Firstborn Read online

  Lamar, who didn’t know what a buffalo was, looked up at me with his big blue eyes. “I hope that’s soon!” he said. “Is the owl a friend of yours?”

  “Heavens, no,” I said.

  “But Rider can’t just be gone.”

  “Your fraternal feelings do you credit,” I said, “but I’m—”

  “What’s ‘fraternal’?”

  “Brotherly.”

  “Inside!” Alberta cried.

  As she herded Ben and Libby into the den, Lamar slipped off to the northeast, the direction the owl had gone. Blue Boy promptly brought him back by the scruff of his neck and shoved him into the den. Lamar popped right out.

  “Rider always curls up next to me at night,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Blue Boy said, with unusual gentleness. “I’ve lost brothers myself. But do you remember what I told you?”

  “ ‘The world’s a perilous place.’ How did you lose your brothers?”

  It was remarkable. Even in his grief Lamar asked questions.

  “One got killed by another pack,” Blue Boy said. “The other . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “The other?” Lamar said.

  Alberta yanked Lamar into the den. Later that night she came out and joined Blue Boy in one of the most mournful howling sessions I’ve ever heard.

  Next morning Lamar crawled out of the den before any of the adults were awake.

  “Have you seen him?” he said, searching the horizon.

  “I’m afraid Rider’s gone,” I said.

  “Until buffalos fly?” he said, looking up at me hopefully.

  I took a deep breath. “You shouldn’t feel too bad. You were a good brother to him.”

  This didn’t seem to comfort him much, but then he didn’t have a lot of time to mope. As soon as Blue Boy got up, he announced that the pups were coming along to observe the hunt. I don’t think he’d meant for them to leave the den area quite so soon, but he wanted to take their minds off Rider.

  Everybody headed along the ridge trail, even Frick. Watching from above, I was afraid Lamar would pull a muscle in his neck, he was looking around so wildly at all the new scenery. When we got to the overlook, the hunters descended their usual winding path, leaving the pups with Frick. I stayed behind, too, curious to see Lamar’s reaction to the valley he was named after.

  “What are the shaggy giants?” he asked breathlessly.

  “Bison,” Frick said. “Also called buffalo.”

  “Can they fly?” The hope in his voice was heartbreaking.

  “I’m afraid not,” Frick said.

  Lamar looked devastated. But there was so much to see that not even the thought of Rider could stifle his inquisitive nature for long.

  “The smaller ones are buffalo pups?” he said.

  “Calves, they call them,” Frick told him.

  “What about the ones with the branches on their heads?”

  “Your favorite food.”

  “Elk?”

  “Mmm. The branches are called antlers.”

  “Antlers,” Lamar said. “And the ones with the antlers that aren’t so branchy?”

  “Those are pronghorns.”

  “What about the ones with the nice eyes?”

  “White-tailed deer. The ones with bigger ears are mule deer.”

  Libby came over and joined us. “How come they don’t eat each other?” she asked.

  “They’re mostly herbivores,” Frick said. “They like grass.”

  “To eat?” she said, making a face.

  “Aren’t there any coyotes?” Lamar asked.

  “It’s mostly big game down there,” Frick said. “Coyotes go for smaller things like mice and voles and rabbits. And wolf pups.”

  “Wolf pups?” Lamar said.

  “Whenever they get the chance.”

  Silenced by this shocking news, Lamar focused on the grown-ups’ hunting tactics. Till then, I don’t think he’d seen his parents move at anything quicker than a lope. He sucked in his breath at the speed with which they headed off a bounding elk. Blue Boy struck first, sinking his fangs into the elk’s neck.

  “That’s how you get dinner,” Frick said.

  He and I led the pups down into the valley, and we all joined the feast.

  This became the new routine. The pups would study hunting tactics from the promontory and dine with the hunters at the kill site. In their sparring the pups took to grabbing one another by the neck, as Blue Boy had the elk.

