Night of the Wolf by Alice Borchardt Read Free Book Online Page B

slab in the middle, glowing in the icy moonlight. Dryas nodded. She could even read this one. Part of her training had been learning what such structures meant. This one spoke as clearly as the wedge of a sundial.
There are,
she thought,
much easier ways now, but the creatures of this moon calendar probably invented them. Yes, it is important for us to know.
    The shadow appeared near the stone in the center of the circle, something darker than the rising moonglow and the misty, distant starblaze. It didn’t coalesce out of the night. One moment it was not there; the next it was.
    Dryas shivered. Yes, the girl had been right. She stood, backed up to the edge, then began to make her way down the same way she’d come up. Only this time her entire concentration was on the openings that served as the ladder. She didn’t look up. She wanted to, but she found she couldn’t. She had encountered a phenomenon more frightening than a journey down a sheer cliff, hand over hand. She was afraid if she looked up she would see something, only God knows what . . . looking over the edge . . . down at her.
     
    Flowers, any flowers, made him remember her. While he loved her, the world had basked in summer, and the high alpine valley and lowland meadows were ablaze with their fire.
    Beyond the mountains, other fires burned. They were not so beautiful, left only ashes and created dark smudges across a fair blue sky. Caesar was on the march. He would climb to the top of a pile of corpses and, at last, achieve primacy in the world.
    But the wolf knew nothing of this and would not have cared if he did. What were the doings of men to him? He and his kind had settled their affairs with the universe millennia ago. They lived according to a fixed code, one that evolved with his species out of the darkness of mammalian beginnings. He and his kind were guided by it, though they never tried to understand it. He gave it no thought at all while he stalked Imona and her companions as they hurried downhill through the dawn mist to bathe in the lake.
    She hung back a bit from the others, trailing along last, as if she sensed his presence and was waiting for him.
    His arms closed around her from behind. He swung her off the path and behind a tree.
    She gasped, but didn’t cry out.
    He gave her every opportunity to scream, but she didn’t. In fact, when she turned and saw who he was, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
    He’d never been kissed before, but he was a quick study. He decided he liked this form of human contact and wanted to learn more about it. Time enough for that. He swept her up, carrying her uphill to a secluded spot only a wolf would know.
    One bitter winter long ago an avalanche had cut a swath of violence through the tree line. When, at length, the summer came and melted the remaining ice and snow, it left a jumble of boulders, broken trees, and thick brush piles that extended down into the pine forest.
    It wasn’t a popular spot with humans, though the wolves and wild cats liked it well enough. The area around the vast piles of broken stone was haunted by vipers and pitfalls. You might think you were climbing along solid ground when the rotten timber and broken branches gave way, sending a foot or leg into a hole, twisting muscles or shattering bones. Whitened trees killed in the mountain’s convulsive rock falls were always ready to slip, drop, and drive splintered limbs into a careless explorer. All in all, not a salubrious place to wander.
    She kissed him on the neck as he carried her along. “Sweet merciful mother,” she whispered. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
    He laughed.
    “Aren’t you afraid . . . The men of my tribe would kill you if they caught you.”
    “I don’t think I’d be that easy to kill.”
    Just at that moment, he reached the spot he had been seeking, a tiny clearing shaded by the heavy boughs of a broken pine and surrounded by boulders of granite and huge fragments