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“Where’s Wolf?” she said.
She hadn’t seen him since the argument, and no one else had either. Everyone started looking. Ayla searched her bed platform, and then every other corner of the hearth, even the curtained-off area with the basket of ashes and horse dung, which she had shown the pup. She was beginning to feel the sa
me panic that a mother feels when her child is missing.
“Here he is, Ayla!” she heard Tornec say, with relief, but she felt her stomach churn when he added, “Frebec has him.” Her surprise bordered on shock as she watched him approach. She was not the only one who stared in amazed disbelief.
Frebec, who never overlooked an opportunity to derogate Ayla’s animals, or her, for her association with them, was cradling the wolf puppy gently in his arms. He handed the wolf over to her, but she noticed a moment of hesitation, as though he gave up the small creature reluctantly, and she saw a softer look in his eyes than she had ever seen there before.
“He must have gotten scared,” Frebec explained. “Fralie said suddenly he was there, at the hearth, whining. She didn’t know where he came from. Most of the children were there, too, and Crisavec picked him up and put him on a storage platform, near the head of his bed. But there’s a deep niche in the wall there. It goes quite a way into the hillside. The wolf found it, and crawled all the way to the back, and then he wouldn’t come out.”
“It must have reminded him of his den,” Ayla said.
“That’s what Fralie said. It was too hard for her to go and get him, as big as she is, and I think she was afraid after hearing Deegie tell about you going into a wolf den. She didn’t want Crisavec to go in after him, either. When I got there, I had to go in and get him out.” Frebec paused then, and when he continued, Ayla heard a note of wonder in his voice. “When I reached him, he was so glad to see me, he licked me all over the face. I tried to get him to stop.”
Frebec assumed a more detached and unconcerned manner to cover up the fact that he was obviously moved by the naturally winning ways of the frightened baby wolf. “But when I put him down, he cried and cried until I picked him up again.” Several people had gathered around by then. “I don’t know why he picked the Crane Hearth, or me, to run to when he was looking for a safe place.”
“He thinks of the Camp as his pack now, and he knows you are a member of the Camp, especially after you brought him out of the den he found,” Ayla replied, trying to reconstruct the circumstances.
Frebec had been feeling the flush of victory when he returned to his hearth, and something deeper that made him feel an unaccustomed warmth; a sense of belonging as an equal. They hadn’t just ignored him or made fun of him. Talut always listened to him, just as though he had the status to warrant it, and Tulie, the headwoman herself, had offered to give him some of her space. Crozie had even sided with him.
A lump came in his throat when he saw Fralie, his very own, treasured, high-status woman who had made it all possible; his beautiful pregnant woman who would soon give birth to the first child of his own hearth, the hearth Crozie had given him, the Crane Hearth. He’d been annoyed when she told him the wolf was hiding in the niche, but the pup’s eager acceptance of him, in spite of all his harsh words, surprised him. Even the new baby wolf welcomed him, and then would only be soothed by him. And Ayla said it was because the wolf knew he was a member of the Lion Camp. Even a wolf knew he belonged.
“Well, you better keep him here from now on,” Frebec cautioned as he turned to go. “And watch out for him. If you don’t, he could get stepped on.”
After Frebec left, several of the people who had been standing around looked at each other in complete bewilderment.
“That was a change. I wonder what got into him?” Deegie said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he actually likes Wolf!”
“I didn’t think he had it in him,” Ranec said, feeling more respect than he ever had for the man of the Crane Hearth.
24
The four-legged creatures of the Mother’s domain had always been either food, fur, or the personification of spirits to the Lion Camp. They knew animals in their natural environment, knew their movements and migration patterns, knew where to look for them and how to hunt them. But the people of the Camp had never known individual animals before Ayla came with the mare and the young stallion.
The interaction of the horses with Ayla and, as time passed, with other people in varying degrees, was a constant source of surprise. It had never occurred to anyone before that such animals would respond to a human, or that they could be trained to come at a whistle or to carry a rider. But even the horses with all their interest and appeal did not hold the fascination to the Camp of the baby wolf. They respected wolves as hunters, and on occasion, adversaries. Sometimes a wolf was hunted for a winter pelt, and though it was rare, an occasional human fell to a pack of wolves. Most often wolves and humans tended to respect and avoid each other.
