Teya had been right. Two months down the road and her kids had evolved into little wolf-like creatures. Still far from the perfection, elegance and style that Dwin and the rest of the adult population possessed. Plus, they were finally able to do stuff too. Not just eat and sleep and lie in pile and emanate a pungent smell of wet-dog hair, wee and milk. Now the little rascals were moving around and even showed promise of learning the basics of games. 

While Dwin stopped by the Raven time from time, she was always busy with a lot of other things, therefore did not help much with the kids. You could not blame her for it - technically an adult (she had turned one year old almost a month ago), there was still a lot of maturing to do. Plus, she did not have any maternal instinct - rather than going "awww and oooh" about babies and claiming that she wanted to become a mom one day, she viewed them more as peculiarities. Curious little things, but no emotional attachment. 

Occasionally - like today as well - she did find interesting things that she brought back for the kids to play with. They had not shown much appreciation for the coolness of antlers and bones and hides that you could chew on and toss around and do other great stuff earlier (mainly because they did not have teeth and could not see or hear either), but now she saw an opportunity to teach those kids something about life. So - on this afternoon she arrived at Teya's comfy home with a gnarly piece of tree root in her jaws. 

There was only one kid awake at present, which Dwin found to her liking. She remembered well, how fights and quarrels would break out, if there were four contender for the toy rather than one. Plus - she would never admit it, but having just one tiny potato to wrestle with meant that she could take the toy away any time she wanted. She was not sure, if she would not be conquered, if all three of Teya's brood pitched in the fight. 

"Hello, Pascal," she greeted the little girl after she had put down the root for the kid to inspect. Pascal was a combination of "potato" and "rascal" that she had come up with. Because at the present moment these little forest elves were just that. "How's life been?" she asked, leaning down to have a whif at the kid. They had the pungent smell signature of milk, wee, dirt and wet dog, probably, natures way of making the kids easy for the parents to find and disgusting for any predator to try. 

Only one came out, Dwin waited a moment to see, if any other would come and have a peek, but they did not. She let Pascal inspect the toy and felt a little annoyed that the pure distilled awesomeness of this thing was not obvious to the kid right away. They had a lot to learn still. So, when Teya's daughter looked up as if asking a question, Dwin guessed the source of curiousity. 

"That's a foot of the Walking Tree monster," she explained helpfully. Asked if this was not a lie (after all she had pointed out to Teya the moral wrong thing of lying), Dwin would argue that adding some colours and exaggerations to reality did not make it untrue. Quite the opposite - she had, in fact caught her foot and tripped over the tree roots on many occasions. And asked to choose, which version of the story you liked better - the one, where you emphasized your own clumsiness or the one, where the clumsiness had been caused by an outside evil force?