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Black Wolf

Chapter 4 – A Journey of Discovery

Black’s mother was not surprised by his decision to become a wanderer as she had discussed the possibility with her mate before asking Sundown to feel out the youngster on the subject. She would have been just as happy to see him stay, but not in the mood he had been in for the last few months. Although she would probably never see her son again, she would content to think that her parent’s bloodlines lived on in another pack.

It was more than she could expect from his larger brother, Bruiser, who still showed no interest in mating, either here or anywhere else.

They spent the rest of the summer and autumn preparing for Black’s departure. They redoubled their efforts to hunt and preserve meat so he would have enough to see him through the winter should it take that long to find a pack willing to take him. Black also prepared several extra fishing lures by the light of the fire while his sisters wove the long hairs combed out of their coats into strong threads to anchor them. Dawn stitched together hides to keep him warm and the other wolves collected whatever tufts of animal fur or fluff they could find to insulate them. Even Bruiser contributed by dispatching most of their prey by breaking their necks, so there would be fewer spear holes in the hides to sew up.

They could smell the snow in the air on the day that Black choose to be his last on Sunrise Plateau. They had successfully hunted the last of the deer that were heading down to the lower valley for the winter and Dawn had saved some of the meat for a goodbye feast. Sundown supervised the roasting outside the den while Bruiser and Chaser stood guard against any coyotes that the smell might attract. When the meat was ready they brought it inside where Dawn carved it with the black glass knife she had saved from Mist Valley. Instead of offering the choice cuts to Bruiser, who had brought the animal down, she gave them to Black, to honour his leaving to start a new life.

Black accepted the meat with a sideways glance at his brother. Bruiser shrugged it off; it was the first and would be the last time it happened, after all. The big wolf did take an extra helping of meat so raw it was bloody to make up for it though.

Throughout the meal Sundown, Chaser and Shaper regaled Black with tales of their adventures in the wild. They were short ones as they had all found Dawn’s pack after less than a month cycle of wandering. They had more stories that were second-hand, ones told to them by wanderers that had come to live in their packs. These interested Black the most. Even Bruiser pricked up his ears when the southern packs were mentioned.

“The largest pack, the one that lives farthest south,” Shaper told them, “is ruled by a wolf so large and so strong that he has been the Alpha for almost thirty years.” He held his fists clenched then extended the last three fingers of his left paw to indicate the number.

The wolves used a counting system based on their ten fingers, starting with the leftmost. The units were counted on the paws and the tens were recorded by clenching the toes. Since they only had eight toes on their paw-like feet when they got to eighty they unclenched the left foot and when they reach one hundred they unclenched the other. Anything over one hundred was considered too large to count and was referred to as “more than a hundred”. Numbers were indicated by showing the tens first and the units second, so three fingers and then two clenched fists meant thirty, while two clenched fists followed by three fingers meant three.

“This Alpha is known as Menace, because he is so intimidating. His pack are called the Druids.” Shaper had trouble pronouncing the last word.

“That’s a funny word, druid.” Sundown said between bites. “What does it mean?”

“Those that serve the Gods.” The knapper informed them in the sounds and gestures that made up wolf speak. “No one knows how the word ‘druid’ came about, but the wanderers we have had from that pack claim that they are the guardians of the holy places, places of death, and the gods themselves gave them the word.”

“Places of death?”

“They say that they cannot expand their territory farther south because the gods have set aside that area for themselves. Anyone that tries to enter there may be crushed by great eyeless beats that move as fast as the wind, and if you manage to evade them lightning will strike you down if you attempt to enter the land of the gods.”

“We have tales of the gods and their powers, even in the northernmost packs.” Sundown said after a pause. “But I’ve not seen much evidence of them.”

“I have.” Dawn said, raising a hand to her collar. “On the day this appeared I saw one of their great dragonflies and heard the thunder of its approach.”

