more than once. 'If anyone can find a name it will be Enlet's son.'
The She-Wolf s arm healed more slowly than she would have liked-more slowly than it would have had Selnac not needed all her healing energies for herself and her child-but it did give every indication of healing properly. The nameless child, the last of the first-bom, clung to life with a tenacity that kept much of the cave awake at night and grumbling in the morning. But neither the child nor her mother could be said to be thriving and, though the ice had melted, the cold deerless spring was giving every sign of becoming a cool and equally deerless summer.
The She-Wolf learned one of leadership's hidden lessons: the leader is the one in front when the pack starts moving. Mosshunter, the most atavistic of the first-born, challenged her while her arm was still bound in stiff leather and the
stench of boiled, smoked or stewed fish had penetrated the very walls of their cave.
'We need meat,' the diminutive hunter snarled, hurling his half-empty bowl into the stream. 'Meat with red blood in it! We follow the deer the way the wolves do!' His eyes and thoughts locked onto hers.
He hadn't meant to challenge; he was only the most outspoken, not the strongest. She turned him aside with little more than the focus of her thoughts against his, but his outburst sparked others less easily controlled.
'You haven't hunted since you fell,' Sharpears stated, his stance suggesting that he was more than ready to take over her duties.
'We can't make leather from fish scales,' Samael added.
Treewalker set his bowl aside and joined Sharpears by the wall where the spears were kept. 'The forests around here are empty. There's nothing to hunt worth eating. It's time we moved on.'
The She-Wolf glanced toward Zarhan, almost without thinking about it, and then immediately regretted it. The flame-haired elf looked away from her-not because he would not challenge her, but because he would not help her. She pushed herself to her feet, studying the firm-set faces as if she had not seen them for a long time.
Healing had pushed her deep within the wolf-song and she had not, in fact, taken note of the growing discontent. Nor, more importantly, had she noticed the shifting alliances among the first-born. Sharpears wasn't waiting for her anymore; Laststar stood close beside him. Likewise Treewalker and Frost had paired.
The birth of Selnac's daughter had forced a resolution to the mating tensions that had been slowly building since the hunt's departure. The first-born had made their choices and the elves-if Talen and Selnac's closeness meant anything, or Samael and Chanfur, standing hand-in-hand. The patterns
her father had left to break were being perpetuated, and she had missed it all, lost in the timelessness of the wolf-song.
'All right, we'll move, then.' She shook her arm free of the sling that held it motionless above her waist. 'We'll go south, where the deer are-and the five-fingered hunters who killed so many of the high ones.' She turned to Samael, giving him a hard, commanding look.**It's time to remember,** she sent.
Tension snapped and re-formed itself. Mention of the savage five-fingered hunters brought the first-born out of wolfsong. They did not want to remember what had happened at the sky-mountain; the elves dreaded reliving it. But Samael found his trove of winter-dried fruits and counted them carefully into a basket. He glanced at the She-Wolf, hoping she'd reconsider her command, but her eyes remained hard and he took the first three berries.
They remembered the slaughter, the terror, and the years of panicked running that had taken them far from the sky-mountain and cast them adrift in this world with only Timmain's now-lost wisdom to guide them. To be sure, Timmorn had led them back to the forest from the frozen flatlands farther north, but he had stopped among the trees that remained ever green and refused to go closer to the five-fingers' territories.
Then, when the remembering was over but the power of the berries yet remained, the She-Wolf challenged her tribe. She thrust the dangers of their journey deep into the wolfsong itself. Here in the ever green forest they were the most canny hunters, but there, where the deer had gone, they would live in five-fingered shadows.
The elves would have abandoned the idea; they would have accepted starvation or an eternity of fish-and- vermin chowder. The first-born writhed inwardly with their refreshed memories but the wolf-song did demand red meat and did not cower away from danger.
