The first contest was a long marathon to test for stamina and speed. Somewhere between forty and fifty of us, from all ranks and ages, decided to compete, and Garth agreed that the top twenty finishers would move on to the next contest.
The race would take us in a spiraling, ovular circuit around the core and perimeter of the Eastern and Western territories. I looked along the line and was most surprised to see, just seven slots down, my brother, Lloyd the Elder. I slunk down the line until I was standing right next to him and queried, "Have mercy on yourself, Lloyd. You can't possibly hope to compete against these fully healthy, younger wolves."
"I have a duty to my pack. I failed the day that we both nearly died. I will do my best not to fail this time." From his tone, I knew that he would not yield on this point.
And then Lilly howled, signaling the start of the race.
It was a grueling path, but I ended up finishing fourth, behind Humphrey (surprisingly), Hutch, and Garth, and just ahead of Heather. My greatest surprise came when I found that, while my brother did not have the speed that many of the other wolves had, he certainly had a surplus of endurance; he was able to keep his pace for far longer than any of the wolves in the pack and came in as the eleventh finisher.
"Surprised?" he asked, his voice barely showing signs of exertion.
"Very," I replied. Heck, "very surprised" might as well have been the understatement of the century.
"With the years that have passed since the injury, I have learned to compensate for the loss of my depth perception that went away with my eye…" He lifted a paw and rubbed at his empty eye socket. "…and the slight loss of mobility that occurred when the hunter's bullet pierced my hip. Those two injuries and their compensations have given me a unique insight of the world."
"I am not surprised at that."
Then came the test of strength. It was rather simple, consisting only of doing tree squats; the twist was that the tree in question weighed easily more than twice the weight of an average wolf and those who would qualify had to do more than forty of them. It was at this point that my brother's injured hip betrayed him; the pain caused his leg, and therefore him, to collapse only a little past thirty squats.
Three others out of the twenty had also failed, but that was little consolation for him. "I failed."
"What matters is that you tried your hardest."
"Maybe. I still failed."
I myself had passed with fifty-two tree squats; Heather had washed out with only thirty-nine; Humphrey had settled for the minimum forty-one; Garth, show-off that he was, achieved over seventy; and Hutch had nearly achieved fifty.
While I was rather proud of my fifty-two, I knew that the tests I most dreaded were about to happen: the tests of combat skill.
However, when I thought on that point, I realized that it had been a good thing that Heather had washed out by then.
Another point I suddenly dreaded, as I gazed upon the fifteen other wolves that were going to be in the combat challenges, was that my dad had been right. Of the sixteen wolves that were still in the running, all but six (unless you counted me in that category, in which case it was all but five) were from the Northeast Glacier Bay Pack. Most of them, including Francis, I had gotten to know before the first Hunter Incident had forced my exile. The rest were wolves who had been born just before I had been forced to leave, but their scars showed that they had been old enough to fight when Lionel had attacked.
I knew that the next day or so would not be fun. My sore spine was already complaining enough as I stretched and a series of pops and cracks ran down its whole length.
However, the night in my den with Heather, both of us encouraging and comforting each other, soothed my body far more than any herbal poultice either of the vegetarians could come up with.