Read The Lesser Blood Free
A story from Silent as the Wild: Whispers from the Animal World
By TJ Wallis
A wolf. A coyote. And a mother who isn't particularly pleased about either of them.
The Lesser Blood is one of five stories from Silent as the Wild, a collection of stories inspired by the lives of wild animals - and by some of the things we humans have in common with them.
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TJ
THE LESSER BLOOD
The pack moved as one.
Eight wolves ran beneath the cold stars, their paws drumming the crusted snow. Each breath rose like smoke, carried away by a wind that smelled of spruce, ice, and memory.
The alpha pair ran at the heart of them; she, gray and scarred from many seasons, and he, broad-backed, steady as the drumbeat of earth itself. Around them their grown offspring fanned out, perfect rhythm born of practice and kinship. The youngest pups followed clumsily, their paws leaving uneven prints that the wind soon erased.
The land was generous this year. The deer were fat, and the rivers had not yet frozen deep. She, the mother, felt the blessing of this season. She had given five litters to the forest. Eight adults now ran under her call; four yearlings played at the edge of the hunt. The rest, those who had gone before, she carried in her heart but not her grief.
In the way of the wolf, she remembered without mourning. The dead fed the living; the cycle closed cleanly.
Still, something had begun to stir uneasily in her den. Her eldest son, the tall one with her silver in his coat and his father’s deep chest, had grown distant. He lingered beyond their hunting grounds, came home with foreign scents tangled in his fur.
She told herself it was curiosity. Wolves his age often tested their boundaries, stretching their spirits across the horizon before settling into their roles. But the scent on him was wrong, thin and dry, like dust after rain.
Coyote.
Her hackles lifted at the thought.
Coyotes were tricksters, skulkers. Quick to sing, quick to flee. The Elders of the wolf nation said they carried a restless spirit, clever but faithless. Wolves fought and bled for their families; coyotes danced around death and called it wisdom.
She had tolerated them this winter. There was plenty to eat, and she had no wish to waste strength driving them away. But tolerance had limits.
Not with her son.
∞ ∞ ∞
He came home at dawn, coat glinting silver in the pale light. He looked … different. Confident. His eyes glowed with a secret.
She greeted him stiffly. “You wander far,” she murmured.
He said nothing, only brushed past her, tail high.
Her mate, ever the calm one, gave a low chuckle. “Let him go,” he said. “He’ll make his own trail soon. It’s time.”
She said nothing. It was time, she knew. But not like this. Not with one of the trickster kind. Her son was meant for more than that. He was born under the Wolf Moon, when spirits ran thick in the sky. She had felt the ancestors’ power in him.
To see it wasted, mixed with something smaller, lesser, felt like insult to creation itself.
∞ ∞ ∞
She began her campaign in whispers.
“You’ll want a mate who knows the old ways,” she told him as they shared a kill. “One who will help you build strong pups. You were born for leadership.”
He only blinked, unmoved.
“There are she-wolves in the hills,” she tried again days later. “They would run beside you. Hunt with you. Understand you.”
He turned his gaze south, where the wind carried faint coyote song, and did not answer.
Her fur prickled. His silence said everything.
∞ ∞ ∞
The day she finally saw them together, her breath left her body.
She’d followed his trail through melting snow, past birch and poplar groves, until she reached the open flats. There, near the half-frozen stream, stood her son, and beside him, a coyote girl, small and light as a reed. Her fur was the color of dried wheat. She trembled when she laughed.
They touched noses.
The alpha’s heart thundered. She crouched among the willows, watching, hatred and disbelief tangling like thorns.
The girl’s movements were quick and nervous, but her eyes, bright, amber, alive, met her son’s with something fierce.
And her son… he looked gentle. Foolishly gentle.
The alpha turned away, trembling with a rage she did not want to name.
Coyotes. Always the scavengers. Always the ones who took what was not theirs. Her son had brought her this shame, this mixing of blood, this forgetting of who he was.
She thought of her ancestors, the ones whose bones lay buried in the high ridges. They had survived famine, fire, traps, bullets. They had passed their strength down through her. And now her own son would dilute that legacy with the blood of a smaller nation.
It was unthinkable.
∞ ∞ ∞
Nights passed. The winter deepened. Her son grew more distant, slipping away without permission. Her patience eroded like snow under sun.
She dreamed of the coyote girl, thin, mocking, dancing circles around her. She dreamed of hybrid pups, neither wolf nor coyote, their cries echoing across the frozen valleys.
Each dawn, she woke with her teeth bared.
At last, she decided: this could not stand.
The pack would not accept it if she didn’t. She was Alpha. She would protect what was hers.
∞ ∞ ∞
That night, she left her den and followed the coyote’s scent. It wound through spruce and snow, light but persistent.
She found the girl alone, drinking from the stream. The moonlight silvered her fur.