  It wasn’t long before Lamar and Libby and Ben joined the hunt. Lamar was a natural. But if he’d inherited his father’s hunting prowess he seemed to have missed out on his focus. One day Blue Boy spooked a fawn right toward where he’d posted Lamar, but Lamar had followed a bull snake over to the river to watch it go frogging. Another day, instead of helping hem in an enfeebled pronghorn, Lamar climbed a rocky escarpment to get a closer look at a mountain goat. Then came the day he stood spellbound on the riverbank, gaping at a wading moose while a fourteen-point buck galloped right past him.

  Blue Boy may have chocked up these lapses to a young wolf expanding his repertory of possible quarry. But what excuse could he find for Lamar’s habit of veering off the ridge trail? All it took was a frisky lizard or rodent to lure him off the beaten path. Sometimes Blue Boy actually went last instead of first, to keep an eye on his wayward firstborn.

  Then came the day Lamar announced that he wasn’t going on the hunt at all.

  “Are you sick?” Blue Boy said.

  “No. I’d just like to stay home with Frick.”

  Frick looked so pleased that Blue Boy actually let Lamar get away with it. But the next time Lamar tried to play hooky, Blue Boy put his foot down, ordering him to come along. A couple of mornings later Lamar asked to stay behind again.

  “There’s plenty of food,” he said. “You don’t need me.”

  “In good times a young wolf has to hone his skills for the lean times,” Blue Boy said.

  “I’ll hone my skills tomorrow,” Lamar promised.

  “You don’t see your brother and sister shirking.”

  “Do I have to be just like them?”

  Blue Boy’s brow furrowed at this obstinacy. But it was clear that spending the day with Lamar gave Frick’s spirits a much-needed lift, so Blue Boy grudgingly let his firstborn take a day or two off each week. Lamar intrigued me enough that I broke my routine and stayed behind on those days as well. Or perhaps “unsettled me” would be more accurate.

  “What do you think that owl did with Rider?” Lamar asked one rainy morning when he and Frick were sheltering under my aspen.

  “Ate him, or fed him to the owlets,” Frick said. “Life’s about surviving.”

  “Is that all it’s about?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How do those antlers help moose survive? They’re so big and awkward-looking. Ben and Libby could sleep on them.”

  “They’re probably to impress a female. Mating is part of survival—surviving into the next generation.”

  “Do you want to have another litter someday?” Evidently he’d heard about the one Frick lost in the forest fire.

  “Nobody would want to mate with me now,” Frick said.

  “I’d mate with you.”

  “I appreciate the offer,” Frick said drily.

  The next time Lamar played hooky from hunting, he asked why his fur was getting thicker.

  “Winter’s coming,” Frick said with a rueful look at his backside.

  “How come everyone kisses Father under his snout?” Lamar asked, perhaps sensing that fur wasn’t Frick’s favorite subject.

  “They’re paying tribute.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, your father’s the biggest and strongest.”

  “Does that make him the best?”

  “Pretty much,” Frick said.

  “But I wasn’t better than Rider. And my father’s no better than you.” Lamar looked around. “I don’t think life’s just about survivin
g, either.”

  You see why Lamar unsettled me? Even though his eyes were changing from powder blue to the same yellow as his father’s, they seemed to take in things unrelated to just getting by. Attached as I was to the wolf pack, especially Blue Boy, I’d never thought of them as more than soulless, earthbound creatures.

  As I’d learned on my first visit, Yellowstone had more than its share of interesting and beautiful sights, and on some of his non-hunting days Lamar would badger Frick and me to go investigate them. Both wolves impressed me with their interest in birds. I introduced them to Sabrina and Audubon and identified new species for them. My heart clutched the day we spotted a mountain bluebird. It wasn’t Trilby, but this one was almost as resplendent, his plumage making Lamar’s long jaw drop—proof that wolves aren’t all colorblind, as some believe. I only failed him in his bird cataloguing once, when I got choked up and couldn’t speak, but on that occasion Frick took up the slack.

  “It’s called a crow,” Frick said.

  Lamar was also intrigued by the mud pots and the petrified forest and the sulfur caldron. And he was wild about a basin of bubbling hot springs we stumbled on. But Frick didn’t care for the smell of that place, so we didn’t linger.

