The Mad Wolf Who Thinks She's a Tiger
"Or what? Were you raised under a tiger? Was your mother one?"
Now that was a refreshingly original way to insult someone's mother. Tarte could not, for the life of her, understand why the pack leader was so furious. She answered with a shrug.
"Why are you getting so angry about it?"
The hunt had gone off without a hitch. Not a single wolf had been hurt. They had brought down a great many deer and come away with a mountain of meat. The pack leader, however, saw things differently.
Tigers are cool, though.
"Your forepaws aren't powerful like a tiger's. At best you'll leave scratches on hide. You don't weigh what a tiger weighs. Pinning an enemy so it can't even twitch is out of the question. A wolf has to live a wolf's life. Keep playing tiger and you'll be dead before you know it."
A tiger is a solitary, silent assassin. Mention one and people picture a tremendous roar, but when it actually hunts it doesn't make a sound — not even a footfall. It prefers to kill in a single strike, clamping down on the nape of the neck, whether the prey is a small mammal or something far larger. What makes that possible is overwhelming jaw strength. That doesn't mean a tiger loses if the fight comes head-on, either. Its claws are razors, and a forepaw driven by its full weight can smash through a sturdy iron gate. On rare occasions a tiger falls to a bear or a crocodile; just as often, it hunts them instead. In any true sense of the word, its only natural enemy is man.
A wolf is a hunter that lives in a pack. The most efficient tactic in a wolf's repertoire is to use coordinated movement and extraordinary endurance to drive prey without rest until the quarry collapses from exhaustion — then finish a target that has nothing left. It is the same method ancient humans used before weapons advanced, when their arsenal was primitive spears and thrown stones. Perhaps that resemblance is why some wolves became companions to humans, and turned into dogs.
A wolf's weight, even being generous, is half that of a male tiger. If the tiger is large and the wolf on the smaller side, the difference can stretch to tenfold. A wolf cannot copy a tiger's hunting method, and must not try. Sooner or later the prey would strike back, and the wolf would be wounded, and then it would die.
He's pretending to be angry while kindly explaining all this.
The pack leader snapped at Tarte and, point by point, laid those facts out for her — the way an adult wolf teaches a pup. When he had asked whether she had no parents, what he had really been asking was whether there had been no wolf around to teach her any of this.
"Your way of doing things will get the pack hurt someday. It'll get you killed."
"I got it, I got it. Stop. My ears are about to bleed."
"Did you actually listen?"
"Don't put the pack in danger. That's what you said. I got it. I got it."
"As long as you understand. Let's head back to the den for now."
The wolves took the hunted deer in their jaws and dragged them toward the den. The pups who could not hunt for themselves still had to be fed. They could not build carts the way humans did, and they had no pouches to butcher the meat into, so this miserable dragging was the only method available. It was also a method that inevitably threw scent in every direction. The blood-smell of dead deer bled out across the forest.
"Everyone — drop the prey and run."
Midway through the haul, the pack leader sensed danger and called the warning. The pack's trust in him ran so deep that the wolves asked nothing and questioned nothing. They flung down the deer they had hunted and fled on the spot. Only Tarte hesitated, caught in an awkward half-step.
We worked so hard for these deer, though.
"What's coming?"
"A bear."
"The bear isn't even in sight yet. Are we really supposed to throw away all the food and run?"
"We won't throw it all away."
The pack leader took one of the deer in his jaws. After telling the pack to abandon the prey and flee, he had chosen to shoulder the risk of being chased himself — hoping that a bear, finding the three deer left behind, would be satisfied enough not to follow. They had taken four, after all.
He tries to take every dangerous job for himself.
When they had marched out on a long expedition, he had stood at the vanguard. When they hunted, he had tried to claim the finishing blow, the role with the highest chance of a counterattack — though Tarte had turned that into a melee, and they had ended up bringing the deer down together. And now he meant to handle the food transport that might draw a bear. This was the life of a wolf pack leader.
So this is what a father looks like in the wild.
This was no mere pack. They were family. Save for one strange wanderer, every wolf in the group was this leader's child. The depth of that familial love was something rare even among humans. Tarte said nothing. She simply took a deer in her own jaws. The pack leader started to speak, then let it go, thinking her a truly fearless female.
Fortunately, the bear seemed satisfied with the two deer it found, and did not bother chasing the wolves.
The real danger arrived at dawn.
"Tiger! Run!"
There it is.
The deer hunt, the bear on their trail — both had felt a little too ambiguous to count as the Wolf God's trial. So Tarte had kept waiting for something to happen. And now it had.
If I die in here, do I actually die?
