The Dog Master Read Online Free PDF Page A

known hunger but not starvation, which was why they had the reserves to keep this pace over the miles. Yet the older wolves would never pursue such a faint trace at such speed for so long. They knew better.
    The other two wolves faltered when the female fell back. Though they were both males, she was taller than either of them by a head, as well as stockier through the chest and extraordinarily powerful in her haunches. They looked to her for leadership when they played together, and had torn off away from the pack on this great adventure only because she had done so. Their tongues lolling, they circled her, sniffing, unsure.
    The big female lifted her nose to the wind. Now that she was no longer racing headlong through the grasses, new smells came to her, clean and cruel, unknown yet imprinted into her instincts, her species’ memory. She would someday experience all of these sensations and know them as winter, but for now, with the summer flowers waving in the slight breeze, they were abrupt and unfamiliar.
    She set out in the direction of the cool flowing air, with its promise of something new, because she was a large wolf, accustomed to being unafraid. The males fell in behind her in submissive single file, finding their places in line according to the pack order they had decided amongst themselves for the purpose of the day’s hunt.
    After a time, the soil changed. The few trees vanished and the grass gave way to sparse, coarse ground cover. The earth squished beneath their pads, and where the landscape dipped into depressions here and there, soupy, dark water lay stagnant, the air above boiling with black insects. Then there was a clear, cold brook, and then another. The wolves drank from these slender streams, invigorated.
    This was land unlike any the large she-wolf had ever seen before, and she found herself lured irresistibly forward. When a scent traveled past like a wave of heat the wolves stiffened in unison. Elk, up ahead.
    She couldn’t help herself: she ran, joy coursing through her veins. Her male companions caught her enthusiasm. They came over a rise and hit the elk herd in a straight line but immediately were disarrayed, made ineffective by their inexperience. There were far too many animals to have a sense of the herd as anything but large. Confused by the elks’ sudden, chaotic scramble and wary of the enormous antlers of the bulls, the wolves found themselves with no clear target. Frustrated, they milled in confusion, snapping at haunches and dancing back from one bull who was charging them with deadly determination, his rack lowered and slashing.
    And then the large she-wolf heard the plaintive bleat of a calf that had been separated from the others, and she turned and sprinted in the direction of the sound. The calf bolted and the chase was on, but the wolves were fatigued and ineffectual in their initial charge and thus were forced to pursue fruitlessly, unable to organize a way to cut off the elk calf as she fled.
    Nothing in the short lives of the young wolves prepared them for this pursuit, because without warning the earth beneath their feet turned white and slick. Though it was summer, a huge tongue of ice was imperceptibly grinding its way over ground, and the wolves were unsure what to make of it.
    The young elk, in flight for its life, was heedless of the abrupt change in footing. She smelled water ahead and her instincts told her swimming would keep her safe. She rushed on blindly, registering but not caring that the ice was sloping forward, that up ahead the world seemed to impossibly end on a near horizon. By the time she realized she’d been betrayed by geography and that the glacier on which she was running was plunging off a rock shelf high above the ground, she was too far down the slick slope to do anything but fall, her legs splayed out and useless.
    The wolves watched her vanish over the glacier’s edge without comprehension. None of them, though, wanted to