The House of the Wolf

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After more than a million views and lots of feedback, here is the re-edited version. There is a brand new cover, plus a few other new things as well: name changes, extended scenes, extra scenes, and one whole new chapter!

And the sequel,  The Way of the Wolf, is now posted on Wattpad too!  Please check it out.

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The wolf made his way along the riverbank, moving warily.

His pack, ravenous for meat, was tracking a herd of caribou farther up the canyon, but he was focused on a solitary chase of his own. He dropped his nose to the barren ground, breathing in the scent trail. The men were very close. He had tracked them for nearly an hour and was closing the gap: before long he would be upon them. He had first caught sight of them on the far side of the river, and waited for them to move on before swimming across. Since then he had lost sight of his quarry, but he could see their footprints in the softer earth near the river: peculiar marks, oblong and toeless, like the tracks of no other living thing; and their scent lingered. It too was unlike any other animal odor.

They must, he thought, be looking for a way up the side of the canyon. Yes, here was their scent again amongst the stones, moving upward and away from the water. That spur of rock jutting from the canyon wall obscured his view. He followed the trail, nose to the ground, up and across the spur to its far side.

There they were – on the slope, just above him.

Men were scarce here in the arctic, and in his brief life he had encountered only a few. But there was no doubt as to the identity of these creatures. No other mammal walked thus, using the hind limbs only. Even on this steep and stony slope they did not make use of their forelimbs. The wolf stood staring up at the creatures.

They had not seen him. Good. His pure white colouring was a disadvantage, he knew. Against drifts of arctic snow it made him all but invisible, but against the dull brown of exposed earth he stood out clearly. Fortunately human senses were weaker than his; even had he not been downwind of them they still would not have been able to smell him. He went on up the side of the canyon, picking his way with care amongst treacherous stones that could announce his presence with a clink or long rattling fall. The men meanwhile had nearly reached the top of the slope. One was clearly a tundra-man, but the other three men looked different: paler in the face, longer in the nose, and their scent was subtly different too. He pressed ever closer, excited and eager.

Too eager. A small stone dislodged by his foot went clattering downhill. His first careless move. One of the pale-faced men turned sharply, pointed at him and shouted. Two of his companions raised their guns, pointing them directly at the wolf as he froze in alarm. But the tundra-man stood still. He shouted to the others.

"Non, non! Ce n'est pas nécessaire!"

The three other men stared at him. "Êtes-vous fou?" one southern man barked back. "Il va nous tuer!"

"Non! Observez-moi!"

The southerners stared as the tundra-man lay down in the sparse sedge. He lay on his back: the submissive posture adopted by lower-caste wolves in the presence of their betters. "Lentement – comme ça," the tundra-man said in a softer voice. "Soyez calme!"

Slowly, the other men put their weapons on the ground and lay down too.

The white wolf approached them, cautious still yet unable to resist his fascination. He went right up to the prone bodies, stared at them, then stretched out his neck and sniffed at their toeless feet. But were these their actual feet, after all? They seemed to be casings of something like loose animal-hide. Men were not then, as he had conjectured, toeless: they merely covered their feet up to protect them, as they covered the rest of their bodies. The discovery brought a sense of relief: these were not strange unnatural monsters, but kindred beings, sharing some anatomical similarities with his own kind.