The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell
“You’re very beautiful, you know, but you have the instincts of a carpet,” said Feo. “Come on! We’re trying to do this quickly! Mama’s worried.” She took a bone from her pocket and skied in a circle around the wolf. “Come on, Tenderfoot!”
Feo reached the lip of the hill and tipped backward over the edge. The wolf followed, not neatly or gracefully, but at least she was running. They made half a mile’s worth of slow progress before the wolf stopped, turned once in a circle, and fell asleep.
Feo grinned, and clamped a fist over Tenderfoot’s jaw and shook it gently. “Wake up! This isn’t the place for sleeping. You were very good, though, for a beginner. Here.” She held out the bone. The wolf’s tongue was rough and hungry against her palm.
As Tenderfoot chewed, Feo felt the hairs lift along her arms and the base of her neck, and for a moment she was unsure why. She laid a hand on the wolf’s neck; with the other she felt at her waist for her knife. It came again: a smell in the wind. “Just an elk,” she said out loud. “A damp elk.” But it smelled, in fact, of damp human clothing. She stared around the clearing: only snow and sky, turning the slanting pinks of sunset.
She straightened up. “Quick. We need to hide you for the night.”
Usually, the wolves who came to be made wild slept under the trees. But since Rakov’s visit, Mama said, everything had to be different.
“Come.” Feo led the wolf up to the house, glancing over her shoulder every other step, trying to keep her back to the trees. “Hurry. We’ll put you by the stove, just for tonight. You must try not to eat the cutlery. We had a wolf once who ate all the forks. It gave him indigestion.”
FOUR
The next day was a day of discoveries. Feo discovered two things: that the wolf was not fat and that the world was not safe.
Feo was running through the woods, one hand on Tenderfoot’s neck, looking out for squirrels. They saw a jackdaw poking hopefully in the snow.
“That’s food, Tenderfoot! Food, quick!”
Several things happened at once. The wolf gave a howl of terror at the sight of the bird. The side of her belly moved and pulsed. And a person fell out of a tree, pointed a pistol at Feo’s head, and said, “Put your hands where I can see them.”
Feo jerked to a stop. Very slowly—so slowly, she hoped, that he would not notice she was moving—she inched to stand in front of the wolf.
“Hands up!”
Feo put her hands up. “Who are you?” An unfamiliar dizzy panic swept over her. She tried to shove the wolf’s great bulk behind her knees, out of sight.
“I’m a soldier. In the Imperial Army.”
Feo swallowed. Terror bleached right through her, and she lowered one hand to take hold of Tenderfoot’s neck, just in case she tried to run near that gun. “Don’t move, lapushka,” she whispered. “Stay.”
“Both hands up!” said the soldier.
“If you try to shoot her,” Feo said, “I’ll kill you.”
“Will you?” said the soldier. He came a step closer, gun outstretched. “I don’t see how.”
“I will! Get back, I swear I’ll bite you!” The soldier stopped, his face astonished. Feo breathed in. “If you come a step closer, I’ll pull your fingers out.”
The soldier looked interested, despite himself. “Could you actually do that?” His face, twisted in curiosity, looked younger than she had expected.
“Yes,” lied Feo. And then: “Probably, actually. If you stayed still.” She stepped forward. He didn’t move. Her hands were shaking, so she hid them behind her back. “I mean it, though—don’t point that at us!” He still didn’t move. “Mama says pointing a gun is a failure of imagination.” She gestured with her elbow at Tenderfoot. “And I have a wolf.”
“I know. I’ve been watching.” The soldier picked some pine needles from his uniform and brushed the snow from his hair. His voice was too high for an adult’s, she thought. A boy’s voice. “She’s not notably fierce, is she?”
Feo was surprised by how annoyed she felt. “She’s much better than yesterday already! Yesterday you wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d started knitting. And besides,” she added, speaking the thing she had just realized, “she’s pregnant. You can’t shoot a pregnant wolf. You can’t kill something before it’s had a chance to try out life.”
