The skies above were just beginning to darken, the near-cloudless expanse of bright, even blue pulling back as evening encroached, deepening its cloak to midnight for the late summer’s night. The lowering sun stretched shadows long and threw into stark relief every bump, every rut, and every imperfection in the texture of the strange landscape. Galahad dragged his weary feet along another few steps and then paused to examine the rough gray bark of a nearby tree. It looked just a little strange, and smelled stranger, this silent guardian of the forest; like the rest of the environment here, on its own it wasn’t that different from the lands where he’d grown up, but taken as a whole the gestalt was just “off” enough to his senses to be unsettling. Rarely had he missed his family more acutely, if only for the familiarity of them, but the young pup refused to admit this even to himself. He sniffed warily at the tree and then sketched a curving path around the obstacle for himself, giving the weirdness of the thicker forest a wide berth.

    His perturbation showed itself in the small furrow in his black brow and the too-serious expression his face wore, unusual in one so young. His apprehensive mien intensified, then relaxed somewhat, as he spied a strange beetle crawling its way up a long strand of grass just ahead. First he paused with one large ebony paw lifted uncertainly, and then he crept cautiously forward, golden eyes wide and intent as they fixated unblinkingly on the small insect. He stopped just short of the beetle, crouching down a bit and staring in fascination as the insect carelessly resettled its wings and scrubbed its feet clean. “Never seen one like that before,” he muttered, commenting aloud to himself as he was often prone to do. He half-reached out a paw to poke the thing in curiosity as it sat there, then drew back again, reconsidering. Should he?

    His paw sat there quietly suspended, indecisive; frozen in time for an instant, a paradox resembling that of Schrodinger: for that one moment in time, before the box was decisively opened and the truth revealed, the world teetered on a pivot of possibility wherein either, none, or both measures could possibly be true. Galahad’s overlarge toe trembled with the effort of delicately reaching itself forth to break that barrier of possible-impossibility, gingerly attempting to lay only the lightest of touches upon the object of its desire like a butterfly coming lightly to rest upon a flowerhead.

    And then with a squawk, a noise as undignified as his simultaneous awkward flailing in surprise, he recoiled backward and spoiled the moment entirely, his carefully-maneuvered paw colliding with its insectoid bullseye in slapstick fashion, sending the object of his curiosity flying sky-high as Galahad reacted in a most violent manner to the utterly unexpected noise from behind him. For just an instant his mind wondered incredulously if the beetle had spoken, and if so how such a small creature could have made such a loud, gruff noise, but this notion was quickly swept away by the collision of both the more logical side of his brain and the appearance, as he fell backward and spun about, of the looming, corpulent form of his fellow canine that confronted him—though in that first shocked moment of recognition this wolf’s appearance was so large, so bizarre, and so unexpected that he might as well have been an alien. From freakin’ Mars. For a long, dismayed moment of silence, Galahad gawped up at the intruder. And fortunately for that intruder’s sake, there was still some reasonable distance between them, because that moment was then interrupted by the reentry of the bug from the orbit whence it had been launched—and it landed in that most unfortunate of places, right smack in Galahad’s up-tilted left nostril.

    The pup choked, gagged, coughed and spat thusly in response to the stranger’s torrent of queries, at last expelling the most unfortunate of insects onto the patch of grass whence it came along with a fair quantity of watery snot. Wheezing and with tears leaking from the corner of his eyes, Galahad squinted up at the other wolf once more as he caught his breath. His body huddled up wretchedly upon itself and tried to comport himself with some measure of dignity once more as his slabs of paws braced akimbo and his breath whistled in and out more slowly. An “adorable” picture indeed, this pup. The youngster wasn’t sure if his insect interruption had interfered with hearing the old fart correctly, or what, but somehow not a darned one of the questions the other had posed (now that Galahad had a moment to breathe again and actually consider them rationally) made one single bit of sense. Surely…surely the scruffy white wolf with the wide wide middle hadn’t just told him to stuff that bug up his butt? He couldn’t really be speaking of booger-snatchers and sludgy rubber wolves—a fellow juvenile perhaps might come up with such tawdry introductions, but surely not any responsible, full-grown adult. Adult wolves simply did not speak so. No, adults spent all their time upbraiding uppity young pups for gabbling about such nonsense themselves. So what in the hell was this insane oldster talking about?!

    Galahad’s reply was both appalled and bewildered. “What? You didn’t— no—what, why; that is— Why would I stick an insect of any sort under my tail?! That’s— doesn’t make any sense!” It was that lack of sense mainly that prodded this initial yelping outburst, and then he shrank back in upon himself much more dramatically, leaning away from the crazy old man before him. He hoped to escape the expected scolding, but dismally figured there was little real expectation of that. “I don’t wanna noogie,” he burbled in tearful dismay, wilting. His unruly hair was already enough of a trial to him as it was, even half-puppy-coat as it still was. …Compressing his hunch-shouldered gangling frame into as small a profile as possible as he goggled in consternation at his presumably-supposed-to-be-wiser elder, the pup did indeed bear a bit of a passing resemblance to the aforementioned wobbling sea sludge as he whimperingly displayed his wimpier side.