Two pale brown wolves slowly made their way through the trees together, making their way along the eastern slopes of Jasper. They were near the very edge of the park, staying clear of the interior pack territories. Both looked incredibly similar to each other, nearly identical in most aspects. Each was quite clearly a sturdy male alpha, though they might have seemed a bit thinner than they should be. Each kept their eyes, ears and noses alert for potential prey, for any chance at a meal, really, but also for the presence of other wolves.
"Do you smell anything yet?" One with a slightly higher-pitched voice than the other asked, keeping his voice relatively hushed.
"Why are you asking me?" The other asked back in equally quiet, but more agitated voice. "Your nose is better! What do you smell?"
"Nothing! That's why I asked you!" The first one responded, followed by a long, weak groaning from both of their stomachs.
Both looked at their guts and then back at each other.
"We've gotta at least catch a squirrel or something." The first complained.
"Well then smell one out!" The second retorted.
"I can't!" The first repeated. "We're too close the edge of the park; there's nothing out here."
"We can't go further into the forest." The second reminded him. "This isn't Banff, we'd risk running into our old pack!"
"I know!" The first insisted . . . right before his nose started to pick something up. "Wait, I got something . . ."
The other began to take concentrated sniffs, needing to draw in more air than the other. "Other wolves!" He realized aloud with alarm.
"Wait, Lyle!" The first stopped him for a moment, focusing on the scent himself. "They don't have our old pack scent." He said.
"Are you sure?" Lyle asked.
The other sniffed some more, even turning in the direction he believed it to be coming from. "Yeah," he answered, "they're probably just other loners."
Lyle relaxed somewhat, though not dropping his alerted tension entirely. "Are they close?" He asked.
"Maybe . . . not too far." The other answered, after another two sniffs. "They're definitely up that way." He indicated a short distance northward, towards a nearby ridge that looked like it overlooked the slope.
"Maybe they'll have some food!" Lyle whispered with sudden excitement, to which the other wolf responded with an equal grin and several nods before they both began moving towards the ridge. Neither actually had the immediate concern of whether or not these other wolves would consider sharing any potential food. But . . . neither of them had ever been too bright.
They made their way up to the ridge over the next few minutes, constantly checking to see if they could spot anything, wolves or prey. They did, finally, and it was not what they were expecting. They'd expected to sight the wolves they smelled . . . but not one like this.
There was one wolf, sitting at the edge where the ridge dropped off several dozen feet to the forest below. He sat there staring out, past the forest it seemed, at the open plains beyond. And . . . he was huge! Absolutely he was larger than either of them; longer, taller, thicker, everything. Neither of them had ever seen a wolf that larger. Granted, their minds were exaggerating his size to some extent. In reality he wasn't enormous or monstrous, but still bigger than any wolves of their region ever grew to be.
"Link," Lyle spoke up quietly, "he's huge!"
"He's bigger than Tony!" Link added. Both remembered most of the members of their former pack. While Mooch was obviously the largest by volume, it was Tony, even in old age, who was the largest wolf by natural build. This wolf, however, was a clear bit larger.
Both of them just starred for a moment, before Lyle finally threw an elbow jab at Link. "Well, go up and talk to him." He intended to pass the duty of going first to his brother.
"Me?" Link was shocked . . . and obviously apprehensive. "You're scarier!"
"Ugh, fine, settle this quick!" Lyle responded, holding a paw out.
At the gesture, Link did as well, and both whispered in unison. "Leaf, teeth, rock!"
"Can I help you?" A different voice broke in right as they would have chosen their play.
The brothers both yelped and leapt back from the source of the new voice, a brown female wolf with dark brown hair. She looked from one to the other, with a mixture between a calm and unimpressed expression. She was of a normal size, unlike the male up on the ridge, though she did have a fairer bit of muscle.
"Ah . . . uhhh . . ." both twins failed to speak any actual words.