“I have to.” The boy rubbed his arms. He was tall and fair, and without the covering of snow he looked very thin; the bones in his hands seemed to be making a bid to escape from his skin. His voice sounded of cities: Soft, Feo thought. He didn’t look very soldierly. “It’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do. Rules have to be followed.”
“No, they don’t.” Feo risked another step toward him. “Please. Really, they don’t.”
“They’ll punish me if I don’t.”
“Well, I—I’ll wolf you if you do.” But she sounded only slightly less frightened than she felt. She kept one hand on Tenderfoot.
The boy shook his head. “I’m the one with the gun here. One gun beats one wolf.”
That was so obviously true that Feo could do nothing but scowl. “Who’ll punish you, though?” Feo thought she might know. “General Rakov?”
“Don’t say that so loud!” The boy looked around as if expecting Rakov to spring out from behind a squirrel. “Yes, him.”
“What does he do?”
“He doesn’t do much personally, not usually. But. He likes to watch.”
“Oh,” said Feo. There was something terrible in the boy’s voice: She hadn’t realized it was possible to fit so much fear into so few words.
“He makes his officers bring us to his study. I bled for three days once.” The boy twitched his shoulders, as if shaking something off. “Look—I have to shoot the wolf. It doesn’t matter if I want to. You don’t understand: There are six of us on watch, and if I don’t catch you, someone else will.”
“What!” Feo stared around the clearing. The air was still. “Where?” She should have brought more than one knife, she thought. It was a stupid mistake.
“Not here. We’re spaced over twenty miles. Anyone wolf wilding is to be arrested, Rakov said. Wolves are to be shot. Those were the orders.”
“I wasn’t wilding. I was just playing.”
“You don’t look the sort of person who just plays.” As he said it, there was a rustle of branches far off. The boy cried out—a short, sharp shriek, quickly stifled—and Feo saw Black’s back as he streaked past among the trees, heading toward her.
“Oh no.” Feo whispered the strongest of the swearwords she had learned from the driver the day before.
“Is that—”
“Go, Black!” she called. She pointed away, toward the chapel, but the wolf kept coming. “Black, please, go! He’s got a gun!”
The boy raised his pistol.
“No!” said Feo. “Go back!” She couldn’t move from Tenderfoot’s side, but she spat at the boy. He jumped back, but only a step: not enough. “Listen, if you shoot him, I’ll find where you sleep and come after you in the night.” The boy’s eyes were widening. “I will! That’s not a joke.”
Black erupted from the trees, growling. The boy cried out. Feo threw herself over Tenderfoot’s belly and screwed her eyes shut, but the pistol did not fire. She opened them: The boy stood where he was, frozen. The pistol in his hand was shaking.
Black slid to a halt in the snow and rested his head against Feo’s thigh. He must have picked up the tension, the shiver in her skin, because another growl came from his throat.
“Oh dear,” said Feo.
“What’s going on?” asked the boy.
“He doesn’t like you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like you. And he can feel it.”
“Well, stop it!”
“Disliking you?”
“Yes! Now! Stop it immediately!”
“You very much started it! You’re pointing a gun at me!”
“I order you to control that wolf!”
“I can
’t! That’s the point. He might do what I ask, but he might not. He’s not a pet.” She shouted the final word, and Black growled again. The sound shook snow from the trees above them.
The boy, Feo saw, was shaking like a whole forest of leaves. “Don’t let it come nearer!”
“Put your gun down, then!” Feo decided to risk it: She turned her back on him and knelt in the snow. “Hush, all right?” She put a hand on each side of Black’s face and breathed warm air onto his nose. “We’re all right, cherniy. There’s no need to eat anybody today.” She glanced round at the boy.
He was standing with his fists balled tight, but his gun was in the snow.
“I’ll let you know if that changes,” she said to Black. The wolf wouldn’t understand the words, but the sound—the softness, a whisper—reassured him, and the hackles along his back dropped down.
There was the sound of a throat being ostentatiously cleared. “So—what now?” said the boy.
