Finch was exploring. He’d always been rather found of exploration. He usually got more out of it than others; he discovered, not just the tangible new places that others stumbled upon, but the much less physical worlds around them as well. Some coyotes passed a meadow and hardly gave it a second glance, but Finch would see a whole new and fascinating kingdom in that meadow. There might even be dragons.
Of course, he’d been called crazy before.
The pack coyote he’d met earlier, Faolin, had suggested he head towards the center of the territory and choose a den. But Finch had never been particularly interested in dens, suggestions, or even centers. He preferred edges to centers: you could find out more on the outskirts of something than you could in the center. More objectivity, less troublesome detail, just plain simpler and clearer. Finch was much more interested by outlines than by what was actually inside them.
Take, for example, the Inferni lands. Inside, there were rocks, shrubs, dens, and maybe some pack coyotes. Outsider there were, apparently, skulls, marauding wolves… and strange blue-haired coyotes.
Finch was beginning to feel rather lonely, the only normally colored creature in a rainbow world. To be fair, he conceded, the strange coyote wasn’t really blue, not in the same way Faolin had been red. And perhaps it wasn’t blue at all, but a strange and misleading shade of grey? Finch considered the lone coyote’s pelt gravely from his perch just the Inferni side of the border, atop a rough grey (nice, simple, steel grey, not puzzling grey-blue) boulder. His whole posture, from his slightly-cocked head to his neatly-placed paws, radiated mild curiosity: he had the air about him of a scientist observing a strange new breed of animal for the first time. The strange coyote was heading in his direction, but Finch did not appear at all concerned.
The thought had, very briefly, crossed Finch’s mind that there might be something that he was obligated to do about a lone coyote at the border, now that he was a member of a pack; however, at the moment he was too busy puzzling out the best way to describe the color of the loner’s mane to dwell on any other, less important questions. Finch had priorities. |