In winter and spring, he visited Green’s old den. He spoke to Green’s seedling oak. The tiny tree wore his scent. He brought good earth to her roots and gave her his blessing. Now, he wanted to hunt, to be washed clean of memory by the weight of the mountains, to be a stranger to the sky until the snows fell again.
The dark precipice at the deepest point of his universe called to him whenever his mind turned toward mourning. That call was dangerous. He wanted to drink in the silence of stone and let it heal him.
It didn’t matter what he wanted.
Most of all, like his mother before him, he wanted to serve the mountains.
He felt the under-saint’s tendrils lazily brushing the stone beneath his paws. He had angled for the perfect ambush for a month.
A careful trap. Wasted.
He growled and felt the saint convulse and slip back into smokeand hideous potential, retreating into abstraction like a groundhog diving for its burrow.
It would return. It had something to prove.
Let it try.
The wolf bared his teeth, then swung the plane of his perception vertically, beginning the journey skyward, running through stone that welcomed his passing.
During his ascent, he tried to focus on the new smell.
What was the change he sensed?
The mountain distrusted unexpected shifts.
So did he.
Yet, the scent did not register as anger.
Not hunger.
Not panic.
Not an invader.
Not an injury.
It was the vibration of an approaching…what?
A parallel world. A mirror place. A point of intersection thinning to permeability.
It was a prickle on his skin, the mountain’s skin.
Such sensations could presage an unwelcome coming. A threat to solve.
A flux worm or the Fickle Seamstress.
So why did this feel different?
Up through the stone, the hollows, the stacked slate, the clear water, the root thickets, the living soil.
He rose from the earth into the heartwood of autumn, crisp and electric. The world of air and light stood on the border of sleep, where stubborn wakefulness feels the fullness of its power. Creatures that rejected the dormancy of the cold, the dead months, walked the world like orphans left behind by the living warmth.
The sun was setting and the wind swam with a million spent leaves on their pilgrimage back to becoming soil. Catskill stood and raisedhis muzzle, the red horizon muddying the pale bone of his skull. The smell was clearer here.
A change.
An arrival.
