“At night we howl to the Spirit Dogs,” Sweet told him softly. “Sing with us, Lucky. Join the Great Howl.”

Those words were like a spirit-force inside him, filling his bones and guts and muscles—something mystical that had to be released into the air, into the sky . . . into the world. His spine tingled with an unfamiliar longing, a need. Lucky tilted his head to the night and howled with the other dogs.

On the opposite side of the circle he saw the black-and-white shape of Moon joining the circle, and the round, fat shadows of her three pups. Even they, with their half-blind eyes, opened their tiny, soft jaws and whimpered little cries to the sky. Though he had never had a glimpse of them beyond their noses before, a surge of fierce pride and protectiveness filled Lucky’s body and he howled longer and louder: for the Pack’s pups, for Omega, for Sweet and Alpha and the rest.

The stars seemed to whirl above him, breaking and reforming into the shapes of running dogs. Not just the stars, though: As if imprinted on the inside of his eyes he saw other dogs, shadow-dogs, flickering across his mind. The ghostly silhouette of a great hound raced between the slender pine trunks of a huge forest; another tumbled through a surging river, but not drowning or fighting: It was part of the torrent, swift and joyful. Clouds drifted across a bright sky, and between them leaped slender, ferocious Warrior-Dogs, springing from cloud to cloud, their leader a bright slash of light that hurt the eyes.

In his very bones, Lucky was aware that the dogs around him were howling to particular Spirit Dogs. There was a high, silvery note to Moon’s howling that her pups did their tiny best to echo; Lucky wondered if she was crying out only to the Moon-Dog. Dart, the brown-and-white patrol dog, let out a cry to the Sky-Dogs, so fierce and clear that it somehow seemed to echo as far as the horizon. Fiery’s deep rumbling howl was as rich as rocks and soil; and though Mulch’s cry was thinner, it too was filled with love of the landscape. The two of them were calling, each in his own way, to the Earth-Dog.

And the Spirit Dogs answered them.

Was he imagining the phantom hounds that raced across his vision? Lucky hesitated, opening an eye and breaking the spell for a fleeting instant. Were the other Pack members seeing them, too? It was impossible to tell. Closing his eyes, he resumed his howling, higher and fiercer than before, and he thought he heard an answering song within him: the great ghostly dog that hunted through the dream-trees in his mind’s eye.

Lucky felt like he could howl forever. The Spirit Dogs were inside him—they were inside all of them, joining with the Pack and leaping in the shadows around them.

But slowly, gradually, the Great Howl died away as the ghostly dogs faded from his vision. Lucky wasn’t quite sure when the last faint howl was swallowed up by the night and the silence fell, but he blinked as if he had awoken from a dream—a dream he did not want to end. The surge of loyalty still tingled in his flesh, and he felt a huge, irresistible tug toward every member of the Pack. He forgot his feelings of only moments ago: his resentment, his shame and humiliation. These were his brothers, his sisters, his hunting-and-fighting friends, and he would never leave them, never. . . .