Ears perked, Banner gazed back at the other she wolf with as much interest as the she wolf showed in Banner. The pup’s red fur was darkened by the water yet she still shone in the late afternoon light. And there was something about her, something that made her different from Banner. Ban couldn’t quite place it but she reminded her of another wolf she and her brothers had met once in the mountains. That wolf had been white as the middle of the sun with slanted yellow eyes. He had claimed to be from a foreign land called Arctic. Banner still wasn’t sure she believed in a place of freezing wasteland with constant snow. The Arctic wolf had called her and her brothers “grays.” Banner smiled at the she wolf’s approval of her name and in turn learned the calling of her new company. “Yakone.” She parroted back, the unfamiliar sound twisting through her teeth. She thought it much more elegant than the plain ‘Banner’. The pale girl’s brow furrowed at Yakone’s description of the sky. She stared ponderously into the water rushing around her rock. It sounded like the story she’d heard from the first wolf she’d met in the crater. “Fire raining from the sky…” She murmured and looked back up to Yakone. “I wasn’t here.” She explained, “I come from very far away in the mountains. But I heard that it was the…red sky that made this crater.” Ban cast her gaze around the trees bordering the creek. Far in the distance she could make out the rising walls of the crater. “You saw it?” She asked her new friend, interested in this reoccurring story of the history of this land. b a nn e r as we walked I heard the laughter in the leaves mars 2013