“We’ve seen them often, Chaser and me. They come from the south, where the Druid pack is, and fly to the far reaches of the land. A raven seems like a fly beside one, and they flee when they hear one coming like a sparrow flees at the eagle’s call.”

Bruiser interrupted the talk of gods. “You say this wolf, Menace, is over thirty years old?”

“Close to forty, I would think.”

“And he is the only male that mates?”

“So far. But the most recent wanders from there say that he isn’t doing much of that anymore.”

“Because he is so old?”

“No, because all the wolves in the pack are his offspring, the females included. He has at least a dozen daughters without a hope of motherhood because the young wolves are their brothers and Menace won’t let anyone else mate anyway. His daughters won’t let him mate with them either, even though he tries.”

This reminded Black of his own situation before Chaser and Shaper had showed up. He had never tried to mate one of his sisters because his mother had said that a she-wolf would fight to the death before letting a blood relative mate with them.

“It is evil, frowned upon by the gods.” She had said in the past and she repeated it now.

“Who is to say what the gods do and don’t frown on.” Sundown said, to which Chaser responded with a list of the things his pack believed were taboo.

The talk broke up into several conversations, with Bruiser questioning Shaper about the size and strength of the pack leaders who ruled by right of combat while Chaser and Sundown argued over the nature and the power of the gods, and why they seemed to favour certain wolves, like Dawn and her parents.

“It didn’t do our pack any good, being favoured.” Bruiser snarled. “The gods didn’t help us when the southerners invaded Mist Valley.”

“Some of the wolves that attacked had god collars also.” Dawn recalled.

“Maybe there are many gods, gods that fight for supremacy.” Bruiser speculated. “And maybe those gods use wolves to fight their battles, measuring their wealth in amount of territory and the size of the packs that fight for them.”

“No god ever asked me to fight for him, or her.” Dawn said, her brow wrinkled in concentration. “But there must be some reason, some purpose for these collars.”

“Do you think that one of us will ever wear a god collar, Mother?” Clover asked.

“I think that the gods have forgotten us, Daughter.”

Black could see the look of disappointment on his sisters’ faces, but he also caught a knowing smirk on Bruiser’s before his brother hid it. If there was anyone that wanted the distinction of wearing a god collar, it would be Bruiser, Black thought.

The next day the pack gathered outside the den to say their final goodbyes. His mother hugged him. It had been a while since she had last done that and she was slightly surprised at how big her little cub had become.

“You are half a head taller than your Grandfather Storm.” She noted.

“You’d be as big as Bruiser if you ever put any meat on you.” Sundown observed. At which point Bruiser wrestled his lighter brother to the ground and rubbed his face in the dirt.

“I’m going to miss you, Brother. You may be built like a twig but you are still the toughest wolf here, next to me.”

Picking himself up and dusting himself off Black realized that Bruiser was right. He was bigger, and likely stronger, than the new males. Bruiser would have pinned any of the others in much less time than it had taken to embarrass him. But Bruiser never bothered wrestling the others. Could it be that he saw me as his main rival for leadership of the pack, Black wondered? Not that it mattered anymore. He was leaving and Bruiser would have to find someone else to humiliate from now on.

Just then a crow flew over the small group of wolves. It was cawing like a demon was after it.

“Crows make liars of us all.” Shaper said as they watched the bird disappear over the cliffs.

“What’s that?”

“Something we said in my old pack. If you hear a crow cry after you speak whatever you said will be untrue.”

Black was glad that he had not voiced his thoughts, but the image disturbed him just the same.

Snow began to drift down in large flakes as if the storm had been following the crow deliberately.

“It’s time I left.” He said as he shouldered the sack full of furs and dried meat that would see him through the winter if need be.

“Wait, I have made something for you.” Shaper ran back into the den and came back with something large and heavy wrapped in a deer hide.

Black had known that the knapper had been working on something these last few weeks but had not known that it was a present for him. He took the package and gingerly unwrapped the hide, being careful not to drop whatever was inside.