“Now you swear never to tell anyone you saw us,” said Feo. She tried to put toughness and growl into her voice. “Unless you want to find a wolf under your bed, eating your toes.”
“Look, I’m supposed to arrest you,” he said. “If they find out I saw you and didn’t take you, they’d . . .”
“What? What would they do?”
“Honestly, you don’t want to know what they’d do.”
“No, I do. A bit.”
“You don’t. They always say the Russian army wasn’t built on compliments and milk. I have to arrest you. All right? I’m going to, right now. Are you ready?” He drew himself up to his full height, which was at least a foot taller than Feo.
Feo looked hard at him, at the way he stood, at the skin around his eyes and on his wrists. Wrist skin is very revealing, of many things. “You’re the same age as me.”
“I’m not! I’m thirteen: nearly fourteen.”
“That’s still not old enough to arrest anybody.”
“I’m supposed to call the others. I have a whistle, here.” He gestured to the inside of his coat. “I’m going to do it now. I have to.” He began to fumble with the gold buttons on the front of his coat.
At that moment Tenderfoot, who had been hunkered low, panting next to Black, created a diversion. She tipped onto her side and gave a short, guttural howl.
“Oh no!” The swoop Feo’s heart gave had nothing to do with the boy or the gun. “Tenderfoot!”
“What’s happening?”
“Be quiet!” said Feo. “She needs to concentrate.”
“Why?”
“Hush!” Feo knelt.
“Is she taking some kind of test?”
“She’s giving birth!” Feo laid a hand on the wolf’s pulsing belly. “Hush, lapushka. Good girl. You’re safe, I promise.” She laid a hand on the wolf’s muzzle to check her breathing. It was ragged, and Tenderfoot’s muscles were tight, and there was urgency in her eyes. She was panting.
“Right now?” said the boy. He edged closer. “How long will it take?”
“Keep back, please. She doesn’t need you breathing all over her. And yes, obviously, right now.”
The soldierly pose disappeared. The boy who took a step forward was just a boy. “Can I watch?”
“Only if you give me that gun.”
He hesitated. “But you’ll—”
“I won’t shoot you with it. Probably. But you can’t be near us with a gun. Nobody is allowed to be near a pregnant wolf with a gun.” She tried to say it as if it were a law, rather than something she had just made up.
He barely hesitated before he picked the gun out of the snow and tossed it, barrel first, toward her. Feo caught it, sniffed it, and threw it deep into the woods.
“You can come this close,” said Feo, and she drew a line in the snow, “but not closer.” She turned her back on him: The boy could wait. There were more important things.
Tenderfoot’s breath was coming in snuffles that blew the snow around her muzzle into flurries.
The boy edged closer and knelt, two wolves’ breadths away from the girl. “Is it painful?” he asked. “She looks in pain.”
“Of course it’s painful!” said Feo. “But less bad than for humans, Mama says. Because their heads are smaller.”
“Can I do anything to help? I’m Ilya, by the way.”
“No. Not yet, anyway. You can stay back.”
“You’re supposed to say your name now. The other soldiers say you and your mother are socially malnourished.”
“Can’t you just be quiet? This is important!”
“I know your name, anyway. It’s Feodora.”
Feo ignored him: She ignored anyone who called her by her full name. It was a policy.
Tenderfoot gave a breathy howl where she lay, and a tiny parcel of fur and slime landed in the snow. Feo held her breath, unsure what to do. The parcel was not moving. Tenderfoot twisted round to sniff at it, licked it. Then she turned away. The noise that came from her was more of a wail than a growl.
“What now?” said Ilya.
“I don’t know! All right?” Feo picked up the little parcel of wet fur. It was much too small, and much too still. She licked the hem of her cloak and very gently rubbed the furry body. Nothing happened. She touched it with a fingertip. There was no heartbeat.
“Is everything working?” said Ilya.
“No, it’s not!” said Feo. Frantically, she opened the pup’s tiny mouth with her little finger and breathed in a puff of air. It did not move. Already the body was growing cold.
“What’s happened?”