The female wolf's nose twitched a little bit on its own as it began to faintly detect something, leading her to take a step toward them sniffing. "Wait," she said, "that's . . . my father's scent on you!" She ended with narrowed eyes, and more actively baring teeth.
The twins looked each other in confusion before turning back to her. "Who?" They asked together.
"King." The female almost growled out the name.
The actual mention of the name brought the two dim-witted brothers' recent memory into light.
"Oh yeah!" Link acknowledged. "Yeah we followed his lead around for a little bit."
"Till he lead us to nothin!" Lyle added.
The female wolf lessened her readied, aggressive stance, more than aware of the likelihood of their desertion being true. "That's something he's made a lifetime of doing." She said back.
"Wait, so you're his daughter?" Link asked.
"Man even his own pup didn't think he was king of anything." Lyle followed up by mocking the absent alpha.
"No," she confirmed, "once, I followed him. I struggled to convince myself that everything he taught me was right . . . but I couldn't do it anymore . . . I'm Princess." She introduced herself at the end, after shaking her head to throw off her regret.
"Oh, I'm Lyle." One brother said.
Then the other. "I'm Link."
And then they both spoke in sync. "And we're everybody's favorite twins." Both ended the sentence with a mild smile, as if they were seemingly proud of themselves for the declaration. It was just enough to give Princess the vibe they were of . . . sub-par intellect.
"Well," she said, "I hope wherever you last left him was far from here."
"Oh yeah." Lyle said.
"We left him way back in Banff." Link finished what his brother had begun.
"Good." Princess's demeanor relaxed a great deal more at the assurance her father wasn't about to become a factor in her life again.
"Hey." A new voiced suddenly broke in with a greeting.
They turned to find the very same wolf from up on the ridge approaching them, only a few feet away.
"Hi." Princess smiled lightly at his sudden presence, and the two rubbed muzzles for a moment. "I'm sorry I stopped before coming back, I ran into these two." She explained to him.
"That's okay." He told her, before turning to the twins.
Both Lyle and Link only starred with wide eyes and more than shaky nerves. Inside their instincts were yowling at them, telling them that they should be expecting some ferocious monster. But, this new, large wolf's voice and face were both placid and calm. He seemed quite . . . normal.
"Hi?" The large wolf asked in a slower manner than would be normal, left feeling awkward from the silence and the stares of the two strangers.
"This is Link and Lyle." Princess introduced the twins for them, the act of which apparently brought their smaller minds back into function.
"Oh, uh yeah yeah." One said, followed by the other. "We're twins."
"It's pretty visible." The huge wolf remarked. "I'm Chevron."
"What are you two doing up here?" Princess asked, in reference to why they'd left Banff after ditching her father.
"Oh, us? We're uh—" One of the twins began speak, but was briefly interrupted by both of their stomachs.
"Lookin for something to eat." The other twin remarked in the aftermath.
"Yeah, Banff wasn't really doing us too good." Lyle told them.
"Plus we're more used to things here in Jasper anyway." Link added on as always.
"You're from here originally?" Chevron asked.
Both brothers looked at each other quickly, before giving an answer, suddenly stuck by the potential danger of answering with the entire truth.
"Yeah, you could say that." They both said together.
Chevron seemed unphased, but Princess let her eyes narrow by just the slightest bit. The manner of their answer was suspicious to her, though not necessarily alarming.
"Well," Chevron offered, "she just caught some earlier. You guys can have some of my portion." He looked at Princess afterward, as if just to make sure it was ok with her.
"Really?" Both twins responded simultaneously with obvious excitement.
Chevron waited for an indication from Princess. She stared back at him for a moment, before letting a more relaxed expression indicate she was okay with everything.
"Come on." Chevron indicated for the twins to follow them, though Princess stepped in to block the brothers' path.
"Only SOME of my mate's portion." She emphasized her own stipulations through bared teeth.
The twins heeded the clear warning and nodded in unison.
Princess turned to begin following Chevron herself, the twins giving her a few paces before then following as well.
"So," one twin began to ask the larger wolf up ahead of them all, "where are you from?"
