I don’t understand that.

Loping back toward Twitch and Dart, he said, “Is there anything particular we’re looking for? There are so many scents, so many traces . . .”

“Alpha wants to know about anything at all that might be a threat,” Twitch replied. “Other dogs, obviously, and of course, foxes and raccoons. Sometimes there are sharpclaws, and they can be sneaky.” He shivered, perhaps at the memory of an old attack; Lucky, too, knew just how much a sharpclaw scratch could sting, and how quickly the wound it left could become poisoned.

“If there’s a small threat, we handle it ourselves, just the patrol,” Dart grumbled. “And if we need support, I head back to the camp to gather the hunters. That’s why there are always at least three dogs on patrol. There has to be one to run back while the others fight. There is no getting the better of our Pack. Spring was patrolling with us while Moon looked after her pups, but now you’re here, so Spring can go back to hunting. More food for all of us.”

“That was good work you did, Lucky,” said Twitch. Lucky couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw approval in the mongrel’s eyes. “I saw how thoroughly you . . . checked.”

He’s testing me, Lucky realized with some annoyance. Then it struck him why Twitch was acting like a strict but indulgent Mother-Dog.

Lucky had taken Twitch’s place at the bottom of the Pack hierarchy.

Being low in this Pack’s order clearly made life even harder than it had to be. Once again Lucky found himself longing for Bella’s scrappy Pack. They might have needed a lot of teaching in the ways of surviving but, when it came down to it, the Leashed Dogs pulled together. They cooperated because they cared about one another. They shared food and tasks equally because they thought of themselves as friends and equals, not as rivals for Pack position or as possible threats. Lucky felt a sudden urge to confront Twitch and Dart, to force them to question the savage rules they were living by. He wanted to tell them that their way was not the only way, that a Pack did not have to exile or kill dogs just for making a single mistake in a moment of desperate hunger. . . .

But Lucky clamped his jaws together and kept his silence. It would not do to start questioning the ways of Alpha’s Pack so soon after he had begged to join them.

Besides, he had not just pleaded to join—he had lied, too. I’m playing tricks on these dogs—and they are not the kind of tricks my Mother-Dog would have liked.

He could hardly lecture Twitch and Dart about friendship and honor. . . .

Ahead of him, Dart had finished a long lap of the bay and was now absently sniffing the length of a huge driftwood log. For all their talk, Lucky thought, his companions’ inspection of their surroundings seemed a bit brief. Dart had barely gotten to the end of the log before she jumped down and trotted straight toward a copse of pines on a small headland. Twitch was winding through tree trunks at the forest’s edge, checking the roots of each, but to Lucky’s eyes he seemed more concerned with following the trees in the right order than with actually examining them properly.