disk shows its face, there occurs the thing that has been burning coldly in the alpha wolf’s memory, the thing that makes every wolf in the pack want to flee this place and find a cave in which to hide itself. Yet none do, no one leaves, for there is a duty to the clan general to remain and face the threat. In this lonely place, far from the world of two-legs, they circle one of their own with bared teeth, snarling and growling deeply, and view the transformation frightened by their own shallow breath.
He suddenly stands up tall on his hind legs in the centre of the circle and his howls are now weak and deeper in tone. The younglings of the pack yelp in terror to see their cousin towering over them, strutting within the circle of the pack. The erect wolf glares around him with fierce eyes full of hatred for his kin. Hair falls from his body as he begins moulting, until his coat has gone and a pink under-hide covers form. His paws grow out at the bottom of his hind legs and his foreleg paws elongate into long thin appendages. The marvellous snout that has sniffed so many trails, has unrooted and uprooted many a prey, begin to flatten into his face until it is but a small nodule above a pair of rose-coloured fleshy lips. The brave flag of his body, that fine-haired flying tail, drops off and shrivels to a thin black vine. His wonderful pointed ears become ugly stunted growths that resemble tree fungi.
Now he is what he is, no longer a wolf, but the one creature on earth that the wolves fear and despise.
The beast that has grown out of moonshadows runs around the circle of savage mouths, trying to find a way out. He wants to get past snarling fangs that would tear the flesh from his bones and tries to find a weak wolf who, in its fear, might turn and flee, and leave an escape hole. There is none. They are steadfast. They are true to their clan. The alpha female howls encouragement, telling them in her own way that their fear must be conquered for just this night, calling on deep courage, on valour of the best and strongest kind, to maintain the prison ring.
The beast has to be kept there at all costs. They know he can smell iron, from a long way off, and he wants that iron. It wants it in order to destroy as many wolves as he can before the dawn comes back. Here is the wolf nightmare, the loathsome brute of the wolf world, the archetype of all killers. This is the creature who has stripped the earth of its forests and covered the plains with its foul dens. This is the beast who more often kills just for the inexplicable pleasure of taking life. In him is the power of craft and guile, the most cunning and devious of living things, that loves to dominate and through its strength and intellect eradicate anything that gets in its way. Even the terrible polar bear can’t compete with him. Nor the mighty grizzly, nor the deadliest of sly insidious poisonous snakes, nor the biggest of the big cats, not shark, not killer whale. None can compete with this soft pink-skinned creature that now shouts at them in a loathsome language no one understands.
They keep him at bay for the whole time that the moon crosses overhead. The night is long and they grow weary but their vigilance never flags. They are the pack and he is their burden. They do not try to kill him for deep within their psyche they know that if his blood mingles with theirs, they too will become the creature he represents. Every stalking moon they will go through what their cousin has gone through and change as he has changed. So they keep their distance, snapping savagely at his naked form if it approaches them, but never actually biting into his flesh. It is good that their prisoner does not understand the rules of the game, for in his present shape he is a demented mindless creature. If were not he would simply run through their ranks. All he sees is the ring of ferocious jaws snapping and grinding every time he advances towards them. So mercifully for all, he does not attempt to break through with sheer bravado, but approaches them tentatively, cowering and wimpering, retreating when he is met with fury.
At one point he feigns sleep, lying on the churned snow, yawning and closing his eyes, but they know all his tricks. He is one of the cunning ones. One of those who have whose conniving ways are legion and the mind that devised all those intricate traps that have been set for wolves over the centuries is now put to devising a method of escape. No matter there is madness in that skull, there is also a thousand artful ways to evade captivity there too. When his pretence at sleep does not work, the creatures tries smiles, and gentle talking, and humming to himself, and acrobatic movements, and threatening a single small wolf in that dark incomprehensible language, and laughing loudly, and letting his tongue loll out, and even making believe his heart has stopped and he is dead. All to no avail, for the wolves are steadfast in their duty.
All night they keep him locked within, until the moon dips down below the distant peaks of the mountains. Then finally he stops his wild shouting, his wild limb-waving, his furious and frustrated screaming. The yellow flaming eyes now dim to a dull red glow. A puzzled expression replaces one of baffled rage. He falls back to the earth on all fours, natural again at last. Hair sprouts along his mane, under his belly, along the trailing edges of his legs. His beautiful snout returns, jutting from his face, the fulsome jaws packed once more with handsome fangs. His cowl gets back its blue-grey colour, his mutated paws shrink back to normal size, his ears sprout skywards, pointed now. Finally his tail sprouts from his backbone and once again flies like a banner.
He is himself again.
They come to him with yelps and whines, licking their cousin, welcoming him back to his own form.
He stands there, bemused by their attention, enjoying it but not knowing why he’s receiving it. His mind seems to be thawing out of a winter state, a numbed brain returning to awareness and the quickness of the world. Finally, he shakes off his clan, wondering, wondering, and goes to be on his own for a while, trying to rid himself of the strange feeling in his limbs and torso: trying to help his mind reach his fast-beating heart to tell it to calm itself. There is no reason for it to force his blood to race like mountain streams through his veins.
And once the morning has come and the sun has chased away the greyness, he does indeed feel his strangeness has fled.
Soon after this the alpha female gathers the clan together, under the black pine, and speaks to them in the way that wolves speak to each other, telling them they must find better hunting grounds now the danger is over, and the menace within them has been contained.