And when I touched her skin, my fingers ran with blood

This whole language thing would have been significantly easier if he had been raised in both the tongue of Tartok and the common tongue as his children would be. His pups had it easy. They would grow up learning and knowing both to the point were each tongue would be interchangeable. As an adult? Learning was a heck of a lot harder, but Nanuk was doing an excellent job of flushing out his vocabulary... and now she was simply being annoying with it.

She refused to speak to him in the language he knew best, forcing him to concentrate more thoroughly on his Inuktituk. His brow furrowed as the chatted back and forth and he tried to shift his way of thinking over to the more clicking words that formed the Tartok tongue. Slowly. The process was slow, but as the hours passed while they roamed his way of thinking was beginning to comprehend the dialect. His responses were faster and more fluid than when they'd started. He was learning and eventually he'd get there.

The howl that rang up on their borders brought their idle jabbering to a knowing silence. It didn't take any words for them to alter their path and seek out the unfamiliar voice who called. Too close. Any wolf who was not their own was simply too close for Iqniq to be comfortable. Not after the run in with the coyotes. Not after the instances in which their borders had been ignored when they were once the Spine. Definitely not with puppies in the heart of their home.

Iqniq lifted a howl of his own, a reply both to the strangers at their front door and to inform the rest of the pack the stranger was properly handled, for now. It left their wolves on standby should himself and Nanuk need any back up in their endeavors. He hoped whoever called would not bring this meeting to blows, but his caution left him suspicious and unwilling to assume the best. He and Nanuk moved with haste.

They came upon a pair of near identical wolves. Both were frosty in appearance, likely of the arctic variety, and held a familiar scent to them that lingered beneath the smell of these wilds. They'd been traveling. For now, it was simply a question as to what they were doing here. With dominance in his posturing and his tail rigid above his back, he narrowed his eyes upon both wolves who lingered. His lips twitched, holding back the beginnings of a silent snarl. They were at the borders. They had called. So far so good, but he wasn't holding his breath.

"What brings you here?" he asked with gravel in his voice. This pair would be met with hostility until they proved there was reason to trust them otherwise.