Firstborn (8 page)

IT TOOK THE POOR EARTHBOUND
creatures two full days just to reach the first big river. And then they had to trek well upstream to find a place to ford it without getting swept away. It was another day before we reached the interstate. The wolves waited till the dead of night, when fewer of the wheeled behemoths were rolling by, and dashed across.

The journey was hard on Frick, but he dragged himself along. On the afternoon of the fifth day we finally reached the ridge overlooking the Lamar Valley. It looked even grander than a week ago, the sun at our backs showing up the majestic peaks to the east.

“Did I exaggerate?” Raze said smugly.

Hope was agog. “I never dreamed such a place could exist.”

“Blue Boy, look at the elk,” Alberta said.

Blue Boy was salivating, but he insisted that we find a home base before thinking about hunting. Since Raze knew the area, Blue Boy let him lead us into the valley. However, Blue Boy wasn't cut out to be a follower, and when we came to a tributary of the main river, he barked for us to stop. Wolves prefer to settle near a water source, and he liked the look of the stream.

“This is Soda Butte Creek,” Raze said. “But I know a better one.”

Lodgepole pines seemed to be very common in Yellowstone, and as Raze led us north, I spotted the warbler, Audubon, in one of them.

“Maggie the magpie,” he said when I landed on his branch. “Sorry, couldn't resist.”

“I'm used to it,” I said.

We chatted a bit, mostly about my recent travels. When I flew on, I found four of the wolves—Alberta, Frick, Lupa, and Hope—by another tributary off the main river.

“This one's called Slough Creek,” Hope said. “Raze says it never dries up.”

“He and Blue Boy went ahead to scout things out,” Alberta said. “There's a scent post on this willow.”

I'd landed in the droopy tree, but I didn't know what a “scent post” was.

“It's how we wolves mark our territory,” Alberta explained. “But Raze says it's an old one.”

“Smells fresh to me,” Frick muttered.

I flew on upstream, gliding over a tree that had fallen across the current and landing on a big boulder by the side of the creek. Blue Boy and Raze were talking in the boulder's shade.

“Choice, huh?” Raze said, looking up a slope.

“Surprised it hasn't been claimed,” Blue Boy said.

“It was. See, somebody dug a den. But now it's here for the taking.”

Most of this side of the creek was wooded, but a grassy swath stretched from the boulder to the hilltop. Partway up the slope was a solitary aspen, and above that a hole that must have served as a den, and standing like sentinels near the top of the hill were a pair of lodgepole pines. It really was an inviting location, open and sunny yet close to the shelter of the woods, convenient to the game-filled valley yet a bit secluded, too. But Blue Boy didn't seem quite sold on it. He kept sniffing the air, his whiskers quivering. Then a howl made his ears shoot up. It was the sort of satisfied howl he sometimes gave himself on the way home from a successful hunt.

“Let's get out of here,” he said.

Raze didn't budge. A moment later a pack of wolves came trotting out of the woods: five adults and four pups. The pups yapped excitedly, racing toward the den.

“Let's go,” Blue Boy hissed.

“Scared?” Raze said.

This stunned me—and Blue Boy, too, I think. Before Blue Boy could react, Raze stepped out of the boulder's shadow. The ears on the adult wolves up the slope shot forward. The biggest of them, a black-furred alpha male, stepped to the fore, fixing Raze with a fierce squint.

“Back for more?” he said.

Raze took a step up the hill and snarled. The pups huddled together, whimpering, but the adults snarled back. The alpha started down the hill, a ruff standing out around his neck. Raze held his ground. I tried to will Blue Boy to get out of there.

He didn't. He stepped out of the shadow and gave the alpha up the hill the same level gaze he'd given Frick on their first encounter. But Blue Boy wasn't wounded now. The alpha froze. So did the rest of his pack. My mind raced. How could I have been so dense? In a flash I saw what Raze had been up to all along, since first coming across us last winter. It wasn't the fresh antelope that had kept him from turning tail and running when he saw Blue Boy—it was Blue Boy himself. He must have thought: now
there's
a wolf to get me revenge on my father! He must have been plotting to bring about this very moment ever since. The last card he'd played, accusing Blue Boy of being scared, had been risky, but clever.

Unnerving as it was to think of Blue Boy facing this pack, I couldn't help sympathizing with Raze's father. What a rude shock it must have been to see a wolf like Blue Boy emerge from the shadows! As my eyes flitted between the two alphas, a leaf blew off the aspen. It seesawed down through the air. When it hit the ground, Raze's father snarled:

“Off my territory.”

I knew Blue Boy would never take an order like that. As he snarled back, all the wolves tensed up. But it was clear things would be settled between the two alphas.

When they attacked each other, the snarls and growls were so chilling I flinched and looked away. That was how I happened to catch the look of satisfaction that flashed across Raze's face.

WHEN I COULD BRING MYSELF
to look up the slope again, Raze's father lay on his side with blood gushing from his torn throat. Blue Boy lifted his bloody snout and let out what must have been an instinctive howl of triumph. The slain wolf's companions gaped in dumb horror. I could only imagine their feelings at seeing their leader dispatched so swiftly. When Blue Boy lowered his snout, his eyes settled on them. They easily outnumbered him, even with Raze, but not one of them made a move.

Hearing something behind me, I turned to see Alberta rushing up along the creek with Lupa, Frick, and Hope in her wake. Even before they rounded the boulder, the other pack gathered their pups and fled. Remembering what Audubon had said about the winning pack slaughtering the losers, I figured that after what must have happened up in Canada, Blue Boy would be merciless. But he didn't give chase.

“Your old pack?” he said as the last of them disappeared into the woods.

“Sorry, thought they'd moved on,” Raze said with a shrug. “But they have now. It's all ours.”

