If you wanted? Hopper said. It’s not about what you want, Young Bull. It’s about what you need. What you know.

Perrin frowned. Sometimes the wolf’s meanings still confused him.

Suddenly, the other wolves in the group turned—as if one—and looked to the southwest. They vanished.

They went here. Hopper sent an image of a distant wooded hollow. The wolf prepared to follow.

“Hopper!” Perrin said, stepping forward. “How did you know? Where they went? Did they tell you?”

No. But I can follow.

“How?” Perrin said.

It is a thing I’ve always known, Hopper sent. Like walking. Or jumping.

“Yes, but how?”

The wolf smelled confused. It is a scent, he finally replied, though “scent” was much more complex than that. It was a feeling, an impression, and a smell all in one.

“Go somewhere,” Perrin said. “Let me try to follow.”

Hopper vanished. Perrin walked up to where the wolf had been.

Smell it, Hopper sent distantly. He was near enough to give a sending. By reflex, Perrin reached out. He found dozens of wolves. In fact, he was amazed by how many of them were here, on the slopes of Dragonmount. Perrin had never felt so many gathered in one place before. Why were they here? And did the sky look more stormy in this place than it had in other areas of the wolf dream?

He couldn’t sense Hopper; the wolf had closed himself off, somehow, making Perrin unable to place where he was. Perrin settled down. Smell it, Hopper had sent. Smell it how? Perrin closed his eyes and let his nose carry the scents of the area to him. Pine cones and sap, quills and leaves, leatherleaf and hemlock.

And…something else. Yes, he could smell something. A distant, lingering scent that seemed out of place. Many of the scents were the same—the same fecund sense of nature, the same wealth of trees. But those were mixed with the scents of moss and of wet stone. The air was different. Pollen and flowers.

Perrin squeezed his eyes tight, breathing in deeply. Somehow, he built a picture in his mind from those scents. The process was not unlike the way a wolf sending translated into words.

There, he thought. Something shifted.

He opened his eyes. He was sitting on a stone outcropping amid pines; he was on the side of Dragonmount, several hours’ hike up from where he had been. The stone outcropping was covered in lichen, and it jutted out over the trees spreading below. A patch of violet springbreath grew here, where sunlight could reach the blossoms. It was good to see flowers that weren’t wilted or dying, if only in the wolf dream.

Come, Hopper sent. Follow.

And he was gone.

Perrin closed his eyes, breathing in. The process was easier this time. Oak and grass, mud and humidity. It seemed each place had its own specific scent.

Perrin shifted, then opened his eyes. He crouched in a field near the Jehannah Road. This was where Oak Dancer’s pack had gone earlier, and Hopper moved about the meadow, smelling curious. The pack had moved on, but they were still close.