Night of the Wolf Read Online Free Page B

Supposedly it was death for men to come here, but many braved the gesa and sneaked in, concealing themselves in the trees surrounding the image. They did so because the women danced naked, danced themselves into hot desire, and they would often couple in supple abandonment with those whose voices charmed them into the darkness and whose hot spill of seed might quicken the empty womb. After all, bees in the drunken springtime plunder the dreaming orchards by both sun and moonlight. What couldn’t be earned in the marriage bed might be stolen by starlight. But all this came about in the springtime.
    Now it was autumn with the mountain winter hurrying in on its heels. Now only the wolves danced and played here in the chill moonlight. They rolled in the short, brown grass, rubbed their heads and jaws against her pillared image, and, at last, sang to the rising moon before the hunt.
     
    No, she hadn’t been beautiful, but then he’d never understood the canons of human beauty. How quick they were to try to hammer something so effervescent, so changeable into a narrow mold. Catch the wind on a net or freeze the play of sunlight on moving water, then you will know what beauty is, but you still will not have been able to lay hold of desire, the fire in the belly that brings us to triumph, heartbreak, or despair.
    He had been determined to make the human she in the grove his last. Her pain had scared him. No bitch wolf knew such suffering and perhaps none found it the gateway to the almost transcendent pleasure she displayed so freely at the last. So he stayed away from the lake and devoted himself to his duty—leading the pack, keeping them fed, ensuring the weaker members were protected, and maintaining proper order. Perhaps if he hadn’t lost his leader counterpart, the she who complemented his powers among the females, he might have escaped the trap awaiting him. But the pack’s great female died under the claws of a bear and, for a season, he had no proper mate.
    The winter had been harsh. No individual but he could remember a harsher one. The Romans haunted the valley— though he didn’t know them as Romans, only as heavily armed, mounted men who carried powerful compound bows and wanted wolf skins for some purpose of their own. A pack living in the valley was decimated.
    He led his to the heights. The men encamped in the valley slaughtered game with both hands. And, as winter wore on and the snows deepened, prey became more and more difficult to find. So when his pack pursued a lean elk into a snow bank and pulled him down, they weren’t about to yield their prey to a snarling bear who appeared and tried to take it from them.
    He and she were the leaders. They knew their duty. As the stronger, he led the attack, circling the bear, snapping at her, distracting her while the wolves fed on the steaming meat and blood of the fallen elk. The ravenous bear, her reserves of fat exhausted by the long winter and drained by her cub, wasn’t intimidated or drawn off by their tactics. She turned back toward the feeding wolves and was nearly able to maul one of the yearling males. The wolves drew away, snarling, from the carcass.
    They had to have the food, and the gray knew it. A few of the older members of the pack were already weak. He could tell by the smell of the air that a blizzard was sweeping across the pass. If they didn’t feed now, the wind and freezing temperatures would end some of their lives tonight.
    He faced the bear, backing her away from the kill with an open-mouthed roar of fury. She reared on her hind legs and swiped at him. He wasn’t quite quick enough and she left a strip of fine marks all along one side of his body. He circled, trying to get behind her, but she followed him. The she-wolf leaped, diving for a haunch. The bear whipped around, dropped to all fours, and in a movement too rapid for the eye to follow, sent the she-wolf rolling, yipping, spraying blood into the snow. But the pack mother had