  One day Lamar spotted one of the great waterspouts in the distance and insisted we go for a closer look.

  “What is it?” he cried, stopping on a rise just above it.

  Landing on some sagebrush, I told him what Audubon had told me: that they’re called geysers.

  “What are those things around it?” he asked.

  “Humans,” Frick said. The base of the geyser was ringed with them.

  “They have so many different color furs!” Lamar said.

  “I believe they call those clothes,” I said. “The poor things don’t have fur or feathers.”

  “Clothes,” Frick mused, eyeing his naked backside.

  “Humans have only two legs?” Lamar said.

  I pointed out that there was nothing wrong with having only two legs.

  “But they have no wings,” Lamar said. “And why don’t they notice us? We’re upwind of them.”

  “They’re not very sharp,” Frick said.

  I confirmed this. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of food they waste.”

  “Though they did manage to get us here all the way from Canada,” Frick said thoughtfully.

  “I saw the place they kept you,” I said. “Want to visit it?”

  Frick shuddered. “No, thanks.”

  A few days after the geyser sighting, Lamar spotted a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Before I could tell him that sapsuckers are almost as mindless as blue jays, he chased it into a sun-dappled pine forest. Frick and I went after him. When we caught up to him, he’d forgotten about the sapsucker.

  “It’s thundering with the sun out!” he cried.

  Frick sniffed one of the pine trunks. “We should turn back,” he said. “There’s a marking scent here.”

  Lamar kept right on going. Frick rushed after him, calling out that it was dangerous to trespass on other packs’ territories, but Lamar didn’t stop till he came to the brink of a yawning chasm.

  “What is it?” he cried.

  “I think it’s called a canyon,” Frick said. “Now let’s go.”

  “What’s that?”

  Lamar was staring up the canyon at the source of the thunder: a river falling over a cliff taller than five lodgepole pines stacked on top of one another.

  “I think it’s called a water—”

  I shrieked. Four wolves were racing toward us along the canyon’s rim. Frick and Lamar took off. They beat their pursuers out of the woods, but as they started up a hill Frick’s hind legs began to buckle.

  “Don’t slow down!” he gasped.

  Of course that’s exactly what Lamar did. He stayed right at Frick’s side. After they crested the hill, Frick lost his footing and slipped all the way down into a dry creek bed. As their pursuers came hurtling after them, Lamar dragged Frick in among some prickly pear cactuses. I strafed the attackers, squawking at the top of my lungs, but I confess I was amazed when they pulled up short of the cactuses.

  Frick was lying in an exhausted heap. Lamar squared around to fight. The other four barked at them, front feet splayed, fangs bared—but they didn’t attack. I landed carefully on a prickly pear and gave them another piercing squawk.

  Once Frick caught his breath, he got up and ambled off down the creek bed. Lamar kept his eyes trained on the other wolves for a while, then turned and trotted after Frick. Pleased with myself, I gave the quartet of wolves one last menacing look before flying after my friends. The creek bed, or arroyo, made several twists and turns. After we’d gone a good distance, we stopped to rest.

  “Thanks, Maggie,” Lamar said.

  “It was nothing,” I said modestly.

  “You think saving our lives is nothing?”

  “You’re a gallant bird,” Frick said. “But we owe Blue Boy, too.”

  Lamar and I both looked around. There was no sign of Blue Boy in the vicinity.

  “He sprayed a couple of those cactuses,” Frick explained. “Those wolves smelled the scent posts.”

  “That’s what stopped them?” Lamar said.

  “They were from the old Slough Creek pack,” Frick said. “They saw what Blue Boy did to their leader.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I wasn’t an actual witness. I think you saw it, didn’t you, Maggie?”

  “Let’s just say it was over quickly,” I said, feeling deflated.

  For a minute there I’d actually thought I’d become formidable.