“They’ve been feeding her the wrong things.” She dug her nails into her palms. “It’s dead.”
“Dead!” He looked stricken. “Already? Can’t we—”
“No. It was dead in the womb. It’s too small: You can see.” She ducked her head, hiding behind her hair so he couldn’t see that her face was wet. “People don’t know how to feed wolves. Idiots.”
There was more straining coming from the wolf, and a strange whining noise Feo had never heard a wolf make.
“Wait! There’s another! Be quiet while she pushes!” Feo stroked Tenderfoot’s head and peered at her hind end. “Well done, lapushka! Steady, now. You can do this.”
“What’s happening?” hissed Ilya.
“Which part of ‘be quiet or the wolves will eat you’ have you not understood?” said Feo. Her chest was burning: She realized she’d been holding her breath. She gulped in air, and then: “Sorry. I’m not—she needs quiet.” She stroked the fur along the wolf’s spine and prayed to whichever saint took care of wolf pups and vulnerable, snuffling things.
Tenderfoot strained again, and the lump that slid into Feo’s waiting hands was bigger, and wriggling hard.
“It’s alive!” said Ilya. “I can see, it’s alive!”
Feo beamed down into the snow. “Yes! But don’t jinx it! Wait for a moment.” She set the pup down by Tenderfoot’s mouth.
The new mother licked it clean. Wolves do not purr, but they do vibrate with pleasure. Tenderfoot was vibrating now. She laid the parcel on Feo’s knees.
Ilya gave a squeak. “Look at that!”
The parcel moved. It gave a cough, no louder than the rustling of paper. Feo could feel, through her skirt, its fingernail-size beating heart.
“Oh!” said Feo. She bent her head to whisper. “Welcome to the world, little one.” It was like being given a kingdom.
“Did you see that?” said Ilya. “She gave him to you!”
“It’s what they do in a pack. They raise the pups together.”
The look on the boy’s face was so exactly like Black’s when food was nearby that Feo was startled: His expression was hungry, and full of longing. She shifted in the snow to make room for him. “Here. Come and see.”
“It’s blind!” he gasped. “Feodora, help it!”
“It’s not blind. I mean—it’s supposed to be. They don’t open their eyes for about ten days.”
The pup’s hips stuck up in
two sharp points, as did his shoulders. He was black with white toes, and with smudges of gray on his chest. His eyes were closed, and as soon as Feo placed him at Tenderfoot’s nipple, his paws began to scrabble at her stomach, blindly coaxing out the milk. Feo laughed. It looked, irresistibly, like an old man dancing.
Ilya put out a hand to touch the pup, then hesitated, retracted it, sat on it. “Look at that,” he breathed. “The cub’s drinking, isn’t it?”
“Pup,” said Feo. “Wolf babies are pups.”
“No more flesh on him than a kitchen table,” said Ilya. Feo stared, and he blushed. “That’s what my mother said about me when I was born. Before she died, not afterward. My father said it’d be useful to have a thin child: less to feed.” He moved closer.
Feo wasn’t sure what to say. The boy wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the pup, who was accidentally tasting snow for the first time. The pup sneezed: tiny, doll-size sneezes.
She said, “I’m Feo, actually. Not Feodora.”
“Feo. Can I touch it, Feo?”
“Him. He’s a boy. It’s really up to Tenderfoot, not me.” But Ilya’s face was so hopeful it hurt her chest to look at him, and she shrugged. “If you make sure she can always see your hands, she won’t bite. They get nervous when they can’t see both your hands.”
He quivered from boots to cap as he stroked the pup. Feo watched him. His eyelashes were so blond they were almost invisible, and they were covered in snow. There was a scar on one eyelid.
“The General wanted us to shoot this?” he asked. “He said wolves were vicious.”
“He’s afraid,” said Feo. “Fear is as dangerous as hatred sometimes. Animals know that.”
“But look at his claws!” said Ilya. Feo looked: They were short and thin as fingernail clippings. Ilya touched the pup’s paws with the tip of his little finger. “You couldn’t shoot a wolf pup,” he said. “It’s only just begun.”
