Verwandte Artikel zu Wolf in Night (Wolfwalker, Band 6)

Wolf in Night (Wolfwalker, Band 6) - Softcover

Buch 7 von 7: Wolfwalker

Harper, Tara K.

 
9780345406361: Wolf in Night (Wolfwalker, Band 6)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345406362 ISBN 13: 9780345406361
Verlag: Del Rey, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

“Tara K. Harper’s Wolfwalker novels are particular favorites of mine.”—Anne McCaffrey

Raised on a foreign world where telepathic wolves hunt in the mountains and mysterious aliens guard against the encroachment of humanity, Nori has grown up scouting in the wilderness. Like her mother before her, she searches for dangers that could devastate the isolated towns scattered across the countryside.

But the wolves have already encountered those forces. Now, disturbed by the sense of death along the broken cliffs of Ariye, they reach out to one who can help them. Unsuspecting, Nori answers the Grey Ones’ call–only to find herself mentally bonded to a half-grown, ferocious wolf.

Spies and assassins stalk the scouts and wolfwalkers while a deadly threat, once thought to be contained, spreads across the land. Caught between the wolves and the horror of plague, and with hired hunters at her heels, Nori is hounded deep into the wilderness to begin a journey that must end in victory . . . or death.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tara K. Harper graduated from the University of Oregon, then went into high-tech, where she has worked in medical, genetic, electronic, and computer R&D. Active in community service, she teaches creative writing in alternative schools, trains youths in wilderness skills, and serves on the board of directors for a youth treatment center. A martial artist for many years, Harper also hikes, kayaks, sails, paints in oils, sculpts in stone, and plays the violin. Some of her latest adventures included canoeing in a small-craft advisory and being dragged around by a sixty-foot tree. Life, she says, has always been interesting.

Visit the author’s website at www.taraharper.com

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I

A wolf doesn’t choose his wolfwalker,

He can’t help being drawn to your side;

There’s a tiny place in his brain and yours

Which seeks the other’s mind.

It’s a need, a desire, a hunger in both,

An addiction that pulls like a chain,

It resonates between you, like the sun

Blinding and swamping your thoughts,

Like the wind rising and falling, falling,

Like the packsong calling, calling.

It binds you like two halves of a knot

That cannot come undone.

—excerpt from Who Hunts the Wolves


Afternoon, just west of Willow Road . . .

The wolf watched from the shadows with a predatory sense, an animal tang of hunger. Evening was approaching fast, when color would shift into shades of grey and the air would grow cool with danger. The young wolf knew what would come with the darkness. He was a year old, experienced enough that the hunt was no longer fearsome, but still young enough that it was something he eagerly sought. This time, he hunted alone.

He hunched beside the roots with a waxleaf tickling his fur. He flicked his ears absently. The yearling liked the weak warmth of spring. Deep winter was hard hunting, especially since it would be two more years before he came into his full strength. Spring meant creatures weak with hunger or heavy with their young. It meant easy running in soft earth, not deep drifts of snow. He inhaled quickly, trying to catch the scent of his prey. From the shadows, his golden eyes stared unblinking, seeking even a blurred glimpse of movement, but the thick hedge remained impenetrable to his gaze.

Overhead, dark vines climbed along the spiny barrier bushes. The vines here were old enough that they stretched up into the arch of trees that hung over the man-made trails. They were two wide streams of white, those man-trails, made of wood so firm it was hard as stone. He’d run on such trails in winter when their wood-warmth kept them from freezing. At night, they glowed like the moons, and the humans used them like highways, clattering this way and that. They didn’t seem to care that any hunter could hear them. They didn’t care about scents, either, for dozens of strange, nose-clogging odors clung to that long line of movement.

It was hard to separate out the things from which the odors came. Some were forest smells carried along with the man-things, like the smell of the danger-fang, the tano, and that of the tiny, venomous weibers. Others were strictly man-scent: sharp smells, unpleasant ones, metal grease and oils. Then there was the smell of the spiny barrier that the yearling crouched behind. It was a man-thing, too, planted deliberately, according to the pack elders. It stank to keep the beasts away and wouldn’t harm the wolves. Unpleasant, yes, but the other side meant safety.

