grime, he could see faint traces of black and white. Shaken, he glanced down at her left front leg. It had once been broken, but had healed in such a way that the bone was crooked and out of place. The leg would be forever useless.
Dusty looked down into her face as feelings erupted inside him. Feelings he hadn’t felt…in a long time. “Kira?”
Kira stared at him in confusion, and he let her up from underneath his paws. They stood facing each other, outlined in the darkness of the den behind them, and Dusty watched Kira’s face as she studied him with puzzlement. Would she recognize him, after two months of being apart? He knew he had changed.
Tiny bones clicked under his feet as he nervously pawed the snow. He licked at the sticky blood smeared across his face and dyed into his fur. He had learned how to kill to live.
He felt Kira’s ocean-wave eyes taking in the deep, crooked scars on his back and legs. He had fought foxes, lynx, and other beasts for territory and food. Dusty would never have thought he had the strength or the anger to take down another living thing, especially a wolf or a fox. He had thought only Copper, who he had heard talk about the Northern Fights, had inherited the fighting ability of the wolf.
Dusty found himself absentmindedly biting at a patch of fleas in his mussed, grimy fur, but he stopped at a strange look from Kira. She continued to stare at him, then tossed her tail and said, “I have no idea who you are, or how in the world you could know my name.”
“Kira,” Dusty said softly, a gentle grin rising to his lips, “It’s me. Dusty.”
Kira’s face changed from confusion to bafflement to astonishment all in the same ten seconds. She studied his face even harder this time, which made him blush and duck his head. Immediately she cried in amazement, “Dusty!” and hobbled towards him to nuzzle him, asking a million questions at once. Dusty was surprised when Kira insisted on embracing him, but he made himself not think about how much he liked it.
“So you’ve been living out here by yourself?” she asked, “And you can hunt? Why didn’t you go back to Nome?”
“I couldn’t leave you out here,” Dusty muttered, wincing at the half-truth. He didn’t want to tell her that going back home would’ve only brought attention to him that he didn’t like, never mind that he had been so grief-stricken that he had barely been thinking straight for awhile.
“I-” Kira’s body went stiff against him, and she tugged in huge breaths as if she were fighting for her life. Dusty quickly whirled to her side.
“Kira, what-!”
“Pups!” she gasped, squeezing her eyes shut, “Pups!”
Dusty tried to hang on to his common sense, and helped Kira into his cave. Immediately she fell limp to the floor with a groan, and drew in gigantic breaths as her body started to snake back and forth with pain. Dusty froze, stuck between wanting to help Kira, and high-tailing it out of there.
“Get out!” Kira yelped, “Get out! You can’t see this!” She seemed to have lost her head while drowning in the stretching agony that engulfed her whole body.
“No,” Dusty said, wincing as he watched Kira claw and roll around on the cave floor. For a moment it was if he shared her pain.
Kira cried out as she rolled over her broken leg, and her eyes gleamed with hidden tears when she accidentally writhed onto her right side. Her whole body twisted and shuddered as she continued to hurt herself, but the pain seemed to be too great for her to calm down enough to stop. Wild-eyed, Dusty ran to her, but threw himself back at Kira’s agonized cries. She strained her back end, and suddenly an outburst of red shot from her rear.
The blood. Dusty had never seen so much of it at one time, and it kept coming and coming, flowing, flooding the den…
Clotted scarlet streamed from Kira, yet she hardly seemed to notice as she bit open the slimy bags encasing her children and licked her pups clean. She didn’t seem to be able to push her three pups to her side, so Dusty crept forward and slid them to her teats with his nose. When he looked up, Kira was lying in a half-asleep state. The birth had worn her out, but the pain from her leg and the rest of her body was keeping her awake. Dusty felt the taunting fear that Kira had injured herself badly, and he hadn’t been able to stop her.
A low hiss from outside made Dusty spin around. He crept to the entrance, and instantly bared his teeth.
A furry golden-brown lynx crouched outside the den, hissing and spitting. Dusty could have taken six steps, stuck his paw out, and sliced the cat across the face. It was that close.
‘It must’ve smelled the birth fluids,’ Dusty thought frantically, ‘Oh, great!’ He remembered hearing somewhere that lynx sometimes steal wolf pups. The thought pushed a threatening growl from his chest. The lynx would never get Kira, or her children!