They sat, wolves and children jumbled together, for hours. They didn’t speak much: They just watched the pup staggering between his mother’s nipples, and clambering over the mountain of her side, and sliding off into the snow.
It was dusk when Feo roused her pack. Tenderfoot lifted her pup in her mouth and looked to the girl for directions.
Feo reached the lip of the hill and tipped backward over the edge. The wolf followed, not neatly or gracefully, but at least she was running. They made half a mile’s worth of slow progress before the wolf stopped, turned once in a circle, and fell asleep.
Feo grinned, and clamped a fist over Tenderfoot’s jaw and shook it gently. “Wake up! This isn’t the place for sleeping. You were very good, though, for a beginner. Here.” She held out the bone. The wolf’s tongue was rough and hungry against her palm.
As Tenderfoot chewed, Feo felt the hairs lift along her arms and the base of her neck, and for a moment she was unsure why. She laid a hand on the wolf’s neck; with the other she felt at her waist for her knife. It came again: a smell in the wind. “Just an elk,” she said out loud. “A damp elk.” But it smelled, in fact, of damp human clothing. She stared around the clearing: only snow and sky, turning the slanting pinks of sunset.
She straightened up. “Quick. We need to hide you for the night.”
Usually, the wolves who came to be made wild slept under the trees. But since Rakov’s visit, Mama said, everything had to be different.
“Come.” Feo led the wolf up to the house, glancing over her shoulder every other step, trying to keep her back to the trees. “Hurry. We’ll put you by the stove, just for tonight. You must try not to eat the cutlery. We had a wolf once who ate all the forks. It gave him indigestion.”
FOUR
The next day was a day of discoveries. Feo discovered two things: that the wolf was not fat and that the world was not safe.
Feo was running through the woods, one hand on Tenderfoot’s neck, looking out for squirrels. They saw a jackdaw poking hopefully in the snow.
“That’s food, Tenderfoot! Food, quick!”
Several things happened at once. The wolf gave a howl of terror at the sight of the bird. The side of her belly moved and pulsed. And a person fell out of a tree, pointed a pistol at Feo’s head, and said, “Put your hands where I can see them.”
Feo jerked to a stop. Very slowly—so slowly, she hoped, that he would not notice she was moving—she inched to stand in front of the wolf.
“Hands up!”
Feo put her hands up. “Who are you?” An unfamiliar dizzy panic swept over her. She tried to shove the wolf’s great bulk behind her knees, out of sight.
“I’m a soldier. In the Imperial Army.”
Feo swallowed. Terror bleached right through her, and she lowered one hand to take hold of Tenderfoot’s neck, just in case she tried to run near that gun. “Don’t move, lapushka,” she whispered. “Stay.”
“Both hands up!” said the soldier.
“If you try to shoot her,” Feo said, “I’ll kill you.”
“Will you?” said the soldier. He came a step closer, gun outstretched. “I don’t see how.”
“I will! Get back, I swear I’ll bite you!” The soldier stopped, his face astonished. Feo breathed in. “If you come a step closer, I’ll pull your fingers out.”
The soldier looked interested, despite himself. “Could you actually do that?” His face, twisted in curiosity, looked younger than she had expected.
“Yes,” lied Feo. And then: “Probably, actually. If you stayed still.” She stepped forward. He didn’t move. Her hands were shaking, so she hid them behind her back. “I mean it, though—don’t point that at us!” He still didn’t move. “Mama says pointing a gun is a failure of imagination.” She gestured with her elbow at Tenderfoot. “And I have a wolf.”
“I know. I’ve been watching.” The soldier picked some pine needles from his uniform and brushed the snow from his hair. His voice was too high for an adult’s, she thought. A boy’s voice. “She’s not notably fierce, is she?”
Feo was surprised by how annoyed she felt. “She’s much better than yesterday already! Yesterday you wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d started knitting. And besides,” she added, speaking the thing she had just realized, “she’s pregnant. You can’t shoot a pregnant wolf. You can’t kill something before it’s had a chance to try out life.”
