Читать книгу Ordinary Wolves - Seth Kantner - Страница 12

FIVE

ON THE FLATS between river drainages, wolves span out over a mile of tundra and leafy green willow thickets. The pups play and bite each other’s legs. The wolves work west, bruised and hungry after spending the recent night—bright and starless as day—testing a cow moose and her young calf. The calf had appeared small and helpless, eligible to be eaten. It struggled, staying close under its mother’s flank during the final battle. In the end, the cow’s berserk defense of her young left a wolf wounded, stomped in the willows. The pack had closed on the wolf, killed it, and left the creekbed. The famished calf nursed.

Now the wolves turn across the tundra toward their den. They recognize each moose in their territory, test each regularly for weaknesses and vulnerable new offspring. Four of the pack are pups. Playful and only a couple months old, the pups are insatiable. Since May, the black male and gray female have claimed most of the available food for themselves and their litter. They are fat. The young adults in the pack are skinny and starved. Two have left to hunt alone.

Today a third wolf rests, lets the family go on. She stops, trots north, and rests again. Finally she travels, a hundred miles northwest in the first week. The sun never sets. The days are hot and flies buzz around her nose. The sunny nights trill with the call of nesting sparrows and waterfowl. Beaver move out into lakes to evade her. Muskrats dive and disappear. The wolf catches a ground squirrel, a few flightless warblers, a ptarmigan. Everything warm-blooded wanders under the canopy of swarming mosquitoes.

The young wolf swims wide rivers, climbs mountain passes, crosses green valleys ashimmer with cotton grass. In the lee of twin peaks she comes to a snowfield. Seventy thousand caribou stand crammed on the snow, nearly insane and forsaking graze to elude a portion of the insatiable mosquitoes. The wolf catches a slow calf and eats, yards from the mass of animals.

Her stomach is distended and tight. She moves sleepily into the alders of a nearby creek. When she awakes, the brush teems with wolves. The young gray wolf rolls on her back, shows her throat to the unfamiliar pack, makes obsequious sounds left over from her puppyhood.

The wolves growl, stand over her with their heads high. The young wolf is skinny, the marrow in her bones dark red. For lack of threat, luck, reasons unknowable—the pack does not kill the intruder. The group moves toward the caribou. Thousands of animals race and mill. The wolves down a limping bull with swollen joints and soft black velvet antlers. The herd accepts the cost, swells back on the snow to await wind. At the kill there are growls. Suddenly a fight erupts.

By the first snow the caribou’s and the female wolf’s bones are clean, almost white.