The huge cat prowled closer. Dusty emptied his mind of any thoughts for himself and lashed out, snarling. The feline paused, switched its ears back and forth, and continued padding towards the den. Dusty threw himself towards the wild cat and roared an angry warning at it. The lynx continued creeping forward until it was nearly face to face with the wolf-dog.
By this time Dusty was desperate to protect Kira and her babies. In a panic, he hurled himself at the huge beast and smashed his teeth into its tough hide. The lynx let out a yowl and clawed at its attacker. The cat’s gleaming nails swiped past Dusty’s nose, and suddenly hit their mark.
Dusty howled in pain as the claws dug under his skin. Instinctively, he bit the leg attached to the knives in his side, and the lynx roared and flung him to the ground.
Dusty dragged himself upwards, but fell back down as his limbs gave out. He could feel blood squeezing out of him with every heartbeat, and he looked up with deadened eyes at the angry lynx. It stood over him with a fierce gleam in its eyes.
Dusty squared his shoulders and looked the lynx straight in the face even as its paw rose. At least he would die protecting Kira. The only thing better would be for her and her pups to be safe after he was gone.
Suddenly the cat’s expression froze and its body slumped forward, revealing Brenner the wolf standing behind it with one paw bloody.
Scarlet streams seeped from the lynx’s neck, and Dusty gaped at it as he realized Brenner had slit its throat from behind. He looked up, but his savior was now only a brown streak in the distance. Brenner had managed to lope away as silently as he had snuck up on the big cat.
Dusty dragged himself weakly into the cave and dropped down beside Kira, the pups in between them. Kira wearily lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes said she had heard the whole fight. She deftly licked the blood and sweat from his muzzle, and he smiled softly at her and closed his eyes, his body aching. Outside, a flock of ravens and a wolverine fought each other over the fresh lynx kill just beyond the cave mouth…
Five weeks later, Dusty lay outside the den watching out for the three fat pups that tumbled and toddled their way around and over him. They had grown into tubby little bundles of soft fur and baby fat, and Dusty felt a growing affection towards them even though each bore an uncanny resemblance to their real father, Lucas.
Silver, the oldest pup, jumped up on Dusty and padded unsteadily along his back, only to wobble and fall off a second later.
“Whoa, Silver!” Dusty caught him in his paws and looked down at the gray pup sternly. “Be careful.”
Silver looked up with innocent blue-green orbs. He was the only one in his litter that had inherited his mother’s eyes. “Sorry,” he mumbled, uttering the word he had to use all the time. All the pups were learning to talk, and so far each had learned more than a few words.
The pup squirmed out of Dusty’s grasp and tackled his gray sister, Gail. Dusty sighed, and turned his head to see the youngest pup fixing him firmly with her shy, blue-eyed gaze. This was the pup Kira had allowed Dusty to name, and the little one’s red chest amongst her gray body had given Dusty the perfect idea for her name.
“What am I going to do with them, Robin?” Dusty sighed.
Robin blinked up at him, then suddenly smiled and licked his face. Dusty laughed, and spotted a yawning Kira emerging from the darkness of the cave. “Morning.”
“Dusty!” Kira exclaimed, “You let me sleep in and you took care of the pups for this long?” She limped over and touched her nose to his face in gratitude. “I owe you big time.”
Dusty stared worriedly when Kira’s limbs started to shake uncontrollably, and she closed her eyes tight as she struggled to remain standing. After a minute the trembling stopped, but Kira’s face was still awash with pain even when she opened her eyes and attempted a courageous grin. “Stop looking at me like that, Dusty. I’m fine.”
Dusty had his doubts. Ever since the birth, Kira had had fits that got more and more frequent, where she would suddenly grow weak and shake like a leaf for minutes on end. He had also heard her cry at night, and seen the bright blood she coughed up daily but tried to hide from him. Between their travels and the birth of her pups, Kira had been injured horribly. Dusty was in pain sometimes too, but compared to Kira he was in perfect health.
“Okay, guys, I think Dusty deserves a break,” Kira said, nudging her pups towards the den. The kids complained with tiny whimpers and whines, and Dusty suddenly thought of something that would calm them
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