As she chewed at the gull, Finn came aware of another presence. The breezy air wafted back and forth, but two quick snuffs brought the scent of a male wolf to her nose. Feigning ignorance, Finn continued her meal, waiting for him to call out. When he did, a small smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. Finn did like company, and she liked talking even more. Maybe she could even convince this newcomer to help her hunt down a seal, if he proved mannerly.
"Finn Fidh goes here." She replied, glancing at the other wolf unconcernedly through the corner of one eye, "And who does the asking?" She marked his dominant stance, his proud mien, and his rather lacking tail held straight and bushy as a wee rabbit’s. Ah, so she was expected to play this game, was she? Indifferent to such politics of the loner lands, Finn kept her posture neutral, tail neither high nor low, ears cocked in a roguish manner that spoke only of polite curiosity and attention, not of violence. All the while she continued her meal, the feathers of the gull drifting about her head like a bizarre, bloody halo.
As she chewed, she took the chance to measure up the wolf, from toes to lanky legs to dappled pelt, to shortened tail to green, green, green eyes. The latter were rather hostile, though Finn guessed by the general body language that this might be par for the course. "Should be interesting." Finn Fidh approached slowly, dropping the gull between them as an offer of goodwill. "What brings you to the shore today?” She asked, presenting her good ear towards the wolf and simultaneously exposing the scars that bared her teeth. He looked young, but proud. Perhaps he was important. His pack scent was that of Salsola, she knew that fact like the back of her paw.
Finn had already begun expanding her repertoire of knowledge when she had joined Anathema. The caves held a library, a library! And Finn couldn’t imagine living without one now. She had carefully taken book by book away to her cave to peruse, returning them dutifully in due time. She couldn’t read the words, but the pictures she could remember. She had always thought of Canada as a place bursting with fauna, but some of the encyclopedias she had nosed through held images of such fantastical creatures!
It saddened the she-wolf that all their names and places were (pun horribly intended) a closed book to her. She could no more read than those seals on the beach But something had started to change in Finn, and her views towards luperci and their ways was beginning to gradually shift, like the ice of a glacier carving the stone across eons. She felt a new desire within her, the desire for knowledge. Her life had been so dark until now, full of brutal instinct and ancient traditions. She wanted to know more about everything. The sun, the sky, the clouds, the birds, the fish, the wolves, the ocean, the mountains, the world.
How could a wolf go through life ignorant of these things? It made Finn ashamed to come from that places in the mountains to the west, where paper and pen was a thing unheard of, let alone books. Her father had made proclamations about the world and they were expected to be learned, unchallenged, lapped up like milk. And already Finn had found several things wrong with what he had said. It was frustrating, to say the least. It meant the great and endless library in her head had to be *shudder* edited.
What was even further distressing was that even the new knowledge she might eke out could be wrong. It was silly to believe everything you read. So what did you believe? Finn had heard that the silly creatures that used to crawl all over this land, the ones that built that city of stone to the southeast, couldn’t smell most things five feet from their nose. Yet wolves, and dogs and coyotes excelled at this, and knew far more smells than any human could name! Therefore the human’s world was defined by their limitations, and thus it stood to reason so did wolves’.
Trying to keep her mind from spiraling further into that philosophical morass, Finn gave a little mental shake, her eyes snapping into intense focus from the cloudy, far-off state of a space cadet. She returned to regarding the wolf. Perhaps he could read. Perhaps he knew things. Well, she’d just have to be her nice little self and see if he could prove helpful.