It was a club, he thought at first, or maybe an axe. He held it up in one hand and examined it.

Shaper had taken a hardwood branch and split it on one end. Then he had taken a large piece of flint and knapped it into a cutting edge on one side while leaving the other slightly rounded. He had carefully chipped away the stone between them so it would fit snuggly in the nock of the branch. Then he had steamed the wood over the hot spring until it was flexible before inserting the stone. Thick cords of untreated hide had been used to pull the branch back together again above and below the stone. Once tied the cords had been soaked in water so that they shrank as they dried, sealing the stone firmly on the end of the sturdy wooden handle, which Shaper had scored in a criss-cross pattern to provide a better grip.

“You can use the round end to crush skulls and break bones.” Shaper informed him. “And the sharp edge to cut flesh or wood.”

“It’s beautiful.” It was the first time Black had used the word, but it was fitting. He stared at it for a full minute longer before slipping it into the thick cord that held up his winter leggings.

There was another round of hugs and pats and then, without further ado, Black set off.

* * * * *

Back in EOS -1 Cheng Meili watched the parting through the camera in Dawn’s collar while she made plans. She wanted to put a collar on the wolf they called Black, and his becoming a disperser was the perfect opportunity to do so. She had picked out the best one from the dwindling stockpile, number 302, and she was now performing the final tests on it before assigning a drone to follow the young wolf.

The only problem was that her annual funds had not yet been released. She was hoping that would be rectified soon and she had scheduled time on the tachyon transmitter with the Co-Chair of the FEC Science council to discuss the delay

The call came through right on time as she had expected it would; her predecessor Doctor Robert Dupuis was a meticulous and punctual man.

Her face lit up when she saw him smiling on the screen from some thirty light years away. “Hello Chairman Dupuis, how are you today?”

“Mary, please, you can still call me Robert.”

“Alright, Robert. How have things been going with the council there last few months?”

His face darkened. “Not well, I’m afraid. The Colony-Firsters have been hammering away at our budget. Their Inside man, Binks, has been using his position as Co-Chair to ferret out all spending they consider “extra-galactic” and therefore a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

“So I heard. But there has been good news, has there not? I also heard the Intergalactic probe program was still a go.”

“Yes, it is.” Robert looked sadder when he said it and she did not know why. He should be happy that the funding for a pure science project had gone through. It would give him time for other administrative tasks, like releasing her funding. “It came at a cost though.”

Now Meili could feel her heart rising in her throat. She was not sure that she wanted to hear what the price of C-F cooperation on the probe program was.

“I’ll cut right to the chase, Mary. Roscoe Binks went through the books and found all the programs that I have ever been involved in and put a hold on their funding pending an investigation as to whether I had been impartial in their allocation now that I am on the Science Council. Including the wolf program.”

“So that’s why the funds have been tied up all year. But … it’s okay now, right?”

“No, I’m afraid that it’s not. Even though the budget for you program is a drop in the bucket compared to the Intergalactic Probe Program Binks insisted in cutting it to the bare bones to free up funding for the probes. He cut all of your operating funds. He has even cut the funding for your replacement.”

Meili bit her lip. She had intended to tell Robert that she wanted to extend her contract here on earth by another five years. Such decisions had to be made at least two years before the end of the current contract to account for the flight time between systems. Now she was wondering if she would be allowed to stay at all. She told him of her plans and asked if she would still be able to stay there on earth.

“Yes, your upkeep there is covered by the environmental project through an arrangement we made decades ago. The money for your return is set aside and not even Binks can touch it, so you can stay as long as you want. But when you come home that will be the end of the Wolf Program. Not that there will be much of a program from now on.”

