Runt by Marion Dane Bauer Page A

Disappointed once more, probably. Disappointed that his son had no more sense than to try to take on this mammoth creature by himself. Disappointed that Runt didn't understand that the main strength of a pack was that they worked together in all they did.
    The old moose stood there, teetering on his long legs, and peered muzzily in Runt's direction. Clearly, he was waiting to see what the wolf pup was going to do.
    And that was when Runt decided. For weeks now he had been keeping his voice still, but he had a voice, a voice and a story to tell. About Bider. About the poisoned meat. His family must know about the poisoned meat. And about the bull moose, about the moose waiting to die, waiting to give strength to his
family. His family must know about all of it.
    And so the small black pup lifted his face to the soft blue sky and howled, loud and clear. "Come," he sang. "You must come. I have found Moose."
    His voice rose and rose on the sunlit air, then slid back down and rose again. He sang until an answer came floating back through the crisp fall day.
    "Moose?" It was King. "Who calls my family to feast?"
    "It is I," the pup answered, and he was going to add his name, Runt, but he couldn't make himself say it. So he said again only, "It is I. The one who wears your black fur and white star."
    At first, Runt heard no response. Only silence followed his father's question, his answer. And then the song came again, eerie and beautiful, ringing through the forest.
    "My son," his mother howled in her high and tender voice.
    "Brother!" sang Hunter and the pups.
    And then his father's voice boomed out again, more powerful than all the rest despite the wounds he had just endured in battle.
"Singer. My son Singer," he howled. "Wait for us there. We come."
    So ... he was no longer Runt. His father had given him a new name. At last. The small black pup turned the name over and over to test the feel of it.
    Singer. He would be Singer. And surely he did have a song to sing, a unique and sad and beautiful song, given especially to him.
    He could sing about death. He could sing about longing. He could sing about loving. About loving his family and the sweet world that gave them all life.
    He could sing about an aging and injured moose, awaiting his fate.
    Singer lifted his face again to the pale morning sky and howled once more. "Come, my dear ones!" he sang. "Come. The feast waits."

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Afterword
    Wolves are complex and varied creatures. Human response to wolves has been complex and varied, too. For centuries white settlers on the North American continent called wolves evil, cowards, murderers. They brought this attitude with them from Europe where both rabies and dog-wolf interbreeding sometimes made wolves dangerous to humans. The fear created by such encounters still colors many of the stories we tell very young children, stories such as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Three Little Pigs."
    Native populations on this continent, mostly hunters themselves, had a much different attitude toward wolves. They admired them for their family spirit and their hunting skill, for their power and intelligence and the close relationship they had with their world. Unfortunately, the attitudes of the Europeans prevailed, and from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries wolves were almost eradicated in North America. They were killed for money, for sport, for vengeance. They were shot from airplanes and caught in
traps and poisoned, taking other equally innocent creatures with them into death. It was only in the late twentieth century that we began to question the assumptions that justified this slaughter.
    Runt and his pack are, of course, entirely fictional. And yet most of what they do in this story—except for talking—is based on observations made by wolf biologists studying these fascinating creatures. Wolves have been observed rejoicing over the birth of their young, burying dead pups, playing jokes on one another and on the