“I have to.” The boy rubbed his arms. He was tall and fair, and without the covering of snow he looked very thin; the bones in his hands seemed to be making a bid to escape from his skin. His voice sounded of cities: Soft, Feo thought. He didn’t look very soldierly. “It’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do. Rules have to be followed.”
“No, they don’t.” Feo risked another step toward him. “Please. Really, they don’t.”
“They’ll punish me if I don’t.”
“Well, I—I’ll wolf you if you do.” But she sounded only slightly less frightened than she felt. She kept one hand on Tenderfoot.
The boy shook his head. “I’m the one with the gun here. One gun beats one wolf.”
That was so obviously true that Feo could do nothing but scowl. “Who’ll punish you, though?” Feo thought she might know. “General Rakov?”
“Don’t say that so loud!” The boy looked around as if expecting Rakov to spring out from behind a squirrel. “Yes, him.”
“What does he do?”
“He doesn’t do much personally, not usually. But. He likes to watch.”
“Oh,” said Feo. There was something terrible in the boy’s voice: She hadn’t realized it was possible to fit so much fear into so few words.
“He makes his officers bring us to his study. I bled for three days once.” The boy twitched his shoulders, as if shaking something off. “Look—I have to shoot the wolf. It doesn’t matter if I want to. You don’t understand: There are six of us on watch, and if I don’t catch you, someone else will.”
“What!” Feo stared around the clearing. The air was still. “Where?” She should have brought more than one knife, she thought. It was a stupid mistake.
“Not here. We’re spaced over twenty miles. Anyone wolf wilding is to be arrested, Rakov said. Wolves are to be shot. Those were the orders.”
“I wasn’t wilding. I was just playing.”
“You don’t look the sort of person who just plays.” As he said it, there was a rustle of branches far off. The boy cried out—a short, sharp shriek, quickly stifled—and Feo saw Black’s back as he streaked past among the trees, heading toward her.
“Oh no.” Feo whispered the strongest of the swearwords she had learned from the driver the day before.
“Is that—”
“Go, Black!” she called. She pointed away, toward the chapel, but the wolf kept coming. “Black, please, go! He’s got a gun!”
The boy raised his pistol.
“No!” said Feo. “Go back!” She couldn’t move from Tenderfoot’s side, but she spat at the boy. He jumped back, but only a step: not enough. “Listen, if you shoot him, I’ll find where you sleep and come after you in the night.” The boy’s eyes were widening. “I will! That’s not a joke.”
Black erupted from the trees, growling. The boy cried out. Feo threw herself over Tenderfoot’s belly and screwed her eyes shut, but the pistol did not fire. She opened them: The boy stood where he was, frozen. The pistol in his hand was shaking.
Black slid to a halt in the snow and rested his head against Feo’s thigh. He must have picked up the tension, the shiver in her skin, because another growl came from his throat.
“Oh dear,” said Feo.
“What’s going on?” asked the boy.
“He doesn’t like you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like you. And he can feel it.”
“Well, stop it!”
“Disliking you?”
“Yes! Now! Stop it immediately!”
“You very much started it! You’re pointing a gun at me!”
“I order you to control that wolf!”
“I can
The boy, Feo saw, was shaking like a whole forest of leaves. “Don’t let it come nearer!”
“Put your gun down, then!” Feo decided to risk it: She turned her back on him and knelt in the snow. “Hush, all right?” She put a hand on each side of Black’s face and breathed warm air onto his nose. “We’re all right, cherniy. There’s no need to eat anybody today.” She glanced round at the boy.
He was standing with his fists balled tight, but his gun was in the snow.
“I’ll let you know if that changes,” she said to Black. The wolf wouldn’t understand the words, but the sound—the softness, a whisper—reassured him, and the hackles along his back dropped down.
There was the sound of a throat being ostentatiously cleared. “So—what now?” said the boy.
“Now you swear never to tell anyone you saw us,” said Feo. She tried to put toughness and growl into her voice. “Unless you want to find a wolf under your bed, eating your toes.”