"Yeah," the other twin immediately followed up, "we're some of the biggest alphas from our old pack, and we've never seen any wolf as big as you."
Princess noted the comment about belonging to another former pack, but said nothing.
"Yeah, not the first time with that question." Chevron answered through a mild sigh. "I'm from Alaska."
Princess couldn't keep herself from giggling at least a tiny bit at the memory the very mention of that place brought. Chevron looked back at her knowingly, with a smile of his own.
"Huh?" Lyle vocalized confusion.
"Why's that funny?" His brother then voiced the actual question.
"An old incident," Princess explained as they neared the ridge, "from back when I was still in my father's pack. A wolf named Humphrey—"
The twins' eyes darted to each other for an instant at the potential connection to the familiar name, something that Princess again noticed.
But she continued. "—from Winston and Tony's pack, stood on the shoulders of Tony's son Garth and put on an . . . awful acting performance, pretending to be a mighty Alaskan super-alpha. My father bought into it, briefly. Humphrey even convinced him and the others that he'd slain a grizzly bear and—"
The twins slipped up again.
"Humphrey?" One mocked to the other.
"Taking down a grizzly?" The other mockingly asked back.
"You guys know Humphrey?" Chevron asked as they all emerged from the trees onto the short space of bare ground between the trees and the ridge's edge.
The two looked at each other quickly with visible alarm on their faces. Princess noticed, almost amused inside at their lack of expressive restraint.
"Uh, yeah," Link said, "yeah."
"Yea, we . . . uh, ran into him a few times before." Lyle furthered.
Princess didn't really feel like calling them out at that moment, so instead she went along and resumed her own story.
"He managed to guile my father into believing that if he ate a piece of a bear he would instantly grow to twice his own size." She told them.
"What?" Lyle half-laughed at the concept.
"Yeah," Link said, "not even we're dumb enough to believe something like that!"
Princess giggled, though she did try to keep it under control. Chevron may just not have had the energy to laugh, but he did look over to his mate with humorous grin.
"Wait, what?" Both twins looked at each other with the sudden realization that they'd just insulted themselves, but Princess kept going before their brains could really work.
"He found out it was all ruse," she finished the story, "but only because some of his other wolves saw members of Winston and Tony's pack running around the edges of the field we were in."
The twins had to laugh. It didn't last more than a few seconds, but they just couldn't help themselves.
"Man," one said, "come on."
"Yeah," the other asked, "did he hit his head on a rock when he was a pup or something?"
"Unfortunately no. His obsession with alpha supremacy just drove him mad." Princess told them.
"Oh yeah." Link said.
"We joined cause he told us he needed the biggest, baddest alphas." Lyle followed on.
Princess and Chevron both bore the same unamused, unimpressed look at the two brothers.
"Well, that was before he lead us nowhere." Link tried to defend their past decision.
"Yeah, we didn't know all he cared about was chasing around pups." Lyle said as well.
That got Princess's complete attention, and brought a readied tension back to her muscles.
"Pups?" She prodded a further explanation out of the two.
The twins looked to each other again before they answered.
"Uh, yeah," Link said, "Stinky, Claudette and Runt."
That name sent the she-wolf lunging for him. No of them saw it coming, and consequently she took Link to the ground with ease, swiftly pinning a paw down upon his throat with a snarl that terrified even her nearby mate.
Chevron's eyes went to Lyle, waiting, expecting exactly what came next.
Lyle jumped for Princess, hoping to knock her off his brother. But his lunge was cut short by Chevron crashing into him in a very haphazard tackle that sent them both tumbling onto the ground, neither ending up on top of the other.
"You, hurt, Runt?" Princess let the three words part from between her bared teeth.
"NO!" Link's response came also as a clear plea, even just for her to listen.
"No, please listen to him!" Lyle spoke up while he got back to his feet. "We didn't hurt any of them! We just chased them around!"
"Yeah!" Link quickly went on. "And we only chased them for a few minutes until they tricked us into hitting our heads into a rock!"
