Through Wolf's Eyes (6 page)

"I did," Firekeeper agreed. "I am not certain,
though, that he is the One. The other one, smaller, with the hooked
nose and silver-shot black hair, they all seem to defer to him."

"True," Blind Seer admitted, "but how could he defeat
even the next smallest in a fight? Certainly he couldn't defeat the
huge one."

"Maybe they are not a full pack," Firekeeper speculated. "They are all males and how could a pack survive without females?"

"All male?" asked the wolf in astonishment. "How can you tell? They smell of smoke and sweat to me."

"Not by scent," the woman admitted. "I could be wrong, but it seems that I remember ways of telling."

"She is right," came a shrill voice from above them. "Males all."

The speaker was the peregrine falcon, Elation, who
had been introduced to Firekeeper soon after sunrise. Elation was a
beautiful example of her kind, compact of body, with plumage of a deep
blue-grey. Her head was capped with feathers the color of slate and her
white throat and underbody were marked with darker bars. Brown eyes
ringed with bright yellow missed nothing.

"If you say so," Blind Seer said, immediately
deferring to the bird's greater experience, "then it must be so, but
I'd prefer to be able to trust my nose."

Ignoring the conversation between falcon and wolf,
Fire-keeper studied the six gathered below, feeling memories stirring
and teasing just beyond what she could grasp.

The men possessed a certain degree of grace, neither
toppling over nor lumbering like bears as they made their way about on
two legs. Firekeeper knew this was how she herself moved, had even
glimpsed her reflection and studied the distorted image of her shadow,
but seeing others move this way was a revelation. Before she had always
felt vaguely like a freak. Now she felt justified in her choice.

Already Firekeeper had observed many things she planned to adapt to her use. All of the men wore their hair caught
behind
their heads with a thong—a thing much more convenient than her own
short cropping with its heritage of odd-length ends that dangled in her
eyes.

The hides they wore were different, too. She didn't
think that all their clothing was made from leather, though leather was
amply represented. Magpie-like, she wanted to steal some for her own
use.

When four of the two-legs left the camp, Blind Seer
and Elation followed to learn where they went. Firekeeper remained
behind, studying the two remaining.

One was quite tall, the other among the smallest of
the group. Neither openly deferred to the other, so she guessed that
they were of similar rank within their pack. Wolf-like, she dismissed
the smaller one as less important and gave most of her attention to the
bigger and stronger.

This one was the second largest of the two-legs,
smaller only than the one who towered over the rest as the Royal Wolves
did over the Cousins.

A passing thought distracted Firekeeper. Could the
two-legs be like the forest-dwellers, each with two kinds? Could the
huge man be, in fact, the master of the rest?

After some consideration, she dismissed the idea. The
big man had deferred quite openly to several of the others. A Royal
Wolf, even a lesser one like herself, would never do so before even the
strongest of Cousins. If the two-legs had a Royal kind, it was not
represented among those here.

Or they all could be of the Royal kind . . .

She shook her head as if chasing a fly from her ear.
Too much guessing. Too little that was certain. As the Ones taught the
pups when hunting, guesses were no replacement for knowledge.

Firekeeper returned her unruly attention to the man below.

He was tall enough to reach effortlessly into the
lower limbs of the tree from which the two-legs had hung their food. He
was strong enough to control the elk-with-long-hair, even though they
outmassed him. After a time, she sorted his attire from himself and
could better see what he looked like.

His hair was reddish, the color of a fox's pelt or an oak
leaf
in autumn. Loosed from its thong, it hung straight, going past his
shoulders by perhaps the breadth of two fingers. It was cut so neatly
that when it was tied back not a strand strayed from its bonds.

What she could see of Fox Hair's skin seemed lighter
than her own, redder as well. His eyes were light, but not blue. At
this distance she could not tell precisely what color they were. From
the way he moved, the little extra motions he made, the fluidity of his
limbs, she guessed that he was young compared with some of the others.

Fox Hair was injured as well, walking as if he had thorns in his feet but not the wit to pull them out.

The smaller man was colored in shades of brown like a
rabbit or a deer. Unlike the red-haired man, he had a thin strip of
hair growing between his nose and his upper lip. It seemed to bother
him, for as he went about the camp doing incomprehensible things with
other incomprehensible things, he often pulled at it with his fingers.

So much! And so much unknowable! Firekeeper watched,
fascination turning into frustration. In the late afternoon, the other
four two-legs returned and more than ever she was certain that the
little hawk-nosed man with black and white hair was the One among them.

Blind Seer came and flopped beside her, his flanks heaving with laughter.

"They went hither and yon, over hills and around
trees. I'll give it to the tawny-furred one. He knows something of the
forest, but he'd know more if he'd heed his red-and-white spotted pack
mate. She saw me time and again—when I let her! From her scent, she's
of our kind in the same way the foxes are and she had wit enough to
stay clear of me!"

Firekeeper listened patiently to her brother's boasting. "Did they find what they seek?"

"No, but Tawny came close. If he goes west again tomorrow, he will find it."

"Hawk Nose is their leader," Firekeeper said. "I am certain of it now. Elation, what did he find?"

"Less than he knew," came the screeched reply. "Time and again, he stopped to study the trunk of a tree or a stump or
a pile of rocks. He had the giant collect some things that interested him."

"My two looked at such things as well," Blind Seer
admitted. "I think they look for sign of their missing kin. Tell me,
falcon, do two-legs do things to trees?"

"Even as your sister does," Elation agreed, "though
she is less obvious about her comings and goings. Two-legs cut down
trees, pile up stones, make lairs from these things or feed wood to
their hungry fires."