“Look, I’m supposed to arrest you,” he said. “If they find out I saw you and didn’t take you, they’d . . .”
“What? What would they do?”
“Honestly, you don’t want to know what they’d do.”
“No, I do. A bit.”
“You don’t. They always say the Russian army wasn’t built on compliments and milk. I have to arrest you. All right? I’m going to, right now. Are you ready?” He drew himself up to his full height, which was at least a foot taller than Feo.
Feo looked hard at him, at the way he stood, at the skin around his eyes and on his wrists. Wrist skin is very revealing, of many things. “You’re the same age as me.”
“I’m not! I’m thirteen: nearly fourteen.”
“That’s still not old enough to arrest anybody.”
“I’m supposed to call the others. I have a whistle, here.” He gestured to the inside of his coat. “I’m going to do it now. I have to.” He began to fumble with the gold buttons on the front of his coat.
At that moment Tenderfoot, who had been hunkered low, panting next to Black, created a diversion. She tipped onto her side and gave a short, guttural howl.
“Oh no!” The swoop Feo’s heart gave had nothing to do with the boy or the gun. “Tenderfoot!”
“What’s happening?”
“Be quiet!” said Feo. “She needs to concentrate.”
“Why?”
“Hush!” Feo knelt.
“Is she taking some kind of test?”
“She’s giving birth!” Feo laid a hand on the wolf’s pulsing belly. “Hush, lapushka. Good girl. You’re safe, I promise.” She laid a hand on the wolf’s muzzle to check her breathing. It was ragged, and Tenderfoot’s muscles were tight, and there was urgency in her eyes. She was panting.
“Right now?” said the boy. He edged closer. “How long will it take?”
“Keep back, please. She doesn’t need you breathing all over her. And yes, obviously, right now.”
The soldierly pose disappeared. The boy who took a step forward was just a boy. “Can I watch?”
“Only if you give me that gun.”
He hesitated. “But you’ll—”
“I won’t shoot you with it. Probably. But you can’t be near us with a gun. Nobody is allowed to be near a pregnant wolf with a gun.” She tried to say it as if it were a law, rather than something she had just made up.
He barely hesitated before he picked the gun out of the snow and tossed it, barrel first, toward her. Feo caught it, sniffed it, and threw it deep into the woods.
“You can come this close,” said Feo, and she drew a line in the snow, “but not closer.” She turned her back on him: The boy could wait. There were more important things.
Tenderfoot’s breath was coming in snuffles that blew the snow around her muzzle into flurries.
The boy edged closer and knelt, two wolves’ breadths away from the girl. “Is it painful?” he asked. “She looks in pain.”
“Of course it’s painful!” said Feo. “But less bad than for humans, Mama says. Because their heads are smaller.”
“Can I do anything to help? I’m Ilya, by the way.”
“No. Not yet, anyway. You can stay back.”
“You’re supposed to say your name now. The other soldiers say you and your mother are socially malnourished.”
“Can’t you just be quiet? This is important!”
“I know your name, anyway. It’s Feodora.”
Feo ignored him: She ignored anyone who called her by her full name. It was a policy.
Tenderfoot gave a breathy howl where she lay, and a tiny parcel of fur and slime landed in the snow. Feo held her breath, unsure what to do. The parcel was not moving. Tenderfoot twisted round to sniff at it, licked it. Then she turned away. The noise that came from her was more of a wail than a growl.
“What now?” said Ilya.
“I don’t know! All right?” Feo picked up the little parcel of wet fur. It was much too small, and much too still. She licked the hem of her cloak and very gently rubbed the furry body. Nothing happened. She touched it with a fingertip. There was no heartbeat.
“Is everything working?” said Ilya.
“No, it’s not!” said Feo. Frantically, she opened the pup’s tiny mouth with her little finger and breathed in a puff of air. It did not move. Already the body was growing cold.
“What’s happened?”
“They’ve been feeding her the wrong things.” She dug her nails into her palms. “It’s dead.”
