I know I have to move fast, and moving fast requires reversing the whole process I went through earlier. Taking back the pain that will shoot through my hip and leg, because even a three-legged wolf is faster than a human.
Heading from Clear Pond toward the mountains, away from the low-lying damp, I take the shortcut up through the tangled forests of young spruce and fir and paper birch. The early autumn sun is swept before dark clouds, and one of the frequent short rains starts in with its thick drops that make the bald hardpan slippery. I skitter down until I reach the mix of maple and beech behind Home Pond.
Long time ago, before the Pack was lulled into a false sense of security, an earlier generation dug a long tunnel that led from the basement of the Great Hall into the forest. In case of emergency. Gran Sigeburg told me about it, as she rambled on about a long-ago party thrown by her echelon and how all the juveniles escaped from the Alpha’s fury through the tunnel. I think the moral of her story was supposed to be that you can never escape a furious Alpha, but the tunnel was the part that stuck.
I’d found the end of the tunnel in the root cellar, but the other end was blocked. I scratched through the ferns and duff until I found it and came back with hands and an ax and hacked away the spruce root that had grown over it. Like all children, I liked the idea of sneaking and used the tunnel from time to time to get in and out of the Great Hall. Then I got older and more persnickety about spiders, and since nobody really cared where I was or when, I figured I might as well just use the damn door.
There were two spruces: one big one and a small one. If you crouch down low like I am now, the tip of Whiteface is centered between them. I scratch around in the forest litter until I feel the hollow scrape of wood.
I didn’t remember the space was so narrow, but I was smaller then and perhaps the taproots that broke through the tunnel roof were a little smaller as well. As soon as I get to the cellar, I squeeze through the light trapdoor and lay myself down, rolling my shoulders and letting the change twist through my body once more.
The doors to the storerooms in the basement are close together in the narrow hallway. As soon as I open the broad wooden door of dry storage, I hear the hum of the dehumidifiers. The open metal shelves are filled with carefully marked bins of clothes. Popping open one of the smallest ones, I find a pair of athletic pants, a Henley, and a hoodie for myself. The Shifter is huge, but so are my people. In one of the several boxes marked XXXL (and Tall), I find a pair of sweatpants, a Big & Tall flannel shirt, a bright-red sweatshirt, and a bulky anorak. Not stylish and not much, but it’ll have to do because the clothes already take up more than half of the big backpack.
Dried apples, ground corn, matches, miso, protein bars, lentils, hazelnuts. Then cooking equipment, a collapsible water carrier, a tarp. I also nab the single bedroll, a sleeping bag, and the pop-up tent the pups use when they play Human.
How do they do it? The humans, I mean. I lasted about five minutes inside the nylon sleeping bag, surrounded by that shell of polyester and silicone, before I bolted out, falling to the grass, my feet already lengthening.
Before I leave the basement, I pull the hoodie tight around my head to hide my telltale hair. I am a silver. Silvers aren’t common, but we aren’t rare either. It just means a wolf with light underfur and pale gray fur on top. In skin, their hair tends to be dark blond or light brown.
When I’m wild, one tendon stays too tight and cripples me. When I take on skin, my hair stays silver. Just so I never forget who and what I really am.
Gran Tito is up early as usual. His nose has started to fail, but I still steer clear of him as I make my way to the med station behind John’s office. Two hospital beds with bedside monitors, ventilators, a freestanding anesthesia system, ultrasound. Mobile storage units are loaded