Chapter 13 Becoming Pack
Shhhh. The rocks have ears and not all of them are our friends. Be a shadow, not a sound.
Pup halted, still all gangly bones with just a fog of flesh coalescing in his ribs.
Mother formed a tongue and licked the length of Pup’s skull.
You don’t have to stop playing. Just not so loud. There will come a time when none of the deep things would dare to take you no matter the sounds you make, but that time is not yet.
Mother yawned like a cave and turned three circles before lying down in the granite hollow.
Pup eyed his game.
It wouldn’t be as fun now.
He was leaping from the root thickets to menace a great gnarled leg of oak that looked like a charging elk.
He couldn’t menace if he couldn’t growl.
So, he settled for curiosity.
Pup buried his muzzle in the stone, feeling the delicious cold enter his bones, soft and secret as fox song.
He listened with his whole skull the way mother had taught him, like a fat spider in the center of her web.
What was the wind and what was food in the trap?
That was the trick.
Pup heard many things in his bones. Lurk-cats that chewed the earth like they hated it. Shadow skates that were still half dream and swam through the ground like trout within the stone. Pinch bugs and peepers that rolled and clattered like pebbles tumbling down the mountainside.
He knew these things.
He ate these things.
The danger, Mother said, was in the deeper ones that kept their bones attuned to his sounds.
The thought made Pup tuck tail and look to his mother.
She was there.
As big and constant as gravity.
Let the monsters come. She killed monsters or chased them back to the nowhere places.
That was the duty for which the mountains rewarded them with sprawling root tangles, the under forests, and stone wilds teeming with food and beauty in the one solid deep-season of forever.
A lurk-cat was chewing up from beneath, blind in its war with earth, moving straight for Pup’s teeth. And why not? The mountains loved them best.
Time raced on.
Pain and learning.
Love and hunger.
Riddles in the dark.
Pup grew,
slow in the moment,
fast in the memory.
Mother stood at the lowest precipice of their territory again, above the endless deep, washing herself in the wellspring of darkness where the silence boomed like thunder.
Pup was not so small now, but he was not his mother. She was strong like the long years had pressed the constancy of stone into her body.
He knew what it meant that she was drawn to that place, their furthest refuge from air and sky.
It was instinct. Even he knew the tug of that narrow ledge if he went too long without sleep and the thoughtless part of his mind wandered free and unchecked.
Go to the deep places. Go to the deep places.
She was going to go. There would be no returning.
On the one hand, it was the highest compliment.
She would not go if she didn’t think him ready to serve as the mountains’ guardian.
On the other, it was like anticipating a wound that would never stop bleeding.
It was true that he hunted easy as breathing now.
It was true that when the thicket singer had come for him, he wetted the ground with its oil and stood howling in its wreckage.
It was true that he dared the lonely deep things to reach for him and they all shied away from the challenge.
But he was not his mother.
Fear and doubt and sadness were the price of wakefulness and he would pay them, but he didn’t have to love the transaction.
He pondered his mother’s lessons.
The stories.
Always the stories.
Mother told such stories, each of them a reminder about duty and a call to prepare.
She could show him images of the things she had driven from their mountains, things that might return. The tooth-wind. The hateful orb. The frozen deer.
Things from just away were bad.
Things from outside were worse still.
Pup was strong, but he wasn’t his mother.
He wanted to do his duty, but he wasn’t his mother.
He felt the mountain’s own heart pumping life through his dark flesh, but he wasn’t his mother.
Mother was leaving.
When she left,
it was a wound of the body.
When the pain was dulled with years,
it was a wound of the spirit.
When he named the world his family,
he became different, but whole.
The pup was not a pup.
He roamed and hunted and fought and found no equal in pure might above or below the mountains.
He could feel the borders of his mountains like he could feel the borders of his bones, his territory.
Home and family, one and the same. He could taste the dark and know all the creatures it touched.
Already, he had learned something of his mother’s old strength; already, he felt the dark stone lending him a tiny fragment of itself, the inertia of its unquestionable, ancient existence.
Perhaps one day, he would have his mother’s strength.
Perhaps even the mountain would grant him kin.
Yet, “one day” and “perhaps” weren’t of much help when the cursed day came that the air betrayed the mountains and let in a trespasser from outside the world of real things.