She was afraid that he was right. Her program did not have much in the way of assets. The drones that filled in the surveillance gaps and the helicopters she used to go examine dead wolves and retrieve their collars, or to collar new ones, were owned by the Environmental Reclamation Program. She had to transfer funds to them quarterly according to the number of hours of use for each asset. She even had to account for use of the tachyon transmitter they were speaking through now.

The only thing the Wolf Project owned the special purpose collars, and she was running low on them. She had intended to order some more and ask about getting some built for coyotes and bears but it was too late now; she didn’t even have the funds to pay for the helicopter to use the ones she had. It as unfair, she thought, its not like paying for an interstellar flight or anything. And she would have saved them that money by extending anyway.

The thought gave her an idea.

“Binks cut my replacement, you say?”

“Yes. The cost of the space travel falls under operations and he got all of that money.”

“But I still have my salary?”

“Oh yes. The personnel levels for the Council programs are based on our overall establishment and your salary, pension contributions, health care and such come from that fund, which he can’t touch for fear of angering the unions and the civil servants – both big C-F supporters. Once you leave Earth the position, and those funds, will simply be reallocated to another program.”

“So where did the funds for my salary come from for the two years I spent on the spacecraft getting here?”

“That is part of the personnel establishment. We assume that the personnel will rotate every five years and allocate an extra twenty percent in salary and benefits to cover the expense.”

“And when they don’t need to spend that money, like when you stayed here for four more terms?”

“Oh my god, yes! We can convert the salary to operating funds. I’ve never had any staff to do that with but I’ve approved a number of those transactions. However did you think of that?”

”The program I worked on for my post grad project needed more funds but couldn’t get any so the Prof asked for more personnel, which we had plenty of funding for. Then instead of hiring more researchers she waited until the budget year was almost up, converted it all into operating funds and paid for equipment he had on quick order. She did that four years in a row and no one in the administration cared, as long as someone was using the funds. The theory was that if they didn’t spend their entire allotment the University budget would be reduced the next year.”

“Genius, in a bureaucratic sort of way. Binks didn’t touch the personnel allotment because he’s from the private sector, he doesn’t know how the government finances work ... yet. This will be the only time we’ll get away with it though.”

“That’s fine. A couple of years of my salary is enough to keep the drones flying for years and even pay for a few helicopter rides. I’ll just have to be frugal with the collaring program, only choosing those wolves who look like they can add to our data over a long period of time.”

Robert looked in a much better mood now that he could pull one over on his Council rival. “It’s good that you can carry on tagging them at all. It was always my favourite part of the program.”

“You instigated the collaring program, didn’t you?”

“No, no. That was my predecessor, Doctor Nancy MacGregor, a mountain of a woman. She was from New Scotland, a rugged planet, and I swear she could wrestle an Alpha male down and collar it with her bare hands. Almost had to once.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. Wolf twenty-one, the leader of the Druid pack, which we called the Gatekeeper pack at the time because they live right outside the gates to EOS-1. A batch of tranquilizer had gone bad and he woke up while she was still fitting the collar. The helicopter pilot had to help hold him down while she finished attaching it. ‘Don’t ye stand up on me, ye Druid bastard’ she told me she said as he struggled. Then she got into a conversation with the pilot, who was from one of the Latino planets, about who the druids were and she compared the gatekeeper wolves to them. ‘Stand’n guard like a pack o’ daft Druid priests’ according to her.”

Robert was laughing so hard he cried as he remembered MacGregor telling him the story the first time. He paused to wipe tears from his cheeks.

“He must have been conscious enough to pick up a bit of the conversation because after they let number twenty-one go he went back to his pack and told them that the gods had visited him and told him that they were the gatekeepers of the holy place, and that they had named them Druids. He could hardly say the word but he remembered it and henceforth they called themselves the Druid pack, and so did we.”

Meili was laughing too. “I’ve always wondered how they got that name.”