But the very young always exert a special appeal; it is the innate source of their survival. Babies, including baby animals, touch some inner chord that resonates in response, but Wolf—the name by which he came to be known—held a special charm. From the first day that the fuzzy little dark gray pup waddled on unsteady legs on the floor of the earthlodge, he entranced the human population. His eager puppy ways were hard to resist, and he quickly became a favorite of the Camp.
It helped, although the people of the Camp didn’t realize it, that human ways and wolf ways were not so different. Both were intelligent, social animals who organized themselves within an overall pattern of complex and changing relationships, which benefited the group while accommodating individual differences. Because of the similarities of social structures and certain characteristics which had evolved independently in both canines and humans, a unique relationship was possible between them.
Wolf’s life began under unusual and difficult circumstances. As the only surviving pup of a litter born to a lone wolf who had lost her mate, he never knew the security of a wolf pack. Rather than the comfort of litter mates or a solicitous aunt or uncle who would have stayed close by in the event that his mother left for a short time, he had experienced loneliness unusual for a wolf pup. The only other wolf he had known was his mother, and his memory of her was blurring as Ayla took her place.
But Ayla was something more. By deciding to keep and raise the wolf puppy, she became the human half of an extraordinary bond that developed between two entirely different species—canines and humans—a bond that would have profound and lasting effects.
Even if there had been other wolves around, Wolf was too young when he was found to have properly bonded with them. At his age of a month or so, he would have just begun coming out of the den to meet his relatives, the wolves that he would have identified with for the rest of his life. He imprinted instead on the people, and horses, of the Lion Camp.
It was the first, but it would not be the last time. By accident or design, as the idea spread, it would happen again, many times in many places. The ancestors of all the domestic canine breeds were wolves, and in the beginning they retained their essential wolf characteristics. But as time went on, the generations of wolves born and raised within a human environment began to differ from the original wild canines.
Animals born with normal genetic variations in color, shape, and size—a dark coat, a white spot, a curved-up tail, a smaller or larger size—which would have pushed them to the periphery or out of the pack, were often favored by humans. Even genetic aberrations in the form of midgets or dwarfs or heavy-boned giants that would not have survived to reproduce in the wild were kept, and thrived. Eventually unusual or aberrant canines were bred to preserve and strengthen certain traits that were desirable to humans, until the outward similarity of many dogs to the ancestral wolf was remote indeed. Yet the wolf traits of intelligence, protectiveness, loyalty, and playfulness remained.
Wolf was quick to pick up cues of relative rank within the Camp, as he would have been within a wolf pack, though his interpretation of status might not have matched the notions of the humans. Though Tulie was headwoman of the Lion Camp, to Wolf, Ayla was the ranking female; in a wolf pack the mother of the litter was the female leader and she seldom allowed any other females to bear young.
No one in the Camp knew precisely what the animal thought or felt, or if he even had thoughts and feelings that could be understood by humans, but it didn’t matter. The people of the Camp judged by behavior, and from Wolf’s actions no One doubted that he loved and worshiped Ayla beyond measure. Wherever she was, he was always aware of her, and at a whistle, a snap of the fingers, a beckoning gesture, even a nod, he was at her feet, looking up with adoration in his eyes eagerly anticipating her least wish. He was totally unself-conscious in his responses, and entirely forgiving. He whined in abject despair when she scolded him, and wriggled with ecstasies of delight when she relented. He lived for her attention. His greatest joy was when she played or romped with him, but even a word or a pat was sufficient to elicit excited licking and other obvious signs of devotion.
With no one else was Wolf quite so effusive. With most he displayed varying degrees of friendliness or acceptance, which caused some surprise that the animal could show such a range of feeling. His reaction to Ayla strengthened the Camp’s perception that she had a magical ability to control animals, and it increased her stature.
The young wolf had a little more difficulty determining who the male leader in his human pack was. The one who held that position in the wolf pack was the object of the most solicitous attention of all the other wolves. A greeting ceremony in which the male leader was mobbed by the rest of the pack eager to lick his face, sniff his fur, and crowd in close, often ending with a wonderful communal howling ceremony, commonly affirmed his leadership. But the human pack offered no such deference to any particular male.
