Whitefish River Summer dress

He was perceptive. Jinx wore battle wounds plainly on her thighs and collar, but these were healing wounds from the cougar that Swiftcurrent Creek had attacked. It was plain as day that the marks left on her weren't of wolf origin, so Bagheera could not have derived his conclusion from only those. She was not well-acquainted with his kind, but the trademark pragmatism of the DeMonte lineage would have made a wonderful complement to the fire of the Kesuk lineage, and she was impressed by his perception alone. Her kind was not terribly intelligent, but they had a fire that could consume them and render all logic useless. They asked questions later, if at all.

A pragmatist would therefore be useful to Jinx, who often leaped without looking. For now, she was more interested in where he came from and where he was going, and what bargain she could strike with him. Things of use to her, and probably to him as well. "Bagheera," she repeated with a thoughtful frown, "what an unusual name." If only because Jinx was well-acquainted with names comprising only two syllables, and therefore extraordinarily easy to pronounce in comparison.

"DeMonte, you say?" She drew herself to stand, finding he was taller and broader. The name would have come up in her memory if she had wracked it hard enough, but the DeMontes must have been most prevalent elsewhere. Though they had landed in the Seahawk as well, she had never met them, but Jinx could assume much about them, all obvious things, if they were all like this wolf. "I have not heard of it. It is a strong family?" Once, Jinx had made th is same assumption with Chakra. The pale Amazon placed a lot of value on a wolf's family name, sometimes more than on the wolf themselves. "I am Jinx Kesuk. You may have heard of mine as well. We are well known in the north."

Or maybe not. The large families seemed to occupy their own separate niches in the world. The DeMonte family hailed from the Salvaje Valleys south of here and inland. The Kesuks hailed from the Seahawk Valley, north along the coastline. These families were bound to meet and interbreed one day, but when it would occur, nobody could know. At present, she knew only of her large family and the Nereides, her family's fated sister pack, who had likely been the Kesuk family's undoing when they travelled to Echo Cove.