Welfpack Chapter 9

Relations with the Human village changed after the cat incident. The wolves were far more likely to wander down into the crater, and what with it being Spring they knew that hunting would be good enough that they didn’t need to deliver things to Smoke Boy so often. They still did, Sly especially granting the boy his presence often, as much to satisfy the boy’s delightful deisres for contact, as to educate himself as to just what he did in that smoke hut of his.

The wolven elves still denned away from the village, but they felt compelled now to center their attention on it. The longtooth cubs hadn’t gone away, either, and within days of the big cat’s attack, they decided it would be for the best to try and drive away this family into the northern canyons, or if they could, eradicate them entirely.

There were three adult cats, and four cubs. Eight wolves.

And a Human village.

**We could get their help, they know the dangers,** Patch suggested. The others thought about this, their minds mixing dully in a group-haze of worry. **Only the hunters, not anyone else.**

**Their hunters are good at catching meat on the hoof, or snaring it in traps,** Sly said, **but they are not practiced at finding predators like us or the cats. They’re very defensive.** His mind went straight back to their first encounter, how the hunters waited quietly and patiently, using deer scents, and not making bold moves to injure the wolves when they’d been discovered. They were not aggressive hunters.

**That … could work to our advantage,** Tarfoot put in, her own feeling, visible strongly in her mental imagery, was still to simply slaughter the cubs and wound as many adult felines as they could. Perhaps an irrational thought, but no more so than any other. **They are good at behaving like deer, perhaps…**

**You want to use them as bait?** Notch asked, his mind was tinged with both astonishment and disgust. But Black agreed quickly, and Red as well.

**They’re good at getting away, you’ve seen them do it, Notch,** the dark furred wolf said. **And as Patch said, they know the danger. It isn’t like they haven’t been in danger from these cats before.**

Red added, **I don’t want them to think we’re going to be serving as their protectors all the time,** which was something they also all knew, but didn’t want to admit. **A cub served too much by its parents will become soft and not learn. The last thing I want is to be serving a bunch of weak Humans their dinners, and keeping them from becoming a meal for anything else.**

It was frankly true, if a bit blunt. The Omega gave off a chuff to finalize his point.

While they were mentally active, the wolf pack was reasonably silent otherwise. Red gnawed on a bone he’d been chewing all Winter, it was his favorite toy these days. Black and Tarfoot groomed one another, while Patch and Beehive had spent a lot of time together working on this ‘speech’ thing.

Once they discovered that the longer they were near the Human village, in the crater’s lower area, the stronger their minds felt, they gave themselves time to linger there. Beehive directed this thought – she and Black seemed most adept at understanding the ways of their minds, even if Black was less able or perhaps less willing to express it in words. It was changing them, but it wasn’t the Humans changing them, it was the crater.

But Beehive realized that Patch’s ability to try speaking in the Human tongue and her subsequent exhaustion were related. Together, they sat at the edge of the crater, and Beehive had urged Patch to try forming words again. She urgently called Black over, just to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.

**You seem to like calling me over here,** Black chuckled. And then he confirmed what Beehive had seen with her mental eyes: whenever Patch tried to speak, her mouth seemed to have a bit of a glow around it, something like the light of a firefly reflected on water, or through fog. Barely visible.

More visible down in the crater’s center. Far more visible. In fact, far more easily produced.

So back down to the crater they went, as a group. Every day that they delayed this action, they knew, was another day that the cat cubs would grow stronger and bigger. The adult felines needed more and more meat, and now that the wolves were catching their own kills and not necessarily bringing the remains out to Smoke Boy as often, there wasn’t a slop pile of innards for the lazy beasts to chew on in the meantime.

**Star, you keep watch for the cats up on the ridge,** Notch instructed the small, sunset colored wolf. He could run faster than everyone else, and his mental range seemed to be excellent as well. They wouldn’t miss a thing if the cats moved up on their hillside, and he was in little danger since he was small and quick.

**We hunt best as a group,** Tarfoot thought to the others, **but remember that as a group, we can surround things and surprise them. The surprise would be better if our prey didn’t even realize we were there.**

**It still seems just… cold,** Notch admitted privately to her, and Tarfoot gave a mental nod.

**I know. But believe me, I’d rather deal with the cats than the Humans, if …** She abruptly stoped sending her thoughts, Notch caught a bit of an odd undercurrent to her mind’s feeling.

**What is it?** He asked.

The image that she sent was not something she’d ever seen, of course. It was straight from her imagination. Yet another facet of their existence that proved they were far more than merely wolves. The distorted picture in her mind was of the Human village, filled with grief, blood from the killed Humans everywhere, and triumphant cats standing among them. But more: her worry wasn’t necessarily that they would be killed. It was more of what their reaction would be after, any survivors would be angry or disappointed.

She didn’t want to disappoint the Humans, by letting them get killed.

Notch kept that to himself.