'We will leave,' the She-Wolf told them all, 'when we
have smoked enough fish to last us eight days' walking.' Then, her arm throbbing, she returned to her fur- mound and went to sleep.
They left after four smoke-filled days of preparation. The She-Wolf spent much of that time sending her thoughts deep into the forest. It was a futile quest and the wolf-song, she knew, would absorb any guilt or ill- feelings she might have over leaving Timmorn and the hunt behind, but so long as the deliberate activity of breaking up the camp kept the wolfsong submerged she had to keep trying.
She should have told them to prepare a month's worth of food-or none at all. Their supposed eight-day supply was gone when the cave was only four days behind them. No one, not even the She-Wolf herself, had imagined how hungry they would be after a day of walking weighted down with furs, baskets, bowls, and weapons. They shed their belongings each night and left a few behind each dawn when they started up again. In Timmorn's day their migrations had been undertaken with the help of the hunt's strong shoulders. None of the elves could carry their fair share of the burden and soon, not more than eight days' wandering from the cave, even the first-born were carrying little more than their best weapons and furs.
The forest changed slowly, a few more of the spreading, leaf-dropping trees mixed in with the evergreens for each day they marched south. But the hunting remained hard. The tall paths, which in other seasons had guided the deer from meadows to streams, were encroached by berry-vines and the stream-banks were marked only with the restless tracks of predators like themselves. When, as often happened now, the She-Wolf called a halt that lasted several days, the unfamiliar terrain proved as empty as hunted-out forest around the cave.
The elves were too tired to complain; the first-born sought refuge in the wolf-song which lowered horizons and made deprivation bearable. Hunt, sleep, walk-a daily cycle broken by eating only if the hunting had been good. The She-Wolf did not notice when Selnac gave her daughter, whom they had taken to calling Journey, to Laststar; the wolf-song saw and sang the changes into timelessness until it took conscious effort to recall that anything had ever been different.
Nor could she ever reconstruct the moment when Murrel started calling herself New-Wolf and used Glowstone's second-best spear as a walking stick. That it had happened was somehow important and she fought to the edge of the wolfsong to ask the elf about it. But the smiling answer:**We found his name beyond your wolf-song** made no sense and was swiftly forgotten.
Only one discord sounded within her wolf-song: Zarhan Fastfire. He lurked at the edge of her vision and the edge of her thoughts. Like all the elves he had withered during the journey. His eyes were hollow and ringed with smoke that would not wash away. He staggered more than walked and his name crept into her dreams like a wounded animal. His agonies became her agonies; she drove his name away but kept the pain and brought it with her deep inside the wolf-song.
The elves knew how many days it had been-and could have told the first-born, had Timmorn's children been able to ask the question. The tall, slightly-built elders sent prayers to their ancestors begging that the journey might end soon, but they dared not fall behind the relentless She-Wolf who pulled them farther south.
Their silver-haired leader, grown more distant and wolflike with each passing day, rejected each likely lair with a toothy snarl and a sending that contained few, if any, elfin words. Deer-the image was burned into her narrowly-focused mind-if her tribe wanted deer, then she would lead them until the deer were plentiful again.
The end came at dawn-the seventy-second dawn, Talen was heard to remark-at the shore of a broad, shallow lake.
Countless split hooves had churned the soft dirt into mud, and out amid the reeds was the largest deerlike creature elves or first-born had ever seen. Mosshunter could have curled up comfortably between the tips of the beast's spreading antlers. Samael, the tallest of the elves, could not have seen over its shoulder.
A collective sigh of awe rose from elves and first-born alike as they considered the bounty nature had at last set before them. A second sigh rose from the first-born: would their flint-tipped spears bring the beast down?
**Fire,** Zarhan advised them, with images of his grandfather's methods.
**Relays,** TreeWalker replied. None of the first-born would carry fire in their hands as Zarhan's images suggested.
Their first hunt was futile, though Frost stumbled, literally, into a den of rnask-eyes, and Glowstone said that