  11

  ANOTHER WINTER CAME, driving the tourists and the less hardy birds out of the park. But for Lamar the frost heaves and the pressure ripples on the icy lake and the snout-prickling air were marvels. He’d put on quite a bit of bulk—he was every bit as big as Raze—and his coat had thickened nicely. If his nose got cold when he was curled up at night, he simply covered it with his tail. He arranged a schedule for him and his siblings to take turns sleeping up against Frick’s furless backside.

  On one of his non-hunting days Lamar coaxed Frick back to the hot springs, convinced the place would warm Frick’s bones. In the icy weather the basin looked like a gigantic steam bath, but Frick stopped stubbornly on the edge of the steam.

  “Come on, the smell’s not so bad,” Lamar said.

  “You go ahead,” Frick said.

  Maybe Frick suspected intense heat would trigger painful memories for him. But I followed Lamar in, and the steam felt good to me, even if visibility was lousy. Stumps, boulders, tufts of grass—everything was a blur till we were right up to it. We weren’t the only ones escaping the cold. Lamar nearly stepped on a ground squirrel, which took off like a shot, and he terrified a black-tailed deer. Then a blast of wind cleared the air for a moment, and I spotted a pair of coyotes out ahead of us.

  “Look at the funny little wolves,” Lamar said, and before I could correct him, he called out, “Good morning!”

  The coyotes shrieked. One bolted to the left and disappeared into the steam. The other bolted to the right and disappeared entirely, like a prairie dog into a hole.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Lamar apologized as the steam enveloped us again.

  There was no response. Lamar felt his way tentatively to the right and came to a bubbling pool. He lowered his head and gaped. Something furry was floating there. He reached for it and pulled his paw back with a yelp. One of the coyotes had landed in the scalding water and been boiled alive!

  Lamar fled the phantasmagoria in horror. I was right behind him. As we came out into the open air, Frick rose to his feet.

  “You did some spooking,” Frick said, amused. “You should have seen the deer light out of there—and that coyote. Must have been a nasty shock to see you.” He paused, seeing the sick look on Lamar’s face. “Did the vapors get to you?”

  “A coyote?” Lamar said.

  “A young
female.”

  “A coyote? Oh, Frick. I think I killed one!”

  “How is coyote anyway? I’ve never tasted it.”

  “I didn’t eat him!” Lamar paced back and forth, his moist fur steaming in the cold. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I thought they were young wolves. He jumped into a bubbly pool.”

  Beside himself, he dashed back into the steam.

  I followed. There was no doubt about it: the unlucky coyote was dead. Lamar was crushed. A coyote howl was one of his first and fondest memories, and now he was responsible for a coyote’s death. But on the way home Frick advised against mentioning his remorse to Blue Boy and the others. Mourning a coyote wasn’t very wolflike.

  It was Ben’s turn to keep Frick warm that night, so Lamar curled up by Libby. But just as I was dozing off I saw Lamar get up and go over the hill. I flew soundlessly to a poplar sapling near him. There was a breathtaking view to the south: ridge after snowy ridge, like the whitecaps the wind whipped up on Yellowstone Lake, lapping against great, jagged peaks under a nearly full moon. A coyote’s howl broke the stillness, beautiful and sad, coming from the southeast. Lamar howled back. It was his first howl, I think—and I’d never heard one charged with such contrition. But all he got in reply was silence.

  The next night Lamar took his Frick-warming shift. The night after that I was asleep in my aspen when I heard my name. I pulled my head out from under my shoulder feathers to see Lamar looking up at me.

  “Could you do me a favor, Maggie?”

  “What?”

  “Find out where that coyote is?”

  I could hear her howl. But as I’ve said, I’m not crazy about night flying, and I doubted very much Blue Boy would have approved of such a mission. However, he was curled up asleep by Alberta—and Lamar’s upturned eyes were imploring.

  The moon was so bright that it actually threw my shadow onto the snowy landscape as I flew along. I didn’t have much trouble locating the coyote, on a rocky knoll a few miles away. She was perched atop a little cliff at the very summit, howling her poor heart out.

  When I got back to my aspen, Lamar was right where I’d left him. I described the knoll, though I warned him the coyote probably wouldn’t stick around if he approached her.