Princess didn't let up, though she stopped inching her jaws closer to Link's face, she still didn't withdraw.
"Darling?" Chevron realized it wasn't either those two that were going to get her to stop. "Darling!"
Her eyes shifted up to him, but she still held her snarling jaw in place.
"I don't think they're smart enough to lie." Chevron reminded her of who the twins evidently were.
She clearly considered it hard, spending almost another entire minute staring down at the would-be victim she had pinned into the dirt. She did release him, but it was very slow, and he slipped away and gradually stood back up instead of wriggling free and jumping.
"If I find out that—" She just began before they both spoke up together.
"You won't!" They swore.
"Yeah," Lyle said immediately after, "like he said we just ran around chasing them until we hit our heads on a rock."
"Then they tricked your dad and his other wolf into slipping all over a frozen lake." Link added some of the rest.
If she had been calm to begin with, she might just have laughed, but coming out of an aggressive stance and snarl, the closest she came to laughing was returning to a calm, normal expression.
"Yeah, I'd believe that." She admitted.
Chevron let out his own sigh of relief, apart from that of the twins nearby. Nothing he'd ever seen had driven Princess into such a swift rage, though he supposed he should've expected something like; she'd told him about Runt before.
"They did get away then?" Chevron asked.
Both twins nodded together.
"Yeah," Link said, "their parents took them home."
"And King never even came to check what happened to us after!" Lyle complained.
"Yeah!" Link remembered as well. "That's when we left."
Princess looked more . . . dumbfounded at their stupidity than angry.
"You realized my father wasn't a wolf to be followed when he didn't care what became of you, but not when he told you he wanted to hurt PUPS?" She demanded some kind of answer out of all of this.
The twins, for once, seemed to realize how unintelligent they were portraying themselves.
"Hey! We were hungry!" One said.
"And our pack's territory barely had any food left!" The other added.
Princess and Chevron had to share a glance at that response.
"You left your old pack because of something they had no control over?" Chevron asked, almost unwilling to believe everything.
The twins both developed the same sudden, defensive expression . . . that then ended up altering into shared faces of guilt as the two looked at each other again.
Princess and Chevron waited for an answer, but no real answer came, just an awkward silence and what they hoped was genuine guilt. To the she-wolf and her mate, it almost looked as if the two brothers had never really thought about what they had done or were doing.
Before anyone else said anything, both brothers' stomachs made themselves known again, shifting the twins' expressions from guilt to embarrassment.
"Um," Link asked, "can we still have some of that food?"
All four wolves ate some portion of the prey Princess had hunted down earlier in the day. Splitting prey meant for two amongst four instead meant that none of them were entirely full afterwards, but for the twins at least it felt wonderful to eat anything larger than just a squirrel or a hare.
"Mmm, thanks for letting us have some of this." One of the twins muttered through a half-full mouth.
"Yeah," the other said, "we thought the humans had driven everything away by the time we left."
Chevron's head lifted up at the name of the planet's dominant species.
"Was that the reason?" He asked.
"Yeah," Lyle answered him, "they've always been taking more forest and scaring prey off."
Chevron looked over his shoulder, out over the ledge at the Alberta plains beyond the edge of the park.
"Well, that's not something you'll have to worry about for that much longer." The Alaskan wolf remarked
Neither brother had any idea what he meant, a fact that took a prodding glance from Princess to alert him to.
Chevron's first response didn't come in words, however. Instead it came in the form of him rising up and walking over to the ledge, then looking back and expecting them to follow. They did, after sharing a glance and hesitating for a few seconds.
Out there, beyond the eastern edges of Jasper Park, were the seemingly endless plains of west-central Canada, a few thin strips of road cutting across the landscape, and even some tiny clusters of lights far on the horizon's edge, only now visible as twilight was beginning to take hold of the sky. Chevron wasn't looking at any of those things, however. His attention was on numerous, much closer objects that he found himself having to point out.