The alpha crouched low. Her breath slowed to a hunter’s rhythm. One leap, one bite, and the problem would end. Her son would grieve for a time, but he would recover. The pack would remain pure.
The coyote looked up.
Her eyes were calm, not afraid, only knowing. The way prey looks when it understands its place in the circle.
But this gaze was different. It carried something almost sacred.
The alpha froze. She felt the air around them stir with something older than hunger. A whisper of kîsikâw pîsim, the Day Sun, watching from above. The forest held its breath.
The coyote bowed her head slightly, then turned and slipped away, vanishing like smoke.
The alpha stayed there for a long time, her pulse slowly returning.
When she returned home, her mate stirred beside her. “You hunt ghosts,” he said softly.
She didn’t answer. But she knew he was right.
∞ ∞ ∞
By morning, her son was gone.
No farewell howl, no lingering scent beyond the southern trail. Only his absence, heavy as ice.
She followed the tracks until they blurred in the wind. Two sets, side by side.
The father joined her, nose to the ground. “He’s made his choice,” he said simply.
The alpha said nothing. The silence between them was like stone.
That night, she howled once, a low, mournful note that rolled through the valleys. The forest answered, then fell quiet again.
∞ ∞ ∞
Spring came early. The snow melted from the pines. The rivers cracked open and ran free.
Her pack thrived. The younger wolves grew sleek, bold, confident. She taught them to hunt, to lead, to listen to the heartbeat of the land.
Life, as it always did, moved forward.
But sometimes, when the moon rose high and round, she felt something stirring at the edge of her territory, a faint chorus carried on the wind.
It wasn’t wolf. It wasn’t coyote.
It was both.
A new song, strange and beautiful, rising from the plains to the south.
Her fur lifted when she heard it. At first, she growled, warning the sound away. But each time it returned, her resistance softened.
There was something powerful in that song. Not weakness, as she had feared, but strength of another kind, flexible, clever, wild. The way the forest itself adapted after fire, sprouting new life from ash.
She remembered the old teachings her grandmother-wolf had growled once, long ago: Every nation has its purpose. When blood meets blood, the land decides what survives.
Perhaps she had been wrong to call it corruption. Perhaps it was change.
One evening, she climbed the ridge to the old cedar grove, the place where her firstborns had played, where she had once buried the smallest pup of her second litter. The wind there was strong, scented with age and smoke.
She stood and listened to the southern chorus. It rose and fell, neither wolf nor coyote, both predator and prayer.
In the twilight, she thought she saw shapes moving along the distant line of trees, slender, light-boned, but carrying themselves with the bearing of wolves. Their howls wove through the night, fearless and bright.
Her chest ached, but not with anger.
This was the way of things. Life found its own form. The land belonged to no single bloodline.
She lowered her head and gave a single answering howl, low, steady, threaded with memory.
The song from the plains paused, then rose again, joined by others. The wind carried them together until the forest seemed to hum.
For the first time since her son had left, the alpha felt peace.
She turned back toward her den, where new pups stirred in the dark. The future waited, wide and wild.
And as she trotted home beneath the northern lights, she realized she no longer feared the mingling of nations. The world would keep turning. The stories would keep breathing.
The bloodline would change, yes, but change was the oldest law of all.
When the coyotes sang again that night, she listened.
And she did not snarl.
If You Enjoyed The Lesser Blood...
There are four more stories waiting for you in Silent as the Wild.
A young bison walks beside her grandmother, not yet understanding that their time together is growing short.
A beaver surveys the valley he has transformed and concludes, quite reasonably in his opinion, that it belongs to him.
A mountain lion moves almost invisibly through a changing landscape, raising a troubling question: if we rarely see something in the first place, how do we know when it has vanished?
And in the darkest story of the collection, a Great Horned Owl watches a Barn Owl from the forest. He learns her routines. He listens to her conversations. He leaves her gifts.
He calls it love.
She calls it frightening.
Five animals. Five stories. Very human questions.
Silent as the Wild: Whispers from the Animal World explores belonging, prejudice, family, ageing, loss, pride, obsession and our complicated relationship with the natural world.
The animals are wild.
The questions they face are surprisingly human.
Continue into the wild.
Why a Wolf and a Coyote?
There is another story behind The Lesser Blood, including why I chose these particular animals, what I discovered about wolves and coyotes, and how my own Métis heritage found its way into the story.
Read The Story Behind The Lesser Blood →
About the Author
TJ Wallis is a Red River Métis writer living in British Columbia. A former magazine editor and freelance writer, she has spent much of her life surrounded by the natural world, including a few years with a small goat farm and rather more years than she'd care to count starting one project before finishing the last one.
She is also the owner of North of Fifty, an online store specializing in authentic Indigenous art and gifts by Canadian Indigenous artists.
Silent as the Wild brings together her love of storytelling, nature and the peculiarities of being human.