“Your father?” Blue Boy said, eyeing the mangled corpse.

“He was a nasty old tyrant. I'll get rid of him.” Raze snorted. “What's left of him.”

As Raze dragged his father's remains into the woods, the other wolves came up the slope.

“What happened, Blue Boy?” said Frick. “Did that fool wolf challenge you?”

“Are you all right?” Alberta said, licking blood off Blue Boy's muzzle.

Blue Boy licked her back.

“It is a nice spot,” Lupa said, surveying the slope.

“Look, Mother, there's a den already dug,” said Hope.

All the traveling had worn Frick out, and he conked out as soon as he lay down. The others were hungry, but it was getting to be late in the day and they were weary, too. Hope and Lupa and Alberta found sleeping spots near the den. Blue Boy stood sentinel farther up the hill. I settled in the aspen. Raze spent a long time in the woods before rejoining the rest of us. I don't know if he was giving his father wolfish last rites or snacking on him.

In the pearly predawn light Blue Boy rousted everyone up. Frick remained at the den site while the others followed Blue Boy along a ridge trail in their usual hunting order: Alberta second, then Lupa, Raze, and Hope. I flew overhead. From a promontory overlooking the valley Blue Boy led the party down into the bottomland, aiming for a bull elk that had strayed from the herd. Blue Boy and Alberta circled downwind of him. The others stalked the elk from the upwind side. The elk lifted his imposing rack of antlers, sniffed the air, and bolted away from the stalkers—straight toward Alberta. She leaped up and clamped her jaws onto the right side of his neck. Blue Boy hit him from the other side. The elk tried in vain to knock them off with his antlers. He staggered a few steps, carrying both wolves, before stumbling to his knees. In a trice the other three wolves were on him too. It was a quick death.

The bull was my first taste of elk. I liked it. But the wolves
loved
it. A grown elk is far bigger than a deer, yet the wolves managed to finish off half the carcass before a pair of enormous grizzlies lumbered up. Not even Blue Boy felt like tangling with them; he tore off a slab of meat for Frick and left the rest for the bears.

And so we established ourselves on the slope above Slough Creek. Food was so abundant in this northeast corner of Yellowstone that we didn't have to go hunting every morning. Some days the wolves just lolled around digesting the feast from the day before. Even when the snows came and Slough Creek froze over, there was still game to be had. The ousted pack never tried to reclaim their territory, and everyone felt the move had been worth it—except Frick, and maybe me. Frick's hindquarters were no more insulated from the cold here than in Idaho, and when mating season came, he had no more luck with Lupa than last year. He spent more and more of his time sleeping. Often he was still out when the other wolves returned from the hunt. As for me, with food so plentiful my game-spotting abilities were no longer needed, and I began to feel a bit extraneous.

On the brighter side, the snow finally began to melt, and as the creek swelled, so did Alberta's belly. Toward the end of April she disappeared into the pre-dug den. A week later we heard the whimpers of newborns. After depositing his chunks of elk meat in the den entrance, Blue Boy took to lying just outside, his ears pricked up. He was sure he could distinguish three different yaps. He started getting up well before the others to watch for the pups. Late one moonlit night in mid-May I woke to see him pacing outside the den as if the ground were on fire. There are places in Yellowstone where the ground actually
is
on fire, but here on the slope above Slough Creek the snow pack had only just melted, and there was still an eyebrow of snow at the foot of my aspen.

It was odd to see Blue Boy nervous, but I could understand his anxiety. He hadn't been lucky with offspring. He'd lost his whole first litter, and of his second litter there was only Hope.

“Think they're coming out today?” I asked softly.

“I can feel it,” he said.

The other wolves were still curled up asleep. Over the mountains to the east the sky was still a rich magpie-black. A faint, triangular glow appeared—false dawn, it's called—then little by little the sky lightened to the nondescript gray of a catbird. Suddenly Blue Boy stopped pacing. Even from my aspen I'd heard the yap.

“Must be the firstborn,” he whispered. “Sounds like a boy, doesn't it?”

I could understand his eagerness for a son, too: a wolf in his own magnificent image. As the rising sun began to gild the mountaintops, birds on the other side of Slough Creek started twittering—thrushes, by the off-key sound of them. Hope and Lupa stirred, and Raze, too.

All of a sudden a pair of pups stumbled out of the den. They were roughly the same size, a fluffy brown female and a mostly black male. When Alberta came out right behind them, Blue Boy barked happily and gave her a congratulatory nuzzle. The fuzz balls tumbled around in the new grass. Then two more male pups appeared—and one was riding on the other's back! The rider was a runt, his mount definitely the biggest of the litter.

Blue Boy shot Alberta a look of surprise. She shrugged. Blue Boy sniffed and knelt down. The first two pups wasted no time in toddling up on their little bowed legs and licking him under his chin. The runt slid off his brother's back and did the same. But the last pup got distracted.

“The firstborn?” Blue Boy said, eyeing him.

“Mmm,” said Alberta.

A little downhill from the den a beetle with an iridescent shell had landed on a twig. The firstborn pup stepped tentatively that way, and the beetle opened his wings and took off. With a burp of excitement the pup chased it. He tripped and tumbled down the slope. If he hadn't bumped into my aspen, he might have rolled all the way down to the creek.

“Quite the little adventurer,” Hope said. “What are you going to call him, Mother?”

“It's your father's turn,” Alberta said. “I got to name you.”

Blue Boy glanced down the notch, toward the valley. “How about Lamar?” he said. Then louder: “Lamar!”

The firstborn pup turned and clambered up the hill. But just when it looked as if he was finally going to pay his father tribute, the sun hit the creek, striking diamonds of light off it.

“This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen,” Lamar exclaimed.

“Out of your vast experience of beautiful places,” said Frick, who'd woken at the commotion.