He liked the wolves of Hearthwood! He liked being one of them. There's no great explanation for why he was currently
away, but he didn't plan to be out for very long. It was just that his legs were so very long, and his nose was so very sharp! And he needed flat lands to range and interesting scents to poke his nose into!
He poked a whole lotta things on the way. Some mud. A tree. A raccoon carcass. Halfway through, he found himself a pinecone, and then his nose was occupied sniffing the dust-and-resin aroma that wafted up every time he squeezed his scissor-like jaws.
In the woods, he crouched over the pinecone and chewed and chewed. Snap, crackle, pop. It didn't go down easy, but he choked a few bites down with feverish intent before giving it up as a lost cause. Besides, there was a more interesting scent around! Another wolf! He abandoned the pinecone to follow this new trail, hoping to find something less pokey than a pinecone at the end.
As soon as the scent grew strong, he stopped to give a cheerful holler:
"Hello! Is anyone around?"
And then he stood there, brushy tail swinging in eager anticipation.
A way to approach a wild Esma is definitely not by thrashing loudly through the woods and calling her to present herself. She had heard the stranger before, but it took her a while to realize that rather than passing through and minding his own business, he would decide to pick up her trail and follow it. For a while so she let him do it, going in zig-zags and circles, making loops and attempting to get him lose her trail. Yet snow was to her disadvantage. If he could not smell her, he could still see the path she had made.
So in the end, when the meeting was inevitable, she played her last trick. Her dappled pelt so easy to pick out against the white of winter and green of the spring and summer, melted perfectly here at the fern grove. The snow matched her white markings and the dry, brown fern bushes, along with branches of undergrowth helped her blend in the scenery. So that at a first glance she was not readily visible.
The stranger came into a view - an odd looking wolf of a small build. He emanated friendliness and - in Esma's opinion - a level of carelessness to the dangers to lone wolves in unknown places. Ever so careful and aware about her own place on the lowest steps of this world, the young man's ignorance of it all was puzzling. Dangerous to himself even.
"Who are you?" she asked, after a long moment of silence had passed and she had decided to engage with him. There she stepped out of her hiding place, but kept a safe distance from him and appraised the fellow with watchful gaze.
The coywolf slinked along, measuring his paw against the trail he followed. His large ears swiveled toward every sound, and his black nose twitched constantly to take in the scents around him. He wasn't sure what sort of wolf he was approaching, but he trusted his long legs to carry him quickly from danger if he was confronted with it.
No one answered him, at first. His idle curiosity grew, and he scanned his surroundings with the fur at his nape beginning to prickle uneasily. He was starting to figure it was time to turn around and head back when the wolf finally revealed themself.
He peered at her for a moment, nonplussed. He did not normally bother with names until he was sure he cared to know the individual he was talking to, but manners won out, in the end.
"Dusty Rose," he replied, the answer almost as clipped as the question. His eyes were focused on her, but his satellite dish ears continued to twist and turn as he stepped toward her. "Were you watchin' me?" he wanted to know, amused by the idea. It didn't sit well with him if this girl had evaded his senses, but that wasn't her fault. Since no ambush had come of it, he was willing to forgive this breach. He'd be a hypocrite not to, even if he didn't have much call to sneak around, these days.
Esma could be honest and tell him - no, I was trying to evade you. But she intstinctively felt that this would put her at a disadvantage. She would signal to Dusty Rose that she was afraid of him and that could encourage him to abuse the situation (author's note - does not mean that Esma's assumptions were right, she just judged people based on her own experiences). Therefore she decided to act smart and reply: "Yes, I was. You are stranger to these lands."
Lately she had become a little bolder than usual. "I am Esma from Riverclan. It's nearby," she introduced herself and at the same time let him know that her home was not far off, the wolves of her group could be within earshot and thus he should not get any funny ideas. "Where do you come from?" she asked.
The coywolf worked to smother his grin while the Very Serious young lady seemed to dissect him with her narrowed gaze. Her boldness was duly noted, and while Dusty Rose wasn't afraid of some kid, he kept his large ears scanning for sounds of another's approach. He couldn't think why anyone would want to attack him, never mind put the effort of flanking him into it — but stranger things had happened.
"Sure enough," he agreed when she called him a stranger. And then, "Pleased to meet you, Esma. That's a pretty name. You know what it means?"
