(GoG Book 08) The Outcast by Kathryn Lasky Page A

that you see on my face is the work of my mother’s talons.” Coryn thought this would shock Hamish but it didn’t. “How would you like it if your mum did something like that to you?”
    “Oh, she did something just as bad, far worse really, except she had no choice. It is the wolf law.”
    Coryn blinked. He had assumed that Hamish’s mother had died giving birth to him, because there was no older female that he seemed to have anything to do with.
    “You have a mother?”
    “Oh, yes.” Hamish nodded.
    “In this clan?”
    Hamish nodded again.
    “What did she do to you?”
    “When wolf pups are born, we are born naked and blind and deaf. We begin to hear within a few days, but our eyes will not open for almost eleven days. On the night I was born, when my mother saw my crooked leg and how ugly I was, she did not even lick off the birth sac but took me in her mouth and walked out into the cold night. She turned her head toward the highest ridge and began climbing. Never breaking stride, she slid through the night with her loathsome bundle. She put me on the ridge where the wolf birds would find me and eat me. My birth sac full of the juices and slime of birth might summon the wild cats that roamed or even the grizzlies. Or if I should wriggle enough, I might tumble down and crush my thin skull on a rock.”
    “How could she do that? That is so cruel.”
    “Not really. That is simply the way it is with wolves. Ifthe pup lives, that means it is marked to be a gnaw wolf and is taken back into the clan.”
    “And you lived.”
    “Yes, Duncan came to see if I had lived or died.”
    “So when you came back, did she nurse you?”
    “She was no longer there, nor my father.”
    “But why?”
    “It is a law: When a wolf gives birth to a deformed pup, both the mother and the father must leave the clan forever.”
    “Where do they go?”
    “Some try to go to other clans. But news travels fast among wolves, and they are usually not admitted. No one wants wolves who give birth to deformed pups.”
    Coryn didn’t say anything. But he did think that as awful as what Hamish’s mother had done to him, it was not quite the same as what Nyra had done.
    “Now, Coryn, the problem is that you, in fact, might meet your mother.”
    “Yes, it is a problem. More than just my problem. She’s probably here trying to get hireclaws. It’s her dream to rebuild the Tytonic Union of Pure Ones. She wants to control the owl world.”
    “Well, that might not happen.” Hamish knew Corynwas upset and decided to change the subject to one he knew his friend loved: the old legends. “They said that in the time before Hoole, the owl world was in terrible chaos. But when he came here to the Beyond and when Grank, the first collier, taught him how to dive for coals, he one day was seized by a vision. Some say it was the fumes from the volcanoes that gave him this vision, but suddenly he went straight for one of the Sacred Volcanoes. It was as if the volcano had turned to glass, and he could see right through it. He dived in and found the Ember of Hoole.”
    “But how did he not burn up?”
    “No one knows. But when Hoole was dying, he returned to the Beyond and buried the ember. No one knows in which volcano, and for years after his death, many a collier died trying to dive for it. That was part of the gnaw wolves’ job, to keep the wrong kind of owls away from the craters of the volcanoes. The volcanoes still attract colliers, because the rivers of coals have the kind they love, the bonk coals, the ones that burn so strong. And the colliers love to ride the she winds.”
    “ ‘She winds’?” Coryn asked. “What are they?”
    “They are the hot drafts that come off the volcano. Iguess if you fly, they are considered a very sporting wind to ride. You’ll see.”
    The first glimpse of the Sacred Volcanoes came at midnight. The Star Wolf, the wolves’ name for the constellation that owls call the Little Raccoon, had not yet risen in