Strana Mechty, Winter Past, 2987.
By the time he realized it, he had put his entire sibko into trouble. The members were taught to move and act as one; that each individual be responsible for one another and now, he had broken that rule and jeopardized them all.
He had wandered off too far, leaving his star mates behind and leaping over the territorial markers that signified the boundary of his Clan's enclave was clearly not a good idea. But he had been challenged and he would by no means back away from any dare. To be called a coward was the ultimate insult and no one ever backed away from that, not unless they wished to be relegated to a lesser caste. Each one had vowed that they would sooner die than be tested out. So far they had already lost half their number from the moment they could pronounce each other's names correctly and they hadn't even begun full battle training as of yet.
As the cold air sweeping the tundra began to seep its way into his little body, the boy stowed his hands into his jacket but it wasn't enough; the icy chill swept over him and he finally realized that he might have made a fatal mistake of wandering off too far and now he was hopelessly lost. Night was falling and all he had was his blade; Strana Mechty's ferocious predators had very little to fear from a preadolescent boy with a pocketknife. He had wanted to cry out but the wind froze his throat to the point that the pain in his tonsils had become unbearable. As the darkness fell around him, all he could do was to just plod slowly as the snowdrifts began to harden while the temperature fell even further.
For a brief moment the boy almost thought he heard a whine from a helicopter that was no doubt searching for him but when he looked up with frozen tears on his cheeks all he could see was the snow cascading down upon him. Gritting his teeth so that it would prevent too much chattering, the boy steeled himself as he chose a direction from random and proceeded to walk towards it. Minutes turned to hours as first his toes and then his legs became numb from the cold and then finally he could no longer feel the lower half of his body. But he didn't give up; he would sooner die than give up.
Due to the fact that his body was half-frozen, he didn't feel too much pain when the ground opened up beneath him and he fell headfirst into the hole. After an indeterminate period from when he blacked out to when he finally woke up, the boy realized that he had fallen into a burrow and he was not alone. After having remembered that he had a lighter in one of his jacket's pockets, the boy instantly withdrew it and flicked it on for an instant.
Several pairs of yellow eyes stared back at him from a nest of gnarled roots and he quickly dropped the lighter out of sheer fright. It was fortunate that the lighter had fallen down on some dry twigs and consequently created a little bonfire that illuminated the interior of the burrow for otherwise he might have been blind. At that moment the boy had pulled out his pocketknife; if whatever predator wanted to eat him, then it would be a meal that must be earned first, he swore to himself as he quickly faced his adversaries.
Instead of attacking, the wolf cubs merely yawned and went back to sleep.
After realizing that the adults must have been out hunting, the boy silently laughed as he huddled beside the sleeping cubs for extra warmth; it was one of the things that he was taught in cold-weather survival training. Curiously, one of the cubs snuggled up beside him and licked his left cheek as the little fire died down. As sleep began to overtake his awareness, the boy remembered something about the wolves of Strana Mechty, they were genetically engineered and were twice as large as their Terran cousins and they were also very cunning predators.
As silence fell over the tundra when the howling winds finally passed it by, the boy awoke to a strange sight: pieces of raw meat had been placed beside him and the wolf cubs were gone. He had remembered a lecture by one of his teachers in biology that had stated that while the smoke jaguars and ghost bears had been known to attack people on sight; there was never a recorded attack by a wolf on a human being. It was almost as if man and wolf were meant to be companions to each other.
It was then he heard voices coming from the entrance of the burrow, calling out his name. The boy quickly grabbed a few artifacts from the den and proceeded to climb out of the entrance. As he breached the frozen surface, he came face to face with a slightly older boy who instantly recognized him and called out to the others.
"Joshua! Are you all right?" His older brother's sibkin said as he pulled the boy up from the burrow.
"Thank you, Travis." Joshua replied sheepishly as his older brother and the other members of the senior sibko ran over and converged around him. A Clan Wolf helicopter passed overhead in a slow circle, illuminating them with its massive searchlight before preparing to land.
"Of all the stunts you pulled, that was by far the dumbest. You knew the weather conditions out here." His brother's face began to turn beet red despite the cold. "You were lucky that our Khan allowed all of the sibkos to participate in the search and rescue; if we were not Wolves then you might have been left here to die."
"I would not have died, Jaime." Joshua smiled triumphantly as he pulled out a tuft of wolf fur from his pocket.
He had won the challenge.