Life to be lived, no time to mourn a woman who would never have wanted her family to wilt in her absence. She was strong and why would she not have hoped for her daughter to be just the same. Nor the children. The pups who perished in the rockslide would never rest in the afterlife with thoughts of the living constantly dragging them back.

Her life now consisted of tracking the herds, of establishing the ailments within them, discovering which had heavy birthing years and which were dwindled or failing.

It was her mother who gave her a mind for numbers, of investigating, of intelligence gathering -- and it was her father’s wanderlusting spirit that inspired such a freeness of self that rolled obligation-without-love off her like water off a duck’s back.

It is in this state, counting and numbering, that she finds herself face to face with Baird. He is not someone she knew personally, but she had a habit of keeping tabs on pack levels to determine how well the herds would do with additions or subtractions to their merry band, so to speak. He was newly raised to the position of Castellan and he seemed quite out of sorts, maybe for want of a reasonable job? The forest had made most hole-up in anticipation of nasty weather and a heavy snow like the prior year.

“No mighty dragons to slay in the name of the mountains, Castellan?” she posits, a merry tail wag signifying the playful nature of the questioning assumption on her part..