“Well, Nancy left the bit about cross cultural contamination out of the official report.” Robert glanced at a clock Meili could not see. “Look, I have to go, but I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve converted the funds. And don’t call me on the tachyon anymore, it’s too expensive. I have a budget for contacting the field programs, so I’ll call you regularly for updates. You take care, Doctor Cheng.”

After the connection was broken Meili went back to her collaring plan. She had a decision to make.

She focused the image from Dawn’s collar on the new disperser as the mother watched her son making his way down off the plateau.

“Are you going to be worth the cost of a collar, black wolf?”

* * * * *

Once out of sight of his pack Black sat down and thought about his journey. There had been plenty of time to listen to the others who had been wanderers and get their advice be fore he left but he had been silent as to his intentions. Everyone had been left with the impression that he would make for the junction of the valleys down below and start howling for a mate right away, but Black had other things in mind.

First, he wanted to explore the mountains that surrounded the land inhabited by the packs. Sundown, whose pack lived farther out than any other, had told tales of wild wolves that still ran on all fours coming over the mountain. There was also talk of the big cats that lived on the upper slopes. They were said to go on two feet like the wolves of the valleys but there some wolves that disputed that. There were also stories of great shaggy beasts, bigger than bears, that ate any creature to cross their path, and others of a place of warmth and light where the gods welcomed any wolf brave enough to climb the heights. It was this legend that made some old wolves climb the mountain, hoping to cheat death by going to live with the gods. Black would like to see for himself if any or all the tales were true.

So instead of continuing downhill the second day he turned right and made his way arounds the arm of the mountain that sheltered Sunrise Plateau and then went uphill from there.

The snow had already started falling the day he left and they continued as he gained altitude. Black found shelter wherever he could through the long chilly nights and made whatever progress he could through the heavy snow during the short days.

To aid him in his travels he had devised a new type of footwear. After observing the wild inhabitants of the plateau for several winters he noticed that the ones who moved best on the snow were the ones whose feet were largest in proportion to their bodies. He had asked Shaper to help make him something he could strap on his feet that would distribute the weight. The knapper had bent some softwood branches over the hot spring and tied them together with sinew so they formed an oval. He strengthened it by adding a few cross pieces. Then Black had strung strips of rabbit hide between the frame because the snow did not stick to rabbit fur. It did not stick to wolf fur either, but he would have to kill an enemy to have a source for that. A deer hide boot attached to the frame that had laces to keep it on black’s foot completed the rig.

It was not perfect, but his ‘snow feet’ helped keep him from sinking too deep. After some adjustments to the placement of the boot and the arrangement of the straps he was able to move fairly quickly across the snowpack with the least amount of effort. That way he was able to follow the narrow valleys and gorges up to highest parts of the mountain.

There he saw little evidence of life. Most of the small mammals were hibernating and the deer had all moved to the lower valleys or beyond. The bison never strayed this far up, not even in summer because there was no grass to sustain them. Even the big horn sheep had abandoned the mountains to forage on the lower slopes. Only the mountain goats, who stubbornly clung to the narrowest of ledges, stayed on the peaks during the cruel winter months. Even the nimble Black hesitated to follow them across the cold, bare cliff face.

There were no rivers to fish in this high up. There were birds, but most were too small to eat and too hard to catch. There were foxes, who ran and hid at the sight of a great black wolf walking on the snow, but foxes meant that there was something else to eat, somewhere.

Black could see tell-tale tracks and knew what the foxes were eating. Mostly it was mice that they somehow tracked through the thick snow and dug out. Wolves could not hear as well as the fox and Black could not find the rodents that way. He could however imitate the way they followed the tracks of the rabbits back to their hutch, where they lay in wait for them to come along the trail again. In that manner Black augmented his stock of dried meat with regular meals of rabbit, and the occasional fox who wasn’t watching his backside.

Although he spent many days wandering in the mountains Black saw no evidence of the gods living up there. He could occasionally hear the passage of some great flying beast down below and once glimpsed something that matched his mother’s description of their great dragoon flies, but it was moving too fast over the dark trees for him to make out much detail other than it was black and its wings moved so fast that they were a circular blur.

