“I apologize in advance, Mr. Green.”
Green had just enough time to question if it had worked before he noticed, in an offhand way, that he had slumped to the ground. The wolf slumped next to him, eye to eye. He wondered if all wolves’ eyes looked like that, like deep green water glinting with islands of gold. His consciousness became too light then and the wind caught it, sending it dancing out and away over the distant treetops, but he wasn’t alone.
Shhhh. The rocks have earsand not all of them are our friends. Be a shadow, not a sound.
Pup halted, still all gangly bones with just a fog of flesh coalescing in his ribs.
Mother formed a tongue and licked the length of Pup’s skull.
You don’t have to stop playing. Just not so loud. There will come a time when none of the deep things would dare to take you no matter the sounds you make, but that time is not yet.
Mother yawned like a cave and turned three circles before lying down in the granite hollow.
Pup eyed his game.
It wouldn’t be as fun now.
He was leaping from the root thickets to menace a great gnarled leg of oak that looked like a charging elk.
He couldn’t menace if he couldn’t growl.
So, he settled for curiosity.
Pup buried his muzzle in the stone, feeling the delicious cold enter his bones, soft and secret as fox song.
He listened with his whole skull the way mother had taught him, like a fat spider in the center of her web.
What was the wind and what was food in the trap?
That was the trick.
Pup heard many things in his bones. Lurk-cats that chewed the earth like they hated it. Shadow skates that were still half dream and swam through the ground like trout within the stone. Pinch bugs and peepers that rolled and clattered like pebbles tumbling down the mountainside.
He knew these things.
He ate these things.
The danger, Mother said, was in the deeper ones that kept their bones attuned to his sounds.
The thought made Pup tuck tail and look to his mother.
She was there.
As big and constant as gravity.
Let the monsters come. She killed monsters or chased them back to the nowhere places.
That was the duty for which the mountains rewarded them with sprawling root tangles, the under forests, and stone wilds teeming with food and beauty in the one solid deep-season of forever.
A lurk-cat was chewing up from beneath, blind in its war with earth, moving straight for Pup’s teeth. And why not? The mountains loved them best.
Time raced on.
Pain and learning.
Love and hunger.
Riddles in the dark.