“Dead!” He looked stricken. “Already? Can’t we—”
“No. It was dead in the womb. It’s too small: You can see.” She ducked her head, hiding behind her hair so he couldn’t see that her face was wet. “People don’t know how to feed wolves. Idiots.”
There was more straining coming from the wolf, and a strange whining noise Feo had never heard a wolf make.
“Wait! There’s another! Be quiet while she pushes!” Feo stroked Tenderfoot’s head and peered at her hind end. “Well done, lapushka! Steady, now. You can do this.”
“What’s happening?” hissed Ilya.
“Which part of ‘be quiet or the wolves will eat you’ have you not understood?” said Feo. Her chest was burning: She realized she’d been holding her breath. She gulped in air, and then: “Sorry. I’m not—she needs quiet.” She stroked the fur along the wolf’s spine and prayed to whichever saint took care of wolf pups and vulnerable, snuffling things.
Tenderfoot strained again, and the lump that slid into Feo’s waiting hands was bigger, and wriggling hard.
“It’s alive!” said Ilya. “I can see, it’s alive!”
Feo beamed down into the snow. “Yes! But don’t jinx it! Wait for a moment.” She set the pup down by Tenderfoot’s mouth.
The new mother licked it clean. Wolves do not purr, but they do vibrate with pleasure. Tenderfoot was vibrating now. She laid the parcel on Feo’s knees.
Ilya gave a squeak. “Look at that!”
The parcel moved. It gave a cough, no louder than the rustling of paper. Feo could feel, through her skirt, its fingernail-size beating heart.
“Oh!” said Feo. She bent her head to whisper. “Welcome to the world, little one.” It was like being given a kingdom.
“Did you see that?” said Ilya. “She gave him to you!”
“It’s what they do in a pack. They raise the pups together.”
The look on the boy’s face was so exactly like Black’s when food was nearby that Feo was startled: His expression was hungry, and full of longing. She shifted in the snow to make room for him. “Here. Come and see.”
“It’s blind!” he gasped. “Feodora, help it!”
“It’s not blind. I mean—it’s supposed to be. They don’t open their eyes for about ten days.”
The pup’s hips stuck up in
Ilya put out a hand to touch the pup, then hesitated, retracted it, sat on it. “Look at that,” he breathed. “The cub’s drinking, isn’t it?”
“Pup,” said Feo. “Wolf babies are pups.”
“No more flesh on him than a kitchen table,” said Ilya. Feo stared, and he blushed. “That’s what my mother said about me when I was born. Before she died, not afterward. My father said it’d be useful to have a thin child: less to feed.” He moved closer.
Feo wasn’t sure what to say. The boy wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the pup, who was accidentally tasting snow for the first time. The pup sneezed: tiny, doll-size sneezes.
She said, “I’m Feo, actually. Not Feodora.”
“Feo. Can I touch it, Feo?”
“Him. He’s a boy. It’s really up to Tenderfoot, not me.” But Ilya’s face was so hopeful it hurt her chest to look at him, and she shrugged. “If you make sure she can always see your hands, she won’t bite. They get nervous when they can’t see both your hands.”
He quivered from boots to cap as he stroked the pup. Feo watched him. His eyelashes were so blond they were almost invisible, and they were covered in snow. There was a scar on one eyelid.
“The General wanted us to shoot this?” he asked. “He said wolves were vicious.”
“He’s afraid,” said Feo. “Fear is as dangerous as hatred sometimes. Animals know that.”
“But look at his claws!” said Ilya. Feo looked: They were short and thin as fingernail clippings. Ilya touched the pup’s paws with the tip of his little finger. “You couldn’t shoot a wolf pup,” he said. “It’s only just begun.”
They sat, wolves and children jumbled together, for hours. They didn’t speak much: They just watched the pup staggering between his mother’s nipples, and clambering over the mountain of her side, and sliding off into the snow.
It was dusk when Feo roused her pack. Tenderfoot lifted her pup in her mouth and looked to the girl for directions.