Tarte did not know that dying in the Tower meant you could come back. She had no way of knowing that Team A had died and been revived. Even when people tried to tell her as much, all that appeared in the chat window was a blocked line of text.
Which meant that any normal person would have run.
Failing the trial versus dying inside it — how different are those two things, really?
It was a fairly logical problem, and Tarte turned it over carefully. If dying in the Wolf God's trial meant actually dying, then losing to Team A would likely mean death as well. Conversely, if the Tower was merciful enough that losing to Team A wouldn't kill you, then dying in the Wolf God's trial probably wouldn't kill you either. In both cases, the profitable move was the same: stake your life on clearing the Wolf God's trial.
So how do I win?
A wolf cannot beat a tiger. The pack leader had drilled that into her ears until she was sick of hearing it. If you stacked enough convoluted assumptions — a tiger already sick and dying, a healthy wolf pack — the chance wasn't absolutely zero. But anything that needs a string of special conditions attached is what people generally mean when they say you cannot win. If a wolf stands against a tiger, the wolf dies. That is the law of nature.
And after yelling all that at me...
The pack leader — the same pack leader who had so fiercely insisted that a wolf could not beat a tiger — stood against the tiger to protect his children. Tarte could see it. She could hear it.
The Wolf God's trial. What does the Wolf God actually want?
To kill the tiger? To keep as many wolves alive as possible? Maybe the point was to save the pack leader, run with him, and become the Adam and Eve of a new world. Even if she tried to read the examiner's intent, there was no chance she could parse the thoughts of the Wolf God. It wasn't human. It wasn't even an ordinary wolf. It was a god of wolves. So Tarte would do it her way. Fortunately, this was not a multiple-choice question. It was an essay. She was free to write whatever answer she pleased.
Watching Tarte break from the pack and bolt off alone, the viewers thought: fair enough. There was no reason for Tarte to risk herself for a pack she had only just met.
The occasional lunatic said something insane, but most of them conceded the point: in front of a tiger, a wolf was supposed to run. Tarte, however, was not simply running. The correct answer to a trial could hardly be flight.
"Hey, bear! I'm here to make a deal!"
She tracked the bear by scent back to the place where the pack had been forced to abandon two deer. The bear was already displeased at a strange intruder trespassing on its territory. Push it a little further and it might attack. The other party was a brown bear — an adult, an apex predator on par with a tiger. A wolf was a mouthful. And that mouthful of a wolf made a proposal.
"Let's hunt the tiger together."
"Why would I?"
Coming here at all had been a gamble. The Wolf God's trial let her speak with the wolves, but there was no guarantee the same would hold for a bear. A bear was a different animal. Fortunately, speech worked with the bear as well. The first gamble had paid off. Tarte started the second: talking the bear into it.
"The tiger hunts the same deer, the same foxes, all the prey we like. Every time it succeeds, you have a harder time finding a meal."
"That's true of you wolves as well, isn't it?"
"Wolves aren't a threat to you at all. A tiger is an enemy that could actually kill you."
"I could wait for all the wolves to die, then jump the tiger once it's worn itself out hunting."
"Kill the tiger, and I'll catch you a fox every day and bring it to you."
The bear weighed the offer's profits against its risks, and decided to accept. Sharing overlapping territory with a tiger had always soured its mood, but fighting meant a real chance of being wounded, so it had endured an uncomfortable coexistence. In the wild, a wound was as good as a death sentence. But a joint attack with the wolves? The outcome might be different. And so a temporary alliance was struck between bear and wolf.
By the time Tarte returned to the pack's den with the bear in tow, the scene was a ruin. Pups and subadults still growing into themselves — many of the wolves were already dead. The pack leader still had breath in him, but breath was all he had. He lacked even the strength to open his mouth. He could only blink at Tarte, who had brought a bear. His life looked ready to run out at any moment.
A wolf cannot beat a tiger. That remains true no matter how fiercely a father loves his children, no matter how desperately he wants it. That was why Tarte had never planned to stay and fight here in the first place. She was not betting on a miracle with zero chance. She was chasing a possibility that existed, even if it was only one percent.
"This isn't quite what we discussed. I thought I'd be attacking alongside a lot of wolves."
Looking over the devastated den, the bear sneered. The tiger did look fairly worn down — but the wounds on its hide were nothing but scratches. The pack leader's resistance, offered with a readiness to die, had left marks that would heal in a few days. Of course they had. He was a wolf, and that was a tiger. If the tiger was in better shape than expected, the bear would break the agreement and leave.
"I'll show you how tired that tiger really is. When I do — that's when you strike."
Tarte stepped forward. She had to make the bear feel this was an easy victory, or she would never get it to join the fight. In the end, it seemed fighting the tiger was a fate she could not escape.