Welfpack Chapter 1

They knew, because they could know, that they were different. From three distinct packs they had come. Tied by a single ancestress from ages before, but thousands of turns of the seasons separated their lines. The youngest of the splinter packs was yet older than the Human city they watched.

These wolves, varied as any but bigger and sleeker than some, had been watching Humans for a long time. The eldest of the joined pack lines had remained on guard from them since they had been made aware of them. And the middle pack line… Well, they knew Humans like any other creature knew them.

Sometimes they were prey, when they were little or old or weak. More often than not, though, they were enemies and to be avoided. This wisdom was known to all wolves, but particularly to these packs which had more than a mere instinct about the upright, furless creatures.

After all, something distant in their blood called to them to understand.

These wolves heard a song that wasn’t just another wolf pack in the distance, it wasn’t crickets mating or birds establishing territory. This was a song that they couldn’t hear with their ears, no matter how hard they turned them. This was a sound within their minds. It called to them from the stars, and drew them out when they were lonely. It was true they howled like their other pack mates, but this group was different.

Ten thousand or more years their blood had been stewing, blood that was infused with both wolf and – other – things. They understood the passing of time, where their bretherin did not. Their litter mates were as healthy and handsome as any, and probably smarter than other wolves without such a strange taint in their genetic history. But this group…

They were not wolves, so much as furry, four-footed elves.

And they knew this; they knew they were not Humans, and not quite wolves. They had a sense that there was something more, they’d seen some other creatures – things that were not Human and not Wolf, now and then. But they were foreign packs and they stayed well away from them, even though they had blood kin, ancient, with those wolf-riding elves.

There were different scents among those elves: some bore taints from battles, others were more or less feral, still others had a weird mix of starsong and darkness. But all of them had the same ancestress as this group.

They knew.

But they didn’t really want to investigate, it was almost implicit that they all knew this as well.

Together, they thought. They didn’t realize that they were the first since eights and eights before to think in such a manner. Elves thought this way. They could combine their minds, act as one. Wolves could do so by a bark or a whine, the height of a tail or the slant of ears. But elfin minds moved altogether differently and this bunch of furry four-footed creatures did so as though they’d never needed to be taught.

They were not bound as other elves to the distant time-torn ship. They did not really have words for ‘elder’ or ‘ancient’, for being raised as wolves, by wolves, generation upon generation, as in early years… they didn’t need one. But this song that the group felt in their mind’s ears, their souls, it was old. Far older than they could imagine. It instilled in this hand-and-two wolf-creatures a yearning. Something felt missing from their souls.

Thus, a number of wolf-like creatures crept toward a high overlook, a place where eights and eights before, a group of distantly-related wolf kin met for the first time. It was here that the three packs became one, a convergence point.

A significant place, to say the least. It still was, but only in terms of a good place to watch for deer or be wary for Human encroachment. The Alphas of those old packs merely sniffed noses and tails, and decided that more was better, and here was as good place as any to raise their young and find good mates. They didn’t commemorate anything – indeed, all they did was scent mark with each other, and left it at that.

Their terrain was varied: the overlook was a slanted outcropping of ancient stone pushed up and covered by tall evergreens. Below it lay a split valley, carved no doubt by old ice and winds, with a pair of long silver rivers swaying through the leafy trees. To the north, the overlook’s land spread flatter and flatter, into a bare plain which also doubtless had been carved millennia before by a great ice sheet.

Toward sun-goes-down, the hills grew into rolling waves, crumpled by the same forces which uprooted the Overlook. Toward sun-comes-up, rugged forests and cliffs, canyons that steadily grew into barren desert. In the south, more woods that seemed to go on forever. Even in the elf-wolves memories, the woods were eternal, though they changed every season.

Hunting was good here, there was small game such as rabbits and badger, fish in small lakes that dotted the flatter northern grounds, and deer that remained in this area the entire year. There were other predators, bear and longtooth and large birds, but they all shared easily because this was indeed a wide land. When it snowed, the land was blanketed in green-dotted white, the hilly land always keeping a little green to itself. In spring, the western hills were covered in brilliant, multicolored flowers, and buzzed with insects.

But when the group of elfin wolves met up, it was not to look for scoop horn or warn their packs of Humans.