The first thing you do is secure your new clothes in a nylon duffel bag. You've planned ahead for shapeshifting, and after a bit of adjustment, everything fits comfortably over your back, and will continue to fit in lupus form. So the only problem now is that you're standing naked in the freezing woods. Time to Change.
The transformation, all the way from your natural shape to the form of a huge, sleek wolf, takes a long time, because mistakes hurt. You let yourself Change slowly and smoothly, muscles gliding in and out of alignment, bones separating and then knitting back together. Your eyes liquefy like caterpillars in a cocoon, first left, then right, before opening again, transformed. As you drop to four legs, your sensorium undergoes a metamorphosis that takes several seconds to reach your brain, so for a moment the world is just an explosion of undifferentiated sensations. But then you feel the ice under your paws, smell the trash and exhaust on the winter air, hear the scurrying of animals under the snow.
You are a wolf. And you run.
Next
Your lupus form lopes east through the woods, a red blur among the trees. You don't just race blindly through the winter woods, though. You parallel I-90, close enough that you can hear the rumble of trucks, but far enough away that it feels like you've retreated back in time five thousand years.
You end the first day in the greenhouse of an abandoned home somewhere outside of Rochester; it's still warm inside, and the air smells of vegetation and rot. You awaken with a snarl of Rage. Your spiritual energy is waxing strong again. You're hungry, so you pad outside, listen, and kill a chipmunk. Squirrels always taste terrible, even in your lupus form, but Black Tarn was right about chipmunks: as a wolf, they're sweeter than pancakes in syrup.
You keep moving, and as you run, you contemplate who you are, and who you could be. You think about the tribes. Clay said that soon after you became a true Garou, you'd start to hear the calls of the Patron Spirits that watch over what's left of the Garou Nation. A mere cub can't join a tribe, but you've thought about each of them over the years. You think about…
The Galestalkers know that only the strong can serve Gaia. But the strength She needs is not the fury of the berserker or the prowess of the soldier. To serve Gaia, the Garou must learn the strength to endure. They must learn humility and endurance. They must learn the limits of flesh, and surpass those limits. This is what the Galestalkers teach. They have endured death and torment, the claws of the Wyrm and the cruelty of humanity. And they endure.
Black Tarn warned you about the Galestalkers and their brutal Patron Spirit, whose name she would never say, calling him only Ice Wind, or the Cruel One. A member of the Mohawk Nation, she had suffered terribly in her childhood, but she said that the Galestalkers she knew—Indigenous or otherwise—had been consumed by their grief, turned into living weapons incapable of mercy. In her lucid days, Black Tarn always cherished mercy for the weak as the highest virtue, and the Cruel One terrified her. To join the Galestalkers is to face North Wind and let him tear away everything weak, everything that hesitates, leaving only a dagger of ice aimed at Gaia's enemies.
Next
Then time becomes wolf-time. You race through a mountain valley near Syracuse. You run with a pack of wild dogs who hunt in the decaying suburbs of Utica. You scare off a stray cat and enjoy the spoils of your victory: half a Boston Market rotisserie chicken and two slices of pepperoni pizza, not yet completely frozen. Then you spot a long-haul delivery van idling out front and think, why not? You're a clever wolf. And you hop in a second before the driver slams the door. You travel the rest of the way in luxury, by wolf standards, until a highway sign says Northampton.
Northampton. You made it.
Next
It looks like you came into town from the south. It's still two hours before dawn, so you cross a highway and another, smaller road called…5? Or was it 10? You're having trouble with numbers. Maybe it's because you've never spent this long as a wolf, or maybe it's because you've eaten nothing but chipmunks and trash, but you're not thinking too clearly.
You investigate the borderlands between town and wilderness until you spot an open door in a building across the street from a bowling alley. It's dark and quiet, so you pad upstairs, find a bathroom, and reverse your metamorphosis, again taking your time. It goes faster the other way, as your flesh settles into its natural configuration. When you see yourself in the steamed-up mirror, there's a bit of blood under your eyelids, but otherwise you did fine.
As you wipe the blood off your cheek, you contemplate the strange and frequently challenging intersections of your human ethnicity, your Garou nature, and what remains of the tribes. The Garou tribes aren't human families. Black Tarn said the tribes were like religions—in the confusing sense that sometimes you choose your gods and sometimes they choose you. To Clay, each tribe was a yearning so strong that it took on a spiritual form in the shape of a mighty Patron Spirit that represented its values. And to Scarper, the Garou tribes were nothing more than street gangs, fighting over turf as an enemy army set up its artillery.
But most humans don't care about your gods, your desires, or your tags. They see another human, and they see skin deep. So you can't help but think about who you are to them, and what that means to you.
You know that at least one of your grandparents fled the Soviet Union, and he was probably a member of some kind of Indigenous group, but you were never able to learn more. And one of your grandmothers had stories of her grandmother living in the Ottoman Empire, but did that mean she was Turkish? Arab? Greek? And the other two were absolute ciphers, last names Lane and Carter, like they couldn't wait to become normal, assimilated Americans. America didn't let them, of course, but they found a niche for themselves. The only problem, then, was you: temperamental, distant, prone to daydreams and fantasies. They had no cultural framework to understand you, but of course, human culture wouldn't have saved them. You weren't a witch or a prophet or a schizophrenic, you were Garou, awaiting your First Change.
And now you're alone, without Garou or humans, fleeing the only home you've known for better prospects.
You adjust your new outfit and check your duster, head back downstairs, and wander around as if you've never before seen human civilization. Bowling alley, Shell station, car wash, a roundabout…it all seems bewildering, but after a few minutes of walking on two legs, you feel less like a ghost or a lost nature spirit. Still, the few pre-dawn walkers shy away from you, as if they know what you are. They're just regular people, the People of the Map, getting ready for their day. Not like you. You have work to do here.
Answers await.
Next Chapter