Lone Wolf by Kathryn Lasky

without the sound. It was all he knew, all he had ever known. He stepped out of the den into the rage of the blizzard and began howling. Howling for the great grizzly. Howling for all he had ever known and loved.
    Then as he howled, an odd tremor rose through the depths of the snow, from the frozen land beneath it, from the very center of the earth. The tremblings were like faint quivers, but Faolan pressed his splayed front paw deep and these tremulous shakings became quite distinct. And then more incredibly powerful. For a moment, it felt as if the entire snowfield had shifted under his paws, and in the distance, he saw the frozen waterfall crack and suddenly gush to life.
    But in that second he thought of death. And he knew with an overpowering certainty that something terrible was happening to his beloved Thunderheart.

CHAPTER NINE
A DIM MEMORY
    ON THE FAR EDGE OF THE BEYOND, the she-wolf Morag had been absorbed into a new pack. She had found a new mate and given birth to a healthy litter of pups. No one knew her history, and in fact, she herself had all but forgotten it. The minute the Obea had walked away with that pup in her mouth to deliver it to a tummfraw, the place for abandonment of malformed pups, Morag began to build up barriers deep within her. These barriers functioned like a kind of invisible scar tissue to toughen her so that she could go on, survive. Such was the way with wolf mothers who had endured the special anguish of losing a malcadh pup to an Obea. They quickly forgot. In the wake of forgetting, there was for a time a darkness deep within them where that pup had grown inside their bodies. But it soon faded until it becamemerely a gray shadow of which they were hardly aware. They had to be this way if they were going to go on, find another mate, and bear more pups.
    Morag was now consumed with a rambunctious trio of red-furred pups. At nearly a moon cycle old, they were busy exploring the whelping den with their milk teeth. They were becoming bolder as well, and began to scramble closer to the white light of the den opening. Morag’s mate helped keep them back. Soon, when the pups were just a bit bigger, Morag and her mate would let them out regularly to explore under careful supervision. At that point, the pups would begin to eat meat. Then they would be weaned, and finally a den must be found near the rest of the packs that made up the MacDonegal clan.
    Morag had decided that today she would leave her mate in charge and set out toward the heart of the MacDonegal territory to begin the search for an appropriate den. The weather was still blustery from the remnants of the storm that had blown in from the north, bringing heavy snows to the border between the Beyond and the Outermost. But here it was merely sloppy with rain and sleet. To the west, the sky was clearing and there was the promise of better weather.
    Morag ambled along a creek bed. Since the earthquake, it was as if the territory had been entirelyrearranged. Boulders that she had never seen before had tumbled from mountains and blocked up several parts of the creek, causing small pools to form. It was no longer a simple task to follow the creek to the middle of the MacDonegal territory. After several hours of travel, Morag found that she had swung far out of MacDonegal territory and skirted closer to the river that ran into the Outermost.
    It was not, however, a tumbled boulder that caught her attention, but a small creek stone polished to a gleaming black finish by the water. She had just set her front paws in a shallow pool when she spotted it. It sparkled like a dark moon in the water and when she looked closely, she saw a pattern of swirling lines. Like eddies in the creek, the lines spiraled around and around. There was something vaguely hypnotic about the spinning design. But more than hypnotic, it kindled a dim memory in Morag. It was disturbing. She turned stiff-legged in the stream with her tail pointing straight out and howled