"Then these two-legs should be able to find sign of where my ancestors found Firekeeper."

"If the signs are not too old."

Blind Seer turned to Firekeeper. "Will you talk with them tonight?"

"No!" the young woman replied, suddenly panicked. "They are still too strange. Let me follow their movements for a bit longer."

"Well enough," he soothed. "I have not had this much fun since we raced with the young bucks of the Royal Elk for sport."

Firekeeper rose to her feet, aware that she was hungry and very bored from a day spent mostly sitting still.

"Come, dear heart. Hunt with me. Dusk is falling and I have no desire to watch shadows by firelight."

Blind Seer howled in anticipation. "And you, falcon?"

"I have dined on mice and young rabbits, today,"
Elation said, preening her wing feathers. "I will watch the two-legs
until darkness falls. Then I will sleep."

Firekeeper stretched, shaking the numbness from her
limbs. Growling low in her throat, she flung herself on Blind Seer.
They wrestled for a brief time; then, wild-eyed and excited, they
chased each other down the hill.

"Wolves!" said the falcon to herself. "May as well try to understand a storm cloud."

W
HEN MORNING CAME
, the two-legs began taking down their dens and loading things onto their animals.

"Perhaps Tawny is more clever than I thought," Blind Seer
admitted. "Look, he goes ahead with Spots and Mountain to mark a trail."

"He marks it," Firekeeper said when they had followed
Tawny for a ways, "as a bear or mountain lion does, by stripping the
good bark from a tree."

"Such marks do last," Blind Seer said, "longer than
our scent posts, especially when the rain comes. I wonder if he found
such marks during yesterday's hunt?"

"He did! Look!" Firekeeper exclaimed, moving to
investigate a tree trunk when Tawny and Mountain were safely past.
"Here is such a mark, greyed now by weather, but clear."

"Then he reads a trail," Blind Seer said, "and the
others will follow his marking. Why doesn't he trust them to see the
old trail or the marks of his passage? The last alone would sing to me
at least until the next rain."

Firekeeper shrugged. "They are deaf and blind and dead of nose as you have said many times before."

She didn't add that she had long been aware that her
senses were less keen than those of the wolves. Her upright manner of
travel and a sharper sense for color had provided her with some
compensation. Now she was beginning to wonder if her senses were to
those of the two-legs as the wolves' were to hers.

Her head hurt a little at the consideration and she distracted herself by concentrating on the problem at hand.

"Do we follow the larger pack," she said, "or these two?"

"Why not both?" Blind Seer laughed. "Elation has
stayed with the larger pack, but she can come ahead if we go back. At
the pace these move, you and I can dance around them as we dance around
a crippled doe."

"True," she admitted. "First then, let us go with
these. I wish to see if I can learn more of these signs they are using
to find their way."

They did so, learning of piled cairns of rock,
appreciating Tawny's skill when he located a pouch of slim sticks with
sharp points where it had been cached in a tree.

"He is not such a fool as I thought," Blind Seer said again. "Without scent or sight to guide him, he found that thing."

Firekeeper nodded. "He is searching for things he
knows may be," she hazarded, "the way in winter we know that fish sleep
beneath the ice or deer hide in their secret yards. He seeks a
possibility and sometimes he finds it."

"It excites him," Blind Seer said. "Look how he marks that tree with his scent and cuts the bark away from another."

"At this pace, they will reach the Burnt Place when
the sun is at peak or soon after," Firekeeper said. "Let us go back and
watch the others."

Blind Seer agreed and they ran swiftly, ignoring the
scolding of squirrels and the frightened flight of a doe and fawn.
Wolves needed to eat either frequently or heavily, but when something
interested them, they could forget hunger. Fire-keeper possessed less
stamina than her kin, but she had long ago learned to ignore her
belly's plaints.

They found the larger, slower-moving group by
following the reek of the not-quite-elk. As the wolves slowed, so as
not to startle their subjects, the falcon called greeting.

"How goes it with Tawny and Mountain?"

"Well enough," Firekeeper answered. "And these?"

"Slow! So slow!" the great bird shrieked. "These men are like ants though, steady."

"We will watch here if you wish to hunt."

"Good! Then I fly ahead to see what the others do."

Firekeeper was far less bored by the two-legs' slow
progress than Elation had been. Other than young possums clinging to
their mothers, she had never seen one creature riding another.

"Most other animals," she commented to Blind Seer,
"carry their babies in their mouths. Two-legs sit on these elk as if on
a rock."

"They go more slowly than they would on their own feet," Blind Seer added. "I wonder why they bother?"

Firekeeper shrugged. "Another mystery."

The sun was slightly past midday when a bleating
bellow, rather like that of a moose but not quite so, called out from
the west. The sound stirred great excitement among the two-legs, who
had persisted in their steady progress, even eating their food while
perched upon the backs of the not-elks.

Hawk Nose, the One of the two-legs, took a curving
thing the color of antler from where it had hung on his belt and,
putting it to his lips, made an answering sound.

"He blows into it!" Firekeeper said, amazed and
laughing. "Look how his cheeks round out beneath their hair! He looks
like a bullfrog courting in the spring!"

Blind Seer laughed with her, then added, "So these
two-legs howl, too, in their fashion. The thing he puts to his mouth
makes a fair cry."

"Just as the Fang gives me teeth like a wolf,"
Firekeeper thought aloud, "this thing gives Hawk Nose the lungs of a
moose. Are all their things ways of being more than they could be
alone?"

"Two-legs," her brother replied teasingly, "are weak,
hairless creatures with flat teeth, no strength, and little wit. This,
though, I have known long before seeing these, eh, Firekeeper?"