"There." He said, pointing with a paw towards a scattered pattern of metal objects, many seeming to have turned brownish red with rust. Upon a more focused look across the distance using their alpha eyes, the twins could see a motion to the metal things, each gradually tipping one end up while the other went down, then the first end down while the second went up. It was a repetitive motion, like when they had played see-saw or teeter-totter on a log as pups. Only after a few moments of gazing, the two brothers managed to notice that many of these actually weren't moving, but were in fact completely still.
"I don't get it." Link said.
"Yeah, what's going on?" Lyle asked.
"Humans are only out here because of those things." Chevron explained.
"What, the see-saws?" Link asked, causing Chevron and Princess to share an amused look again before Chevron went on.
"Yeah," he explained further, "there's something special they get out of them, from under the ground. They need it, and it takes a lot of humans to do all the stuff they need to do to get it, so humans go wherever they find it. But . . ." The Alaskan wolf ended with another outstretched paw, pointing towards one particular device down on the plains that a closer look showed two humans walking around.
The four of them watched, only Chevron knowing what was really happening, with Princess having some idea from what he'd told her and the two twins being completely clueless. One of the humans stopped and apparently squatted down, looking at something on the side of the large object. Whatever he saw or read caused him to stand back up and motion to the other human with some back-and-forth movement of his hand in front of his throat. The other human, in response, walked over to something else nearby and began to turn it with some amount of effort. After several turns and a passing moment, the up and down motion of the machine slowly stalled out until it became completely still like many of the others.
"It's running out here." Chevron resumed his explanation after letting them see. "They're checking each well to see how much is still coming out. If it's not enough anymore, then they shut it down."
They all watched for another moment as those two distant humans moved on to check another well.
"So what?" Lyle asked. "When it's all gone they'll leave?"
"Most of them." Chevron nodded. "Or at least a lot of them. A lot are already leaving for another place off to the northeast where there's way more of the stuff they want stuck in sand."
The two brothers shared a similar, unknowing look as before, and Princess shared her own with Chevron, one he could tell was meant to let him know not to go too deep into the subject.
"So, when do you think they'll all be gone?" Link asked, with some underlying enthusiasm.
Chevron did a wolf shrug. "Not sure. A few years, maybe. They've been shutting down at least one well every day since we've been watching them. There's only about three quarters as many still working than there were when we first met up here, and that was several months ago."
"The end of winter." Princess added the exact timeframe. It was summer now, several weeks into it.
"How come you know so much?" Lyle asked.
"About human stuff?" Link immediately clarified.
Chevron looked back at the two of them, then back out at the Alberta landscape before laying down. Princess laid down as he did, next to him but not right up against him.
"I've been with them a lot." Chevron only then answered the question
Both twins looked to each other, then back to him. Neither asked anything else for a few seconds, but their faces gave away their curiosity.
"I was part of a preservation program." Chevron went ahead, opting for a more concise, less wordy and detailed version than he otherwise would. "Our territory was burned down in a wildfire when I was a pup. Humans rescued me and some others, and kept us in captivity for a while until they could relocate us. First they released us somewhere else in central Alaska, but they came to get us out again when the area was deforested for mining. Then they set us out in the preserves on the North Slope, by the Arctic Ocean, but then a lot of drilling needed to start there so they took us back again. Then they released us in the actual mountains of the North Slope, but then they needed to tear the mountains apart to get the black rocks, so they took us back again. And, eventually they decided to give us over to the Canadians instead. They finally brought me out here."
He paused just to glance at the two of them, both of whom were still evidently listening.
"Every time they actually had us in captivity I listened to a lot of the things they said. Sitting in a cage there wasn't really much else to do. And I also saw some of the things first-paw each time I was actually out in the wild before they would take us back again."
He waited, he and Princess both, for whatever response or other questions might be coming. But what did come surprised them both . . . even though they would realize later on that it really shouldn't have.
Both twins shared a look as always, before both asking the synchronized question. "What's an ocean?"