Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Wolf Man

Published as an ebook in 2022 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Originally published in 2008 by Tundra Books in Canada and Tundra Books of Northern New York in the United States.

ISBN 978-1-625675-66-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Dedication

To Shaun Ellis, a true wolf man.

Prologue

The wolves had been through this part of the forest so many times, they’d worn a path through the trees. On their previous travels, they’d moved from bush to tree to bush without a sound, without disturbing branches, and without letting any other being in the forest know they were there.

But not on this night.

Tonight they followed their leader, who boldly strode between the trees brushing aside branches and stomping saplings beneath him like so much deadwood. The pack’s alpha male didn’t try to hide his presence, but instead moved as if announcing his existence to the world and proclaiming his rule over all that surrounded him.

In the past, the pack would be cautious around the places of men, scurrying from shadow to shadow for fear they might be caught where they did not belong.

Some men were good and worthy of respect, and the wolves knew where they lived and how to find them: Other men, however, were bad and killed without reason. They were also weak, but they had cowardly ways of making themselves strong—ways to kill without touch, tooth, or claw.

Deathsticks! That’s what they were like, and sometimes all it took was for a man with one of those sticks to see you. Then there would be a loud crack, or a boom that echoed down the mountain, and just like that, something would be dead.

Alive one moment, dead the next.

That’s what men could do.

And so the pack feared men and had learned to stay away from them, venturing near their dens and lairs only when there was no other choice, even then only at night and only in silence.

But not on this night.

Tonight they would go to the places where men lived. It was dangerous, to be sure, but they really had no choice.

While the icy chill of Mother Earth had made it hard for the wolves to survive—much of their prey hiding beneath a blanket of snow—men still had food…more than they could ever eat.

And so the wolves moved from place to place in search of easy prey, hunting the animals that belonged to men, or maybe even the men themselves.

After all, it was only fair.

No, more than just fair, it was right.

Nature’s way.