Trenton the Wolf - Chapter 1
“The glory of the young wolf is his strength,
but the splendor of the old wolf is his grey hair.”
- Wolf Book of Wisdom
The snow was blowing hard. He could feel the cold flakes brush across his white whiskers. It wasn’t the coldest night he had slept in, but it was cold. The storm was strong enough tonight that some of the snow drifted into the entrance of Trenton’s cave. Well, it wasn’t necessarily his cave, just the place that had been his home for a bit. He had found it on his journey, and it had clearly gone unused for a very long time. But it had been lived in, seemingly long ago, perhaps before the Great Winter. There were strange markings all over the walls, along with what appeared to be shelves and even small dugout rooms on the edges. Trenton had never been to this area, and when he had found a stream nearby full of mountain trout, he decided to stay a while and explore. That was three months ago.
Soon, the snow began to calm, and the glow of the morning sun began to push through the breaking clouds on the edge of the sky. To any wolf, but especially an adventuresome one like Trenton, a cold, crisp morning like this was full of possibilities. He stood up and stretched in the cave, shaking his thick white fur, fluffing his coat, and removing any lingering snowflakes. Trenton was a younger wolf, but he was now full-grown. And although he didn’t know it, he was a magnificent sight to see as he emerged from the cave. His flowing white fir glistened in the sun as his large wolf paws padded out into the snow. It was time for some fish.
The small stream was nearby. It ran into a larger river just a few hundred yards further down, but the delicious trout liked to swim up the small stream and rest in its calmer waters. Most wolves could fish if they really had to, but Trenton was exceptionally good at it, having been raised with foxes. As he approached the stream, he could hear the voice in his mind of the fox mother who had raised him, “Remember Trent (she was the only one who called him Trent), the fish can see well. You must sneak to the water's edge, as you would sneak up on anything. And be sure to come from downstream. The fish face upstream, waiting for bugs to flow down to them.”
As he peered over the bank, Trenton saw what he was looking for—a good-sized breakfast trout. With one smooth and swift motion, he swept his strong paw into the water and landed the fish on the bank. Breakfast. The fox had taught him well. Trenton was able to catch the fish with hardly any splash, and the splash that he did make blended in so well with the sounds of the stream that he was able to go right back for a second fish nearby that hadn’t been scared off by his first catch.
Trenton had been looking forward to this morning for some time. He had been exploring this side of the large river the entire time he’d stayed in the cave. The past few days and nights had been colder, slowly piling up more snow and ice across a large log jam on the river. Trenton had been hoping it would be enough today to easily walk across the snow on top of the log jam to the other side. He could’ve swam across the river at any time over the past several months. But it was a big river and very cold. He wasn’t in any hurry, other than his own curiosity, to reach the other side. And he knew it would be wiser to wait rather than risk a swim across such icy water. The words of Jebsom, the father fox, rang in his head, “The fool moves rashly, but the prudent gives thought to his steps.” He would often share sayings like. He said they came from the old Wolf Book of Wisdom that had been written ages before.
As Trenton approached the log jam, his heart jumped with excitement. It had iced over and was covered in a nice thick blanket of snow, with water flowing under it. He was able to walk across to the other side easily. When his paws hit the ground on the other side, he felt the anticipation of exploration as he looked at the two small hills he had longed to walk between to see what was on the other side. These were the kinds of days he loved. All new. All unknown. All adventure.
When he emerged from the other side of the two hills, he was greeted by a long valley that dipped down below him, with small, snow-covered meadows and rolling hills dotted with snow-covered clumps of trees.
He’d been making his way down into the valley for a couple of hours and had just come around the edge of a large rock formation on the edge of a hill when he saw it. Just a few hundred feet away was something he’d never seen before. There were dozens of structures, obviously not natural formations. They were built of wood and stone, close together but of different sizes. He was staring at these structures when something about the size of his head came whizzing by his ear and landed in the snow behind him. He quickly hid behind the rock formation, crouched in the white snow. His wolf senses were now on high alert. His powerful nose smelled something that he had never smelled before. He couldn’t tell what it was, but he could tell it was alive. His large ears turned back and forth, picking up the sound of something coming.
As he crouched behind the rock, he could hear the crunching of the snow under the feet of something coming from the other side. Whatever it was, it was not very quiet as it plodded through the snow, and Trenton could tell by the direction the sound was moving that it wasn’t coming directly toward him but rather by him in the direction of the strange round thing lying in the snow that had zipped by his head.
Sure enough, a strange-looking creature, walking on two legs and covered in some interesting fir, walked right by him without seeing him and up to the round thing in the snow about ten yards away. Trenton was breathless. It was a human. The foxes had told him about people, but he had never seen them in all his travels and had wondered if they still existed. And from the looks of it, it was a younger one. A boy, wasn’t that what the young male ones were called? And the structures must be his village, where other people lived.
The boy picked up the round thing out of the snow and turned around to walk back but froze in his steps when he saw the full-grown white wolf crouched in the snow behind the rocks. They both stayed there frozen, looking into each other’s eyes, afraid of what the other might do. But after a minute or so, the boy tilted his head sideways and seemed to look deeper at Trenton, as if he was trying to see into the heart behind the large animal. Then he smiled a little smile as if to say he knew that Trenton was a good wolf and began to walk back toward the village, still looking into the wolf’s eyes until he had passed the rocks. Trenton peered around the formation and watched as the boy walked back into the village and out of sight.