The Legend of Black Wolf - Sully's Journey Home

Chapter Thirty Three

         When was last left Sully, he and Wolf had taken a walk among the Cheyenne winter hunting grounds only to find themselves lost in a sudden winter storm.  After taking shelter for the night, Sully and Wolf are now on their way back home...or are they?

      The wind howled through the medicine man's teepee all night, determined to keep him from finding rest.  He had not known such a storm for many seasons, and it bothered him that Sully had not returned.  Although his whole family slept around him, safe from harm, Cloud Dancing could not help but look around the family teepee and feel that a brother was missing.  He found himself turning to Snowbird in the night, holding her in his arms to find enough comfort to drift off into a fitful sleep.

     In the morning, while everything was still dark and foreboding, one of the younger boys appeared at Cloud Dancing's teepee, bursting through the stiff flap with a gust of freezing wind and snow.  Snowbird chided him for almost putting out her fire, but her stern words could not quell his urgent need to speak to his medicine man.  As Cloud Dancing gestured for the young boy to explain the problem, the youth recounted to him a strange dream that had come to him during the storm.  It had bothered him enough to send him out through the snow to seek an answer. 

     He had dreamed that two wolves had been fighting, circling each other, brothers.  Cloud Dancing could not get the boy to explain why he felt they were brother wolves other than a shrug.  When he asked the youth how the boy could tell them apart, he gestured that one was big and the other was small.  As the dream had progressed, the snow had crept in from outside his teepee and into his dream, obliterating the fight so that the boy could not tell which had come out the victor.

     To keep the boy from worry, Cloud Dancing quickly told the boy that the spirits were sending him a vision about a fight that might come up between him and his brothers.  He urged the youth to keep the wolf of hunger from invading his thoughts and making him lash out at those who needed his protection.  It was the best he could come up with on the spot, and the boy took this as an omen of great responsibility, and went away happy, leaving a blast of cold snowy wind in his wake.

     Snowbird grumbled as she scrambled to bank her fire.

     "You hid something from Goes Along."  She said, knowing her husband all too well to have entirely believed his interpretation of the dream.  She watched her husband stare into the growing flames before him.

     "He is too young to understand he brings me word from the spirits about Black Wolf."  He told his wife.  She paused in her cooking to check that her children were still asleep.

     "He fights another?"  She whispered.

     "He is lost."  Cloud Dancing whispered back as he dressed.  "He fights himself."

      When Sully awoke, everything was white.  Having somehow managed to have slept through the storm, he was amazed to find him and Wolf buried under a few inches of snow.  Wolf was first to burst through the crusty blanket above their heads and go relieve himself.  Sully stretched and took in the situation with freezing hands and feet.  The day before, he had thought that a particular path among the trees had looked familiar.  He had expected to go along that supposed path to get back to camp.  Now that the scenery seemed so much different, he wasn't so sure.  To make matters worse, his snare had been blown over by the storm before it had gotten the chance to catch anything for their breakfast.  As he looked for a place out of the wind to start a fire, Wolf barked from a dozen yards away.

      Sully walked over to see what the animal had found.  But as he approached, Wolf began walking in a direction clearly opposite of where Sully had determined was the way back to the tribe.

      "No, boy, this way."  Sully said, snapping his fingers.  Wolf barked back at his friend.  Thinking that perhaps Wolf had found the scent of food, he followed the wolf for a ways.  But Wolf's head was not down in tracking mode.  He was playfully bounding through the snow, eager to get back to the tribe and scare himself up something to eat.  Sully stopped him.

      "Wolf, no."  Sully said.  Wolf turned, clearly growing frustrated at this frozen mission his master was leading him on.  "The teepee is back this way."  But, in spite of all their time together, Sully's words were unconvincing to the animal.  Wolf kept trying to lead Sully off in a direction he was sure was wrong.  In the midst of the unfamiliar trees, dressed in the rare snow that draped itself like a crisp cotton sheet, Sully could not even be sure of where their night shelter had been made.  Could Wolf be right?  He couldn't risk going in the wrong direction with no food or water.  If he was wrong, exposure to the cold without food would be a deadly mistake.

      Disgusted, he vowed not to take another step in any direction until he built a signal fire.  Fire would not only help him warm up, but it would surely show his position to someone in the tribe who was bound to be looking for him.  Sully devoted the rest of the morning assembling a pile of branches and wood.  His hands were long numb by the time he coaxed a flame to life beneath the pile.  Exhausted, he sat and tried to get as much smoke into the sky as he could.  The snow had stopped and the sky was overcast, but clear.  He could only hope to be found soon or else figure out where he was so that they could both get back to the tribe.

      The fire grew, and Sully kept it fed.  In the quiet of the woods, he suddenly thought that he heard Wolf howl, but decided it was another wolf.  The howl was as distinct as a person's voice and Sully had grown to know his friends 'voice'.  That had been a different wolf.  In the distance, Wolf answered.

      "I'm trying to signal for help, and he's off meeting new friends."  Sully muttered to himself, frustrated at the apparent situation.  With another couple of howls, the woods grew quiet again for a few minutes.  Then, a sharp report of a rifle sliced through the snowy day like a crack of thunder.  Startled, Sully tried to guess as to where the sound had come from.  After that, everything was far too quiet.

      He lowered the rifle from his shoulder and smelled the gunpowder hang in the air.  Far to the right of the signal fire, the creature lay in the snow.  Taking a few careful steps out of his concealment in the snow, he walked onward to aim once again...