“Now that wolf,” said Willow, “was far more of a mother than the frail, confused girl. She had cubs in a hollow deep in the woods and plenty of milk to feed them with. So she took up the wee one, carefully, with the back of his garments in her sharp teeth, and carried him off home with her. She loved him in keeping with her nature, practically, wisely, and she nurtured him long after her little ones were grown and had gone their own ways. She cleaned him with her rough tongue, learning the patterns of his strange, hairless body; she discovered how weak he truly was. She hunted for him, since he could not seem to master it. She kept him warm at night; she made beds of bracken and leaves to shelter him when his garments wore away to shreds. And in time Wolf-child learned to crawl and to scamper and to run, mostly on all fours like his brothers and sisters, but sometimes up on two legs, awkwardly. He learned the smells and sounds of the forest; he learned ways to protect himself. He learned the growls and barks and whimpers of the wolf pack’s language. The others tolerated him because of his mother, for she was high in their order, having whelped many strong litters. The pack leader did not consider Wolf-child a threat, since the hairless one was such a weakling. Among the others, the boy’s singular nature earned him a wary respect.

“Years passed, and Wolf-child was a boy the size of this young fellow”—Willow nodded in Coll’s direction—“with the skill to make his own shelter and to snare a bird when he wanted meat. His mother still watched over him, but she had reared many cubs since the day she took the waif in, and her human son was learning to do without her. Only when the winter bit hardest, in time of storm and sleet, would she let him sleep next to her, curled up against the warmth of her body. It was their misfortune that men came to that part of the forest early in the morning on such a day, men who saw with disbelief the aging wolf rising from sleep and the half-grown boy, naked in the cold, jumping up and spreading his arms to protect her from their hunting spears. They did not kill the wolf mother—their astonishment made them too slow for that—and she fled away soft-footed under the trees. It was the boy they pursued, and it was the boy they finally caught, hardly knowing what they would do with the snarling, thrashing creature they had in their hands.