Night of the Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page A

given the gray his chance. He went for the giant thighbone. The bone crumbled in his jaws. He was able to leap away just in time to avoid a last vicious swipe of the bear’s claws. The broken bone leaped out through the skin like a javelin. The bear gave a cry of anguish, spinning ’round and ’round, snow packing under her paws as her blood pulsed, fountained from the shattered leg and drenched the snow. ’round and ’round she went, snapping desperately at the wound that was killing her until, at last, her struggles ended and she sank down in the scarlet pool and died.
    Ignoring the bear’s stiffening body, the wolves returned to the kill. The she-wolf stood, shook off the snow, limped over, stood next to him, and took her share. The blizzard’s first clouds reached them. Snow flurries spattered their fur even as they cleaned the elk’s bones. The bear was only a mound of white near the bloody scraps of the kill when they finished. The she-wolf limped away from the elk and the rest.
    He knew where she was going—to the den where she had borne her pups for many seasons. Her head was down, her ears back. She was limping badly now, and looked as if she were in great pain. The rest had another shelter and they would seek it.
    He followed her.
    The den was beyond the tree line. Up and up she went. The snow flurries had settled into a steady downfall that seemed to grow thicker by the minute. The sky was a uniform deep gray that imperceptibly darkened, washing color out of the world, then slowly strangling light. He moved behind the she over the high windswept waste.
    The light was blue-gray when they came to the den. The entrance was choked with snow. She wiggled in and found a corner piled with dried moss. She lay still.
    He followed, resting next to her, lending her the only support and help he could. His big, warm body stretched out next to her. He heard her sigh, the same sound she made after sex. The previous springtime’s loving hadn’t taken. She was having a barren year.
    Her eyes were closed and her muzzle rested on his back, just below the neck. He curled his body around hers as well as he could. Outside, blue evening became black. The wind howled louder and louder as the blizzard ripped through the mountains, tearing at the naked stony peaks and the glacial heights with frigid fingers, wrapping any unsheltered, warm living thing in a cocoon of icy death. Wailing, sobbing, moaning, and, at last, screaming out the triumph of cold and dark over light and warmth. Of an eternal frozen death over the fleeting loves of a transient springtime.
    He didn’t know when she died. All he knew was that sometime in those blackest, wildest, cruelest hours before dawn, he woke to find he could no longer feel her heartbeat and that in spite of his warmth, her body was cooling. When he moved, her head slipped from his back and landed with a soft thud on the moss. She lay on her side, jaws slightly open, the tongue protruding a bit between them, eyes staring unseeingly out into the last darkness. He rested his head on his front paws and awaited the dawn.
    When it came, he slipped out of the den. The storm had passed. Sun shone on the snow. The sky was blue.
    He returned to the den. She lay where she’d been before. He pushed her with his nose and found her already stiffening.
    He turned and went outside. He became human. God, it was cold, but this wouldn’t take long. He pulled at the snow above the entrance to the den. A miniavalanche ensued, sealing the entrance not just with snow, but with rock and pebbles that had been piled on the granite slab that formed its roof.
    When he was finished, he turned wolf again and marked the den. He marked in a way humans don’t understand, the way wolves mark traps.
    This is a place of death. Stay away!
    Wolves don’t grieve. What he had done showed respect for what she had done and been. No more.
    Then he left to join the rest under an overhang where they’d found shelter from the