Too early.
He was not ready.
He had seen the creature before, in his mother’s mind. The frozen deer. The moonlight fawn. The parody of life that slid through the barriers like a glass splinter.
It wore its shape in mockery of the natural world.
It was a deer the way ice is an imitation of stone.
No.
There was no metaphor in nature to explain the outsider.
A wrongness in the mind and an insult to the land.
A famished absence with a body.
He was not ready.
He was not his mother.
It didn’t matter.
He loved his mountains and he loved the duty that transformed his hours from numb waiting to needful purpose.
He would answer what the deer was with what the mountains are, with stone teeth and the places kept forever holy with unseen eons.
He chased it.
When it turned to fight, when it reached for his mind to unmake him, it was like a thousand years of frozen wind biting at the stones.
In other words, it was nothing.
His mind was the mountain’s mind and the wrongness of the deer had no power over the billions of years enfolded there, of all those countless tons of simple, blunt existence.
Yet, neither could he will the outsider away in the manner his mother had done, sending the smoke of its intent fleeing back through its hole to the outside.
He couldn’t force the sky to be unmarred through tooth or mind.
Neither could he catch it and tear it, litter the woods with its shreds like torn moonbeams fading in the dirt with the rotting sycamore leaves.
He was not his mother, but nor would he turn from his duty, even though failure felt like a burning ember balanced on the back of his neck, sinking deeper every day the deer continued to stain his homelands.
Somewhere, down in the unending dark where the world’s weight walked on four paws and licked its children clean of all memory of the frowning sky, did his mother watch? Did his failure put an ember on her back too?
No.
He wouldn’t allow the thought.
She was in the forever deeps now, where the loyal pack remains beyond all danger and sadness.
Each of that pack endured the trial of the shallows, defying the open air, and it was his turn now.
Hateful months passed and the frozen deer grew bolder.
It defaced the world’s works and arts. It grazed on soft, fragile lives beneath the skies, a coward’s prey, not even honoring them by consuming their flesh, the fleeting wildflower creatures that glimmer across the ground like sparks, bright then dark within moments, lovely temporary things like storms of ghost lights in the cavern lake.
Its empty appetites changed as the year ripened. He did not know why, only that whatever it sought must be denied.
Birds.
Squirrels.
Humans.
Purposeless vandalism of all the life-forms the mountain called to root in its gardens, but the mountain had a guardian.
If only it had a stronger one.
One night, by the human dens above the racers’ maze, he saw the outsider fail to take its prey.
This was new.
A pattern change.
An opportunity?
A trap?
A human in a car endured the frozen deer. Watching the fawn’s failure was like seeing a great horned owl crack its talons on the hide of an April cottontail kit. It was absurd.
The outsider fled at his coming, and he faced the human.
The human’s mind met his mind. Another first.
He knew people were clever the way a badger was fierce, but he had never spoken to one.
Its mind was fear stink and panic, but there was something else he couldn’t place.
It was a man.
No.
It was a not-man.
He broke the not-man’s car to smell him. He tasted his sweat and blood.
He wasn’t from the outside.
Were his senses failing?
The not-man had something in him that tasted of mountain-kin, of deep scent.
Impossible.
It was a trick.
There was too much wrongness in it.
He couldn’t afford two invaders.
He should kill it.
Would his mother have killed it?
No.
We do not trouble about root nippers when an under-saint goes prowling.
He left the not-man shivering in his brittle den.
The deer had done another space-blur and was elsewhere.
It didn’t matter.
There was no hiding from him, not in the mountains.
Every life the frozen enemy claimed was an insult.
It was a taker without reciprocity.
It was an unliving pestilence. A waster. A killer for nothing. A hollow blight that shed its emptiness wherever it went.
The mountains wrote poetry.
The deer scattered the words like sow bugs beneath a kicked log.
The wolf did not dream,
except when he did.
Twice he dreamed of the not-man.
Strange upon strange.
Tonight’s dream was different.
The entrance to his den,
south bitterroot cave,
shifted into Mother’s muzzle and spoke.
“What is family?”
The pack.
“Why?”
We are the mountain’s own.
“Service to the mountain is family?”
Yes.
“Good. Remember that.”
I don’t understand.
“You will, Pup. Go with my love.”