He did not see the tracks of any great shaggy beasts either. What he did find was plenty of sign of a large feline that walked on two legs in the upper passes. He found paw prints as long as his but wider with three lobes instead of the two found on wolf and coyote feet. They had the same number of toes, but they were more spread out, and there were no claw marks. Sundown had said that the mountain cats had retractable claws, on their hands at least. Black also found tufts of tawny fur caught in the branches of thorny plants near the trails.

Once he found a pile of scat that was too large to be from anything other than a creature at least as big as him, if not bigger. It was still soft when he found it, despite the freezing temperatures, and that was troubling. It was disturbing because even though many of the signs he had seen were fresh he had not as much as glimpsed a single one of the big cats, yet he was sure that were watching him; something at the back of his neck told him so.

Black took the scat on the trail to be a warning that he was about to cross a line into the cat’s territory beyond which he would be considered an invader. Reluctantly he turned back down the mountain and headed for the lower valleys.

* * * * *

“What’s up Meili? You’re not using as much of our drone time as you used to.”

Cheng Meili turned to her sometime lover, Wang Lijun, one of the many Environmental Technicians here at EOS-1. The fact that they outnumbered the scientists stationed here one-hundred-to-one was not unusual, given that the installation was really a waste processing site where the pollutants left around this particular patch of the home planet were brought for processing and destruction. It had only been named Earth Observation Station One to make it sound more palatable for the taxpayers on the colony planets. The company that had been contracted for the clean-up operation owned ninety-nine percent of the assets here, and leased time on them to the science projects.

“No, I’ve had to count my pennies.” Meili replied in her native Mandarin as Lijun massaged her shoulders from behind. “I’ve been concentrating on the input from the existing collars and only using the drones to track a single wolf that has become a disperser, of sorts.”

“Ah, your favourite, the black one.”

She blushed a bit. Lijun knew her better than she had thought. “Yes, the black one. He was an unusual cub and now he proving to be an unusual adult. He left his pack after telling them that he was off to seek a mate but instead he has spent the last few months wandering about on the mountains where no wolves live.”

“So, he lied to his mother about where he was going? Is that so unusual for a young man?”

Meili frowned. Had she mentioned Black’s mother to Lijun? She must have. No matter, it was his refereeing to the wolf as a young man that caught her interest. For all intents and purposes these wolves were men, or humans rather. Before the Great Exodus mankind shared eighty-four percent of its DNA with wolves, about the same as with dogs. But recent tests on wolf carcasses showed that percentage to be up in the high-nineties now, close to the level of gorillas or chimpanzees. They were practically cousins.

“He is unique I think.” She said. “He was discovered fishing and reinvented snowshoes. It’s like he is some sort of inventive genius.”

“Or he picked up inherited memories from all the human genetic pollution in the region.”

She was familiar with the argument. Were they inventive because the human DNA that had invaded their system had genes for inventiveness or were the language skills, tool use and other innovations simply inherited memories from the genetic waste we behind? If Meili could find out which it would be the basis for a paper that would place her in the forefront of her field. The only problem was how to prove it either way? It was not like there was another colony of sentient animals living around another one of their ancient dung heaps. Not that she had heard about anyway.

Still, the unusual case of this particular wolf could make a nice paper that would keep her from disappearing in the sea of academic wannabees – publish or perish, she reminded herself.

“I’ve decided to put a collar on this one.” She told her boyfriend. “When can I get a chopper?”

* * * * *

Black made his way carefully down the mountain. He took his time to carefully read the snow pack before venturing across it. Living on the high plateau against the seep cliffs had taught them that the slightest wrong move could set off an avalanche. Sundown had been particularly keen on keeping them away from unstable slopes. Black’s artificial snow feet helped since he didn’t disturb the snow like a struggling biped normally would.