The yearling’s ears flicked again at an impression of motion much closer to his position. He was not mistaken. At the base of the bushes, slow blue flowers closed their soft, hungry mouths on the gnats that fluttered nearby. Everything was thickening and strengthening, not just with spring, but with the coming dusk.

On the other side of the hedge, the behemoths rumbled, unaware, unflinching, unstoppable. Rishte could hear little over their noise, but he knew his prey had moved beyond him. He scanned the roadside fruitlessly. He could feel the creature like the prickling of fur when one steps up to a trap. It was waiting, faintly wanting him as much as he wanted it. Calling for him to approach. Like an itch just under the skin, it clawed at his consciousness.

It had been there all day. At dawn it had begun to tug like a packmate on the rough edge of play. In the grey light of morning, it had crept through the forest. It had grown stronger as the pack moved out warily to hunt the thin eerin that grazed eagerly on fresh spring grass. It wasn’t like the danger sense of the beetle-beasts that was making First Father so worried. It was more subtle, like a fern touching an ear or the sweep of wind-grass across the back, and it was stronger to Rishte than the others. Then the midmorning warmth had begun to saturate the air, and the sense of it had become sharper and harder to ignore. Since then, it hadn’t stopped pulling, digging at his mind.

The young wolf flexed his paws as if ready to run. He stayed low, where it could not see him. He feared its eyes, the bind- ing eyes. Pack Mother said that human eyes could trap a wolf like a dog. They could fill a mind with nightmares, split him off from his pack, and starve him for the grey. He believed her. There were images in the older songs of things the Grey Ones feared. He could feel that in his prey. But still he watched its passing. He couldn’t help it. Nor could he help reaching out toward its mind. It pulled like a tether, and he howled back, scratching at its mind.

He rose and slunk along the road, slipping through the brush like a ghost to follow the deafening monsters. For a quarter day’s run, he had followed his curiosity, till he’d been all but run over with sound. He’d had to force himself to approach the hedge that stank like rotting stingers. The noises didn’t hurt his ears, but they masked other sounds so that he felt uneasy and vulnerable. Another monster banged by, and he cringed at the rumbling that his human ignored. He wondered how it could hear anything, even its own thoughts under that torrent. A lepa flock could descend on them all like a rockfall without them knowing.

The line of monsters curved again, and he knew they were starting to circle the den-hill. He was actually closer to his pack home now than before. The thought gave him some comfort, although he wished the human would leave the monsters and follow him to a quieter place. Its eyes would not be so terrifying if he met it within the pack. He was beginning to feel a need, not just a desire, to explore this odd and itching packsong.

The dying breeze ruffed the grey-and-white fur unevenly across his back. He had disturbed a monkeybush that morning, and two spurs were now caught back by his shoulder. He twisted and bit at them irritably, but they were hard-tangled and sharp as the human’s mind. He snarled quietly, then turned back to the road. His paws itched to run, to flee from the monsters and scent of men. But that mental needle stuck in his thoughts, changing the tone of his voice in the packsong to one of long- ing and distance. The sense of muted smells, oddly sharp tastes, and smoothness instead of fur—they confused him. They had blinded his mind all day so that he’d actually slipped off a boulder at dawn when crossing a stream with the pack. Grey Helt and Second Mother had laughed, but Pack Mother had been grim as if facing a full-grown worlag. After that, Helt—First Father—had turned the pack back to the den, cutting off their hunt. Rishte had lagged behind, first slowing, then turning east, away from the pack, as he heard the strange voice in his mind.

Now he was close, close enough to smell what he sought. He saw them now, the humans. He could see their eyes. Flat, wary, they looked his way often, and there was no trap, no binding. He barely even felt them, just the one human he sought. Even amidst the musk of the riding beasts, even above the man-scent, he could smell that one in his mind. The feel of legs moving, tottering, never quite falling forward—it made his ropy thighs tense. He crept closer to a break in the brush. The grey shades shifted. He could see the monsters now. Huge—they were bigger than badgerbears, bigger than the boulders at the base of the cliffs. They made a line as long as a glacier worm.

Fear knotted his belly as if he were still a cub. Humans. Danger. The...

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Verlag
Del Rey
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345406362
ISBN 13 
9780345406361
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
494
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Verantwortliche Person
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