Sunset Valley heart of the wilderness

The amusement in that golden eye glimmered to little more than embers, but it sparked through the mangled features of his face all the same. Children, he'd learned, were the most telling of all different cultures. Whether they were broken spirits or innocent things, emaciated or chubby, grunts or the next generation, all depended on the wolves that raised them. He wasn't jealous of her naievete, no, but he appreciated some far-off ideal of it, just as much as she seemed to delight in his company.

Just as the thought. A careful glance tossed about the clearing, one tattered ear flicking sharply. Where one is, more follow. He'd never had to worry about this nonsense in wartime — and what an easy time that had been! Her question, though, brings him back to the present, and the normally-uninterested old man lets himself drop to his belly, crossing his forepaws over one another. "Very far," he mused, watching her down the length of his nose as she burbled in the mud and dirt. 

His brows knitted, and on impulse, he just had to ask — "What are you hiding your scent from, then?" He'd never really played as a child; the concept that mud could be used as anything else was a little hard for him to grasp.