Wolf Captured by Jane Lindskold

Author:Jane Lindskold [Lindskold, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy Fiction, Fantasy, Wolves, Epic, Human-Animal Relationships, Speculative Fiction, (v4.0), Firekeeper (Fictitious Character), Human-Animal Communication, Wild Women
ISBN: 9780765348234
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Firekeeper felt awash with guilt now that she understood what the tainted blood of the Wise Wolves meant to them and for their future.

Now she realized how much Blind Seer—his own blood uncorrupted—would mean to these inbred wolves. He would be a strong sire, one these Wise Wolves needed as an isolated pond needs a fresh inflow to flush away the stagnant water. The wolf-woman's guilt came from her awareness that she did not want Blind Seer to stay here—and from her awareness that this might be the place he would not only be most needed, but most appreciated.

During her introduction to the puppies, Firekeeper had learned that the Wise Wolves kept genealogies rather like those she had seen among humans—although the genealogies of the Wise Wolves were oral, not written. Rascal's introduction had included not only each puppies' pack, but who their parents were within that pack, and who those parents' parents had been, and those parents' parents' parents. Rascal's recitation did not go any further back than those three generations, but Firekeeper learned, when she asked Rascal if he knew his own heritage as thoroughly, that Rascal could recite the litany of his forebears for ten generations.

Among the Royal Wolves this type of recordkeeping was not necessary. As Blind Seer explained, scent alone was sufficient to distinguish close relations, and there were strong taboos against mating with one who shared either parent or grandparent. He couldn't say whether the taboos were taught or interwoven into the blood, only that this was so.

If there was an instinctive revulsion against mating with a close family member, the Wise Wolves had bred it from themselves in those long-ago days of which Grey Thunder had spoken. In any case, throughout the Sanctuary Islands the bloodlines had been bred so closely that—as their physical similarities showed—wolves proved to be close kin even when their parents were, ostensibly, unrelated.

Even those like Dark Death, who had come a fair distance, were—so Blind Seer assured Firekeeper—marked by a similarity of scent. Even to one as nose-dead as Firekeeper, the proof of this relationship emerged with the damaged puppies that, as she had been told, still appeared in almost every litter, even when care had been taken to try and make certain that the breeding pair was unrelated.

From the genealogies Rascal recited with such blithe ease, Firekeeper deduced another dirty little secret of the Wise Wolves: the Ones of a pack were not necessarily both—or even either—the parents of the litter the pack reared as its own.

"Secret" was perhaps not the best word for what she learned, for the truth was there, solid and implacable. Pups were presented first as the product of their pack, just as if the One Female had properly born them to the One Male, but in some cases the recitation of the pup's parentage showed differently.

Quite frequently, the litter was said to be "born for" their pack by the intercession of some male with some female. Almost always either the One Male

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