Runt by Marion Dane Bauer Page A

survived in it. And sometimes not even they. Two of the pups in the last litter had died before they ever emerged from the den. Their mother had taken them, one at a time, off into the forest to bury them. Would she be doing the same again?
    At last, under Silver's persistent tongue, the black pup took a breath. Then another. Air filled his tiny lungs, just as it did his brothers' and sisters', and his mother drew him gently toward her belly to begin to nurse.
    Only then did Silver acknowledge her mate and the name that had sprung unbidden from his lips. "He may be Runt for now," she said, laying her chin across this latest arrival, "but who knows what gift he may bring to the pack?"
    "Who knows?" King repeated softly, though wasn't the pup's mother supposed to know? She always had before. "Maybe," he added, "you have a better name."
    Silver was silent for a long time. "No," she said at last, "I know no other. Not yet."
    Which only confirmed King's fears. His son was marked for death.
    The pups' father looked long and hard at his five offspring, especially at this last, the one whose black fur and white star filled him with such love. Then, tail wagging more slowly this time, he backed toward the surface to carry this further news to the pack.
    Leader, Sniffer, Runner, Thinker. Four fine pups.
    And Runt. Now there was Runt.

2
    For the next few weeks Runt and his brothers and sisters emerged slowly into a world of scent and sight and sound. Their eyes opened. Stiletto teeth popped through pink gums. They drank their mother's warm milk and snuggled against her side to sleep, then woke to nurse and drifted into sleep again. Silver rarely left them except to get water, and when she did, she was always back almost before the befuddled pups had recognized her absence.
    Gradually, they came to be aware of the great black wolf who came often into the den. He brought with him the rich scent of the meat he carried in his mouth for their mother or coughed up for her from his belly. But the pups had no interest in meat yet.
    Gradually, too, as they crawled over the
pile of fuzzy bodies to reach milk and warmth and the comforting caress of their mother's tongue, they began to notice one another. They went from crawling to wobbling along on uncertain legs. To pouncing. To clumsy tussles.
    And they grew. Their bellies constantly round and tight with milk, they doubled or tripled their weight in a week, tripled it again in three weeks. Runt grew, too, of course, but he remained the smallest, much smaller even than his two sisters. When the game was wrestling, he ended up on the bottom of the heap. When two competed for the same teat, he was the one pushed aside.
    Still, he accepted his inferior size without question, as infants will. He accepted his name, too. His mother spoke it so softly, with such musical tones. "Runt. Sweet Runt. My dear little Runt." So when the day finally came for Silver to call the pups from the familiar darkness of the den, he followed without the slightest concern about what the world might hold for such a pup as he.
    The last to stumble into the dazzle of a
spring morning, he paused in the mouth of the den, blinking. All around him, his brothers and sisters tumbled, emitting small, inarticulate yelps of pleasure. Only Runt stood silent, overwhelmed by the wonders spread before him.
    "What is that, Mother?" he asked at last. "And that, and that?"
    "That is the sky," she told him of the soft-looking blue roof above their heads. And the radiant ball that floated in it, so brilliant he had to turn his face away, was the sun. The sweet-smelling stuff riffling in the breeze in every direction was called grass, and that other sky, stretched out at the bottom of the hill below the den, was a lake.
    Beyond the lake and at the edges of the grassy clearing spreading away from their den on every side, a wall of darker green rose. "Trees," Silver explained. The trees held up the sky, floated upside down in the sky lake, and