Impossible.
It was a trick.
There was too much wrongness in it.
He couldn’t afford two invaders.
He should kill it.
Would his mother have killed it?
No.
We do not trouble about root nippers when an under-saint goes prowling.
He left the not-man shivering in his brittle den.
The deer had done another space-blur and was elsewhere.
It didn’t matter.
There was no hiding from him, not in the mountains.
Every life the frozen enemy claimed was an insult.
It was a taker without reciprocity.
It was an unliving pestilence. A waster. A killer for nothing. A hollow blight that shed its emptiness wherever it went.
The mountains wrote poetry.
The deer scattered the words like sow bugs beneath a kicked log.
The wolf did not dream,
except when he did.
Twice he dreamed of the not-man.
Strange upon strange.
Tonight’s dream was different.
The entrance to his den,
south bitterroot cave,
shifted into Mother’s muzzle and spoke.
“What is family?”
The pack.
“Why?”
We are the mountain’s own.
“Service to the mountain is family?”