Of course, she had another question for him as well.
"Far from here," he replied, wondering if she was the sort of kid who could be won over with fanciful tales. "A place called the Red Desert. The specific wellspring I was born to, we called sunset over red sage."
He fired back another question before she could: "What's Riverclan like?"
"Yes," Esma answered with a furrowed brow, as if wondering, if this was a trick question from her companion. "It means me," she said, as if pointing out to something very obvious. She had not met any other Esma's around here, therefore she could safely say that at least in this corner of the world Esma by definition was a young, adolescent wolf with a brown-white coat from the Riverclan. "Does your name mean something else than you?" she asked, feeling curious.
"It is home," yet again Esma did not fully understand the question. Home to her encompassed the feeling of safety and familiarity. That was, what Riverclan meant to her. The other descriptives regarding the landscape and history did not really matter. "What is a wellspring?" she asked.
The yes didn't surprise him so much as it disappointed him — right up through her follow-up, until she got to her question. Then he was still disappointed, but surprised, too. He waited half a beat to see if she would laugh at him and say, just kidding! I know what those words mean!
She didn't, though.
"A rose is a kind of flower," he said, trying hard not to use the tone Esma had used on him. "And dust is, y'know." He kicked at some snow to reveal the dark earth underneath. "Whatcha got righ'chere. Dirt. But drier."
Her next answer was equally dry. Dusty Rose measured her with his eyes once more, and decided that she was not young enough to use that as an excuse. Her poor conversational skills were due to something else, and the coywolf wasn't sure whether he ought to be pitying or annoyed. In the end, he chose a little of both and tried very hard to hide it.
"It's water that runs underground," he replied. This, at least, was not something he expected others to know about this far from home. "You gotta dig to find it. And they do, where I'm from, 'cause there's no water anywhere else."
He weighed the merits of mining for more information about her home. Clearly, he needed to be more specific with his questions.
"Do you live with your parents?" he wondered. He had a guess, though. The girl didn't scream "well adjusted" to him.
"How can you be two things at once?" Esma asked, continuing to ride along the tracks of her own thoughts and ideas of the world. She could not understand, why would anyone name their children in names that had already been claimed by other beings - alive or inanimate. "Are you more of a dusty rose or a wolf then?" she asked next, still not understanding, how could a wolf be a flower at he same time. Dirty one too.
"Riverclan has water everywhere," she remarked, finding it odd that one had to dig for it. "Why did you live in a place, where you had to dig for water?" she asked and the question reflected her own lack of experience with the outside world. She just could not picture, how could it be that the water would not be easily available. Found everywhere.
"Yes," she nodded. "Do you?"
Once more, the coywolf had to stop and stare for a moment. If she'd been a little younger, he might've found all this terribly cute. And maybe he did still, just a little. But the girl looked like a yearling, and these were concepts he thought she ought to have grasped by now.
"It's not about being," he told her, "it's just what I'm called. My daddy liked roses, and when I was born, I was red all over — but not bright rose-red. So he called me Dusty Rose. It's like your Riverclan. Your pack's not a river, but they call themselves that. It's like lightning bugs. Or fireflies, if that's what you call it here. They're not lightning or fire — we just call them that."
He plopped his ass down right there. He had to sit for a minute, because this girl was taking up all his mental faculties. He felt like he had to use enough for the both of them.
"Esma," he said, "All kinds of folks live just fine in the desert. I'm gonna ask you though: can you sit there and believe that while I tell you about it? Or are you just gonna be thinking up ways it's impossible or wrong?"
Because he had better things to do, depending on the answer.
"My pack is clan that lives by the river," contrary to Dusty rose Esma saw a difference between a name of a group of people and name of a single person. Her home's name was self-explanatory and she thought (with a sense of pity) that the other was not very smart either. Had he engaged more in the ideas she was putting forth, she would have given him credit for having made a good point.
The next thing he told her, made Esma frown. It was as if he was blaming her for asking questions on unclear things. As if she was doubting him or giving an impression that she knew better and he was wrong. The sense of injustice riled up in her mind, while she sought the best way to counter him. "You did not answer the question," she said. "Would you want to live there now still, if water here is plentiful and you do not have to dig it up?" she decided that she needed to clarify, what she had wanted to find out and ignored the rest of his sentence, because it was just plain wrong.