Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
The elk’s pupils blow wide. My arrow hits home, seconds before Khalil’s splits mine in half and Alroy’s wolf leaps from the brush, slitting the bull’s throat with his claws. The animal falls to his knees and then collapses, eyes open, staring sightlessly at the perfect sky.
I jog down the ridge, joining Khalil. We go to crouch by our kill, resting our hands on his warm, motionless flank. Alroy’s wolf comes to sit silently beside us.
Needles rustle in the limbs above us. We breathe in pine and sap, earth and air, our lungs fueling the muscles that his flesh will feed.
“Go in peace,” I say.
“May I have so good a death,” Khalil murmurs the words we were taught to say when we were pups by males whose faces we can hardly remember.
We’re silent on the walk back, except for Alroy’s muted muttering whenever it’s his turn to help haul the carcass.
I haven’t figured anything out.
I am still walking back to a mate who doesn’t want me. I’m still going to have to let her go again, and somehow, keep living.
Unless I can find the words to convince her to give me a chance.
To stay.
To leave my heart where it is—beating in my chest. For her.
10
ANNIE
Male!
Approaching from your left!
I’m sure there is a male approaching. There are folks everywhere. I’m sitting among a dozen females, some gathered around the fire, others working under the canopy or resting in the tent. Pups swarm the ladders and ropes hanging from the branches of the sycamore tree in front of us.
Males meander the invisible paths around the camp, going about their business, none of which seems to be urgent. Wolves of all ages lounge and wrestle and groom themselves, and then set off at random on urgent missions that end with them lounging, wrestling, and grooming themselves in a different location.
Male! From your left!
The pecking voice is back, and she’s been promoted to Captain Obvious.
LOOK! MALE!
I grind my teeth and glance up from my knitting to shut her up. Griff, the pup who brought the hatbox to me, strolls up to the fire. I wouldn’t call him a male, but the voice has always gone by size, not age.
“All right, Ma?” he asks Elspeth, poking at the charcoal with a stick although it doesn’t need stoking. “You need anything?”
“I don’t. What about you, Annie?” Elspeth asks me.
“I’m good.” I muster up a smile for Griff. This is the fourth or fifth time he’s dropped by to see if we need anything. Justus must’ve asked him to, although it’s possible that it’s Griff’s habit to check on his dam. The males do seem drawn to the females’ camp like moths to a flame.
Already, a male has come by because he found a particularly smooth rock and wondered if any of the females had lost it, and if not, if any wanted it. Diantha took it. It was threaded with a neat green color, almost like jade. It was lovely. Another male came by to offer us fresh bread he’d made. It was delicious—nutty and warm.
Griff is still messing with the fire, waiting in case we change our mind, I guess, when a pair of males come by rolling a huge, wooden spool they’d found in the woods. I can’t imagine how they got it up the narrow, rocky trail to the clearing.
I’ve seen something like it before. There’s a bigger one at Quarry Pack in the field behind the nursery. We were told it was human-made, a device to hold the wire they use to run electric lines. Pups pretend it’s a giant’s dining room table or a stage.
As soon as they see it, the Last Pack pups shift to two legs and join forces to roll the spool as fast as they can with no regard for life or limb. They narrowly miss the canopy stakes. The broad side of the tent. The huge trunk of the sycamore. A babe in basket.
The babe is the end of the game. Before my brain even computes the danger, Diantha leaps from her loom, shifts to her wolf, and leaps onto the spool to shove it off course with her paws. Her wolf then chases the culprits into their tree playground, baying as ferociously as any male wolf I’ve ever heard. The pups scramble to the highest branches they can reach.
It isn’t until she sashays back to the fire on two legs, her tail swishing, that I realize I’m standing, my knitting dumped on the ground, a needle clutched in my fist like a knife.
Elspeth gently takes my wrist and lowers my arm. “Listen to your wolf,” she murmurs. “Diantha is not a threat to them.”
I never listen to my wolf. I don’t have to—she’s not shy about letting her thoughts be known. Run and hide. Twenty-four seven, in any given situation. Run and hide.
Elspeth is still holding my wrist, though, and she’s gazing into my eyes like she’s waiting for me to do what she asked.
My face flushes. I can’t tug my wrist free—that would be rude—so I do what she says and listen to my wolf.
She’s on her feet, but she’s not alarmed. She’s excited. There was an enormous wooden spool rolling around, wreaking havoc. She wishes she could’ve rolled it around. She would’ve pushed it up the switchback trail to the dens and watched it roll back down.
My wolf has zero concerns about Diantha. In fact, she thinks Diantha’s wolf went easy on the pups. She didn’t even nip a behind, and the pups were being much too wild around babes and elders.
My wolf wouldn’t have been so wild. She would’ve howled to clear a path before she sent the spool sailing.
I blink, meeting Elspeth’s kind gaze. I don’t understand. I was afraid for the pups. Why wasn’t my wolf?
Elspeth pats my wrist as she lets it go and resettles herself in her chair. She picks up her own needles, smiles gently, and says, “I was the same at first. Always prepared for the worst. It helped to listen to my wolf. She was quicker than I was to realize that things are different here.”
