The day of the first waxing crescent of fall is when all of the wolves who
live on the Homelands traditionally run the perimeter and make sure that our
land is properly marked before the ground freezes and damaged posts become hard
to replace.
The entire Pack is wild. Barking and wagging tails, they lick each other and
jump around each other, their ferocious jaws open and gentle. They chase mice
through windrows, their hind legs scratching leaves into a brightly colored
explosion high in the air, so that the pups can twist and turn and catch them in
snapping teeth as they spiral down.
Not me. I have to pull on heavy muck boots over thick socks with jeans shoved
inside. And I won’t mark our territory the way wolves are supposed to. I will
mark it on an iPhone 6 Plus, crammed into the big pocket of a thick orange vest.
All because Ti refuses to phase and John doesn’t like it.
“He tells himself he’s human,” John says. “But if he lies to himself, what
makes you think he’s not going to lie to us?”
So because I am Ti’s
schildere, I have to stay in skin too. Keep an eye on
him.
“I mean, what were you thinking?” I ask as Ti fits the Outlast cap over his
clipped skull. “When you came to a bunch of wolves asking for protection. That
you’d just keep on being a human? Was that your
grand plan?”
“I didn’t have a grand plan. What I had was a hole in my stomach, a vague set
of directions to my mother’s pack, and a need to survive. I changed long enough
to fight; I never thought you’d be asking me to give up my humanity.”
“No one’s asking you to give up your humanity, but if you refuse to admit
what you are, it is going to rise up and bite you in the ass.”
“Well, how about you?”
“
Me? I love changing. I—”
“I know you love changing. You do it all the time. The second Sten doesn’t
need your thumbs, you evaporate, and there’s nothing left but clothes hanging
from a branch. I may be a crappy wolf. But you… You’re a crappy human.”
I cringe, because he’s right. I’ve never been happy in skin, but then those
stupid fire fairies burrowed into my body all those days ago, and that spark has
caught fire and burns so fierce that now when I walk beside him and hear his
quiet, low voice or look into those gold-flecked black eyes, my tendons strain
and my muscles coil and my lungs open up and my blood beats hot and fast. The
only way I know how to deal with need is to run hard and far until I collapse,
unable to feel anything at all.
A brindle pup barks worriedly at my feet. All of the other wolves have
disappeared, fading like a whisper in the woods.
“I know, Leelee. We’re coming.”
“She’s going with us?” Ti asks.
“We’re supposed to take her along. Help her learn the farther reaches of the
Homelands.” Leelee scampers on ahead, leaping awkwardly over a huge downed log
and sliding down the other side, her fur covered in the sooty brown decay.
Ti clears it in one stride and stands close, not helping me exactly, but I
know if I falter, his big shoulder is there for me to grab on to. I make it by
myself, but I appreciate his silent gesture.
Leelee watches, her head cocked to the side, as I take a running jump over
one of the numerous small, mucky streams that crisscross our land. I slip down
the other side, my foot sinking into a soft bruise in the moss. She yips and
worries, waiting for me to pull my boot out with a dull sucking sound.
I lift her up and give her an open-jawed kiss on her ear, but she sees a
squirrel and won’t stop squirming until I set her down.
“No farther than the Stones, Leelee.”
When we finally catch up, she’s clambering over the variously sized rocks
that form rough circles around the ancient central stones. Over the years, the
circle has encroached farther and farther into the forest, surrounding the
trees.
Leelee marks one of the stones.
“What is this?” Ti asks.
“It’s,
um…the
Gemyndstow? The memory place? But we just call it the Stones.”
“Like a graveyard?”
“Graveyards are for bodies, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“So, no. Coyotes eat our dead. That’s why we call them
wulfbyrgenna. Wolf
tombs. The stones are only for wolf names and the date of their last hunt so
that we can remember.”
When Ti crouches down and looks at one near the front, Leelee runs up to him
and looks too, trying to figure out why it is so interesting.
As soon as he stands, she marks that one too.
An ill-advised squirrel runs across the outer rim of the Stones, and Leelee
turns quickly to run after it, the wind tickling her fur and the scent in her
nose. I know that feeling of taking it all in—moldering pine needles, owl
pellets, borer beetle, tree sap, two-year-old porcupine den, sassafras
bush—until the scent of prey hits you right in the back of the throat and
everything tenses and you chase, even if your tummy’s little and full and all
you really want is for the thing, whatever it is, to escape so you don’t have to
eat it, but still you can’t help but hunt.
She peels off after her squirrel, looking behind to make sure we’re watching.
The squirrel chitters at her from the safety of a maple. Ti stares, his hands
fisted by his sides, as Leelee scampers and bounds and falls on her back and
twists her little legs in the air, her belly dotted with leaf litter. A tiny
furrow cuts through his usually impassive brow, and his mouth, while still
tightly closed, turns down a little at the corners. His wild—that seductive
scent of crushed bone and evergreen—radiates thicker now, and when I touch his
arm, he jolts as if from a waking dream and blinks down at me, looking in this
moment like a lost boy.