His plan was to head down to the top of the lower valleys and camp out there for a time. From there he should be able to hear the calls from a number of packs like his mother’s and decide which ones to reply to. But something inside rebelled against that plan. Why not, he asked himself, go farther, and explore the plains where the bison and the elk went to spend the winter?

By the third day he was back below the tree line, where the tall evergreens provided shelter from the wind and one could camp out under them where the snows could not reach. He stopped to hunt there and from then on he moved one day and hunted for two to conserve energy. He would need to be in top form if he expected a pack to accept him into its ranks. He checked the moon and figured that in another two cycles he would be in a good position to start his mating search.

Black had paid particular attention to the passage of the moon since leaving his mother’s pack. Wolves counted small increments of time by the number of breaths they took and larger intervals by the position of the sun or stars. They knew that the time between seasons could be measured by the cycles of the moon and used half-cycles and quarter-cycles to describe things that would take less than a cycle but more than a few days. “I haven’t laid a good scat in a quarter-cycle” was a common expression.

There was a time of year when the full moon would just be rising as the sun set and setting the next morning as the sun reappeared. It happened twice a year, once in the spring and again in autumn. The first heralded the end of winter, although more snow was always possible, and the second warned of winter’s approach. Black thought that the beginning of spring would be the best time to start a new life, as it was for the plants and many of the wild animals.

One day he came upon a large meadow in the middle of the pine forest. The snow had accumulated there as the trees surrounding it blocked the winds that would have otherwise redistributed them. With the temperatures rising already the snow was wet and heavy, and Black found it difficult to cross the open space even with his snow feet on.

He was half way across when a sound made his ears prick up. It was a thrumming sound that was somehow familiar. At first he could not place it but then he remembered the giant dragonfly he had caught a glimpse of. It had sounded something like this, but from much, much farther away.

Too late he realized that the sound was growing louder and coming straight for him. He was in the dead centre of the large meadow when the beast appeared over the trees from the south.

It was huge, as his mother had said, and loud, louder than anything he had ever heard. It was all black with shiny parts that looked like huge eyes in the front. Its wings, the source of the thrumming noise, were a blur above its back, moving so fast that Black could not tell how many there were or how they moved. It had a tail, with small whirling wings at the end of it, but no proper legs to speak of, or any kind of mouth that Black could see. He wondered if they ate wolves as he scrambled to back track with the cumbersome snow feet still attached.

He ran as fast as he could, which was not very fast but faster than he could have run without the devices on his feet. He cast a fearful glance back over his shoulder as the sound intensified and saw that the giant insect was hovering there in the middle of the field. Something was crawling out of it, a parasite the size of a small wolf, he thought. The smaller creature was puffy, like a caterpillar, with large blank eyes like a fly. But it had arms and legs, like a wolf, and it was holding some kind of stick and pointing it at him. He turned away and redoubled his speed.

He heard a crack, like a tree snapping in the dead of winter, and felt a pain in is shoulder. He stopped running and reached back to grab at what felt like a spear in his back. His hand closed around a cold round shape and he pulled on it. He felt something like a thorn pull out from his back and he brought the object around in front of his face as he swayed from a sudden fatigue. It was a shiny tube with a point like the nose of a mosquito at one end and a red tuft like some kind of fur at the other. A drop of his blood was poised on the tip of the needle that had pierced him and it fell as he watched. A clear drop of strange smelling fluid followed.

Time seemed to stretch as the world twisted inside itself. The sound of the dragonfly subsided as Black fell forward face first into the snow. His vision started to fade.

The second-last thing he heard before he passed out was the crunch of some creatures approaching from behind him across the snow.

The last thing he heard were words that sounded alien and yet, familiar.

“He’s out. Let’s fit this puppy with a new collar.”

Based on The rise of Black Wolf

Produced by National Geographic Television, © 2010 NGHT LLC