Firstborn by Tor Seidler

Author:Tor Seidler
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Two nights later he returned to the knoll with another offering—a creature he’d killed that looked like a weasel but with a bushier tail. He laid it in the cave and again waited a short distance away. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and when the coyote appeared at the top of the cliff, her golden fur and delicate snout and shining eyes were plainly visible.

“I hope you like marten,” Lamar said.

“I suppose I should thank you for the food,” she said, making no move to descend from her citadel. “I haven’t felt much like hunting lately.”

“Where do you like to hunt?”

“This time of year Kyle was partial to the hot springs. Have you ever been?”

“The hot springs?” he said uneasily.

“If you go, be sure not to stay too long. The pools give off a gas that makes you woozy. Once we even saw a buffalo stumble to his knees. Kyle liked to pretend the gas had killed him and lie there like a corpse. One time a badger came snuffing up to him, and he grabbed it.”

“Very clever. Is Kyle . . .”

“He was my mate. But he’s dead.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lamar said.

After a while he asked her name, but she didn’t reply.

“I’m Lamar,” he said. “Where’s the rest of your pack?”

“We don’t have packs,” she said, and with that she vanished.

When Lamar and I got home, he collapsed under my aspen.

“Oh, Maggie,” he groaned. “She has no pack. Thanks to me, she’s all alone. She has no one!”

I didn’t say it, but it occurred to me that, in a way, she had him.

Two nights later he took her a field mouse. He retreated to his usual spot, and it wasn’t long before the coyote appeared at the top of the cliff.

“My name’s Artemis,” she said.

Artemis! Another wonderful name my parents hadn’t thought of. Lamar repeated it aloud, clearly enthralled by it.

“You’re kind of a strange wolf,” Artemis said, cocking her head to one side.

“Frick says I’m not very wolflike sometimes,” Lamar admitted.

“Is that your father?”

“He’s in my father’s pack.”

“The pack belongs to your father?”

“My father’s the highest-ranking wolf,” Lamar said, sitting up a little straighter. “Frick’s . . . I suppose he’s at the bottom.”

“You’re in a hierarchy?” she said.

He looked blank.

“That means some wolves are ahead of others,” I told him.

“Oh,” Lamar said. “Don’t you have hierarchies, Artemis?”

“Coyotes don’t believe in them,” she said. “We just have couples.”

The next morning Hope suggested Lamar go ahead of her on the way to the hunt, but he shook his head.

“It’s time,” Hope said. “You’re much bigger and stronger than I am now.”

“She’s right,” Blue Boy said.

But Lamar obstinately refused to go ahead of her. Artemis’s views on hierarchies must have made an impression on him.

When I joined Lamar on the south side of the hill that night, Artemis’s howl sounded a little less mournful, more like the musical howl we’d first heard back in June. But as he was about to howl back there came a crunching sound in the snow.

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