Different how?
I have so many questions, but I’ve never been good with strangers, and I’m too shy to ask in front of everyone. Now that the spool is settled in place under the sycamore, the females return to their conversation. It’s been going pretty much nonstop all day. Back at Quarry Pack, we chat while we work in the kitchen or the garden, but nothing like this.
For one thing, not everyone is making themselves busy. Several females are lounging in chairs or blankets, doing nothing more than soaking up the sun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen females idle in the middle of the day, especially if they have pups.
It’s almost lunch, and the sun is high in the sky. Despite the shade, I’m sweating like a pig from nerves. Although the chatter and clack of the needles and the loom are calming, this is still a strange place, these are strangers, and my mate has left me here alone.
I’m not too mad about it. Or hurt. I just can’t settle. The breeze is sweet, and the yipping and shouting of the pups as they swarm the sycamore are soothing in their own way, but as the hours wear on, it’s getting to be too much. I’m homesick. I want to lie on my bed with my fan blowing straight on me from my night table and take a few months to work through everything that’s happened in the past two days.
The Last Pack females keep trying to be polite and include me, but my calm is wearing thin, and every time they preface a comment with, “Annie,” I jolt and drop a stitch. Being with them is nothing like being with Una, Kennedy, and Mari. They know how I am, and I don’t ever have to worry about offending them with my startles or my silence.
My stomach aches with missing them, and it’s not a new feeling. I’ve been missing them a while now. If I were home, they wouldn’t be there. Una and Mari would be with their mates, and
Kennedy would be out, training or scouting or hunting. She’s grabbed freedom with both hands.
At home, I felt so left behind, so forgotten. And that’s what feels like safety to me?
On a whim, I listen to my wolf again. She’s drowsing with her head on her paws, perfectly content. What does she know that I don’t? What’s different now for her?
It’s a wild thought—that things could possibly be different.
“Annie, you wouldn’t believe what Max would have to do to keep Justus out of trouble when he was little,” Elspeth says, and I startle, but I don’t drop a stitch. I make myself focus on the conversation.
Diantha, Nessa, and the others chuckle like family who’ve heard a story a hundred times and knows what’s coming. Most of the females’ hands are occupied in our small circle. Nessa braids one of her pup’s thick black hair in neat rows, the female named Lelia files her nails, and Diantha works her loom. It’s an interesting cherry wood piece, foldable, with a built-in bobbin winder and shelf. If it’s homemade, the craftsman was very skilled.
Elspeth waits for me to reply, but I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to say quickly enough, so she takes pity on me and continues, “Max would take the pups out to teach them how to hunt, but of course, if you left Justus to his own devices, he’d tear off and kill everything in a five-mile radius before the others had a chance to sniff out a track.”
Everyone chuckles fondly. Elspeth pauses for me to respond. I should chuckle, too, or make some approving sound. She’s so obviously proud. Yet again, though, I don’t manage to reply before Elspeth feels compelled to go on. My face burns. The embarrassment doesn’t help the sweat situation. It’s trickling down my neck.
“Well, it was so bad that Max would have to hunt down an animal the day before—say a badger—and then go out in the middle of the night and create a whole trail of badger sign—up, down, and all around, over hill and dale. Like a maze. Then, the next day, he’d take the pups out and tell Justus to have at it. Justus would tear off after the badger, and Max would tell the others, ‘Today, pups, we’re hunting fox.'”
She laughs. I can’t imagine a male creating such an elaborate ruse when he could just bark the pup into submission. That’s what a Quarry Pack male would do.
“Oh, remember the time Justus caught that skunk?” an older female named Mabli cackles. “Skinned it and everything and brought it to Alys proud as a peacock, the pelt reeking to high heaven.”
“Who’s Alys?” I ask. Several females glance up in surprise, but they recover quickly.
“Justus’s dam,” Elspeth answers.
I focus on my knitting so I don’t see their expressions. They know Justus and I aren’t really mates. It isn’t so strange that I wouldn’t know his mother’s name. I’m not in the wrong, but you couldn’t convince my stomach. It aches like it got kicked by a mule.
“Well, she soaked that pelt in tomato juice for days, scrubbed it with lemon rinds,” Mabli recalls. “She tried everything to get the stink out, and she never quite could, so in the end, she made a pair of slippers out of it. She said her feet were the furthest she could get that foul fur from her nose.” Everyone laughs, and again, it’s the warm, easy laughter of people who’ve heard the story a hundred times.
I remember, one time when I was very young, when my father was still alive, Ma let me help her make a mincemeat pie. I was so careful with spooning the pre-measured spices and dumping the raisins and stirring, but rolling out the dough was beyond my coordination and strength. I kicked a fuss, though, so Ma let me do it.
In the end, she made the crust on top look pretty, but the dough on bottom was uneven, so some parts burned, and others didn’t cook all the way through. I still remember how her face lit up when she ate her slice, how she hummed happily and sunk back in her chair, saying to Pa, “Our Annie’s a natural cook, just like her mother, isn’t she?” And he smiled and agreed.