Guardians of the Taiga by StacyPlays

Author:StacyPlays
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

THAT NIGHT, AFTER all the wolves were safe and accounted for back at the cave, Stacy fixed supper, cracking a few of Fluff’s freshly laid eggs over the wolves’ stew for a change. Without a rooster, Stacy didn’t need to candle each egg to see if there was life inside. She would need a rooster eventually, but that was a problem for another day.

After everyone had eaten, Stacy sat down to write her journal entry for the day. She added a quick sketch of Page standing next to the fawn with bats flying around them. Even with today’s success, she was worried about what would happen next.

Had the hunters who killed the doe been out here looking for wolves? Or had the Village Council voted down the wolf bounty? We can’t relax until we know for sure.

She wondered, not for the first time, how she could be one of them—humans. The animals in the forest lived and worked together in a beautiful ecosystem. And yes, death was part of that. Stacy knew nature could be cruel. She knew some animals killed others for food. And she also knew that some humans killed animals for food because she was one of those humans. She fished for salmon in the rivers and slaughtered the chickens from her farm. But Stacy always followed the laws of the taiga. She never took more than she needed and the nourishment she gained from the kills fueled her on her rescue missions. She was part of the forest ecosystem. But the villagers that visited the taiga were not. No matter how hard she tried, Stacy couldn’t make sense of some of their actions. They had leveled a great swath of the forest for the electrical substation, and then shot at the wild creatures for trespassing on “their” land. They camped out and left piles of garbage with no regard for the animals and the trees and the plants. And the worst part was they acted entitled—like the forest belonged to them more than it did to the wolves and the deer and the rabbits and even the bats.

The forest belongs to the wild animals who live here, not to the humans who show up to take what they want from it and leave.

Page’s behavior was getting to be almost as big a mystery to Stacy as the humans were. She was still trying to puzzle out how the sweet, little dog had known about the doe and her fawn. She knew from some of her nature books that dogs have a powerful sense of smell, but it wasn’t more powerful than that of her wolves.

So how did Page lead us directly to the doe and then to her fawn?

She finished her journal entry with questions still swirling in her mind. She walked toward the front of the cave to let Wink know it was his turn to patrol the ridge that night.

The moon was just coming up over the treetops when two bats whizzed past Stacy’s head from the